There was a time when geography did most of the matchmaking. Your friends were the children who happened to live on your street, your partner was statistically likely to have grown up within a few bus routes of your own, and the people who understood you best were simply whoever happened to remain after distance had done its filtering. Somewhere along the line my village became distributed across continents instead of counties. The people whose opinions I value live in Tokyo, Frankfurt, the USA and places I've never learned to pronounce properly. I know what projects they're building, which books have rearranged their thinking, what kind of coffee they make before sitting down to work, and occasionally what keeps them awake at three in the morning. They occupy a surprisingly vivid corner of my life despite the fact that I couldn't ever bump into them while I'm doing my grocery shop. Part of that is because I'm well travelled. I have friends in other countries because I've been there, but I also have friends in other countries because the internet gifted them to me. There is something democratic about finding your intellectual neighbours without needing them to be your literal neighbours. The internet has always been accused of making people less social, but I suspect it has just changed the geometry of friendship. Distance used to be measured in miles. Now it is measured in bandwidth, time zones and the small arithmetic required to remember whether someone is asleep when you visit their usual chat rooms. I live in a town full of elderly people and young families. We exchange the necessary smiles, apologise when shopping baskets collide, and discuss the weather. But I long for conversations that begin with an obscure essay, drift through philosophy, detour into operating systems, mythology, cinema or consciousness itself and they happen between me and other people based hundreds or thousands of miles away. We still describe these people as online friends, as though the adjective somehow weakens the noun. Increasingly I think it does the opposite. Villages were never defined by walls or roads; they were defined by repeated encounters, shared language and the slow accumulation of mutual recognition. That's what the internet enables. The internet folded and collapsed the distance between people. But now I think there's a reversion happening. When people use dating apps they may have the option of purposely limiting how far away potential matches are. And fewer people now use the internet as a place to wander, instead transfixed by centralised apps such as Instagram, TikTok, Tinder. The internet has become less of a village square and more of a collection of privately owned shopping centres where every doorway eventually leads back to the same few corporations. The new internet is much more efficient, which is perhaps the problem. Efficiency is wonderful for many things. It is good for finding directions, paying bills, ordering replacement parts for obscure household appliances. It is less wonderful when applied to the strange, inefficient process of becoming a person. Human connection has always contained an element of wandering. You meet someone because you happened to be standing in the wrong queue, reading the wrong book in the right place, attending a talk about a subject you only vaguely understood. You discover friendship through the accumulation of accidental moments. Algorithms, by their nature, attempt to remove the accident. Even dating, which seems like the obvious beneficiary of a connected world, has somehow become an exercise in recreating older geographical limitations. We have access to almost every person on Earth, but we often voluntarily reduce the radius to five, ten, twenty miles. We have transformed the planet into a village and then immediately rebuilt the village fence. The digital world promised that nobody would have to settle for whoever happened to live nearby, but many of us have quietly returned to choosing from whoever happens to be nearby, only now we do it through a glowing rectangle while being judged by a series of photographs and a carefully optimised sentence about ourselves.

There is something almost ecological about romantic desire when you've reached an age where you've loved properly before; it stops behaving like a wildfire and becomes more like weather, arriving quietly, lingering over impossible landscapes, and eventually moving on without needing to burn the forest down. Every now and then someone appears who seems to possess precisely the gravitational pull required to bend your thoughts out of their usual orbit, but no. They are a perfect human being, except they are geographically improbable, emotionally unavailable, entirely the wrong age, or invested in a relationship already: otherwise filed by the universe under not partnership material. Perhaps that's for the best. The universe loves to introduce me to men who are too young for me at every opportunity. I live in a town that has no partnership prospects anywhere near my age (most men my age are married). I live somewhere with all the romantic biodiversity of an abandoned retail park. Perfect human beings: I can think of some, handsome (or beautiful), soulful, intelligent and entirely out of reach. When I think about that, something like an avalanche of snow sweeps down and entirely engulfs me. I would say I'm too old for crushes, but as the snow settles that's exactly what I have left over, smooth cold crushes on unattainable beings. Perhaps then, our previous long relationships teach us that intimacy isn't measured by proximity but by permeability, by the slow and mutual redrawing of invisible borders until two lives can coexist without annexing one another. I've grown fond of my own borders. Solitude, once an empty room, has become something closer to a well-tended garden; visitors are welcome, but not everyone gets a gate key.