It's a warm late-summer night in New York's West Village, and I'm on my way to rendezvous with a woman I met on the Internet. Or, more accurately, a stranger my mom met when she was pretending to be me on her phone. She'd arranged the meeting through Tinder, my Tinder, in hopes of finding me a girlfriend. I only knew the woman's first name, and as I got closer to the bar where we'd agreed to meet, I saw a young brunette just outside. This had to be her.

I heard my mom's voice in the back of my head from a few days earlier. "You could get a lot of sexually transmitted diseases," she'd said over the phone, swiping through a carousel of pouty female twenty-somethings. "I don't think you should just hook up for casual sex. I think you should get to know people."

When I gave my mom control of my Tinder, I thought it would be funny. I did not think we'd talk about casual sex, but here we were.

"Oh, my god. Here's one that matched you," she said. "This one is NAKED! Yuck."

Mom, there are no naked people on Tinder.

"Well, that's a no. I swiped her off," she said, another potential soul mate discarded left into oblivion. "Just because you have it doesn't mean you have to show it."

Oh, boy.

"That's something that I would think about," she continued. "But I'm a mom."

This all began because my mom thinks I'm going to die alone.

Or, at the very least, that's what I thought when we finalized plans to go see the Broadway show Hamilton together.

"We got four tickets," she told me a few months before the date of the show. "Dad, me, you, and, you know, if you have a friend by then you want to bring."

A friend "by then"? So, like, not one of the friends I already have? Like, a girlfriend? You're talking about a girlfriend, aren't you, Mom?

I'm 26 and single. I have not had a girlfriend for four years. When she was 26, my mom was married to her high school sweetheart, the man who took her to the prom in a goofy Volkswagen Beetle. By 28, she'd have her first baby. That baby was my brother, who at 26 had already been with the woman he would marry for six years.

And then there's me. Single. Slowly dying. Constantly fifth-wheeling at Christmas.

But unlike when my mom was 26, there is now, quite literally, an app for this. It's called Tinder, and it's a floating box on your iPhone that you can touch when you have no one to touch. To me, Tinder had always been merely something to do to pass the time, like a sexually charged version of Candy Crush. More than being with someone, Tinder creates the illusion of not being without anybody, a way to remember that there are indeed a lot of fish in the sea, and a great number of these fish might want to have sex with you. And if my mom is so intent on my having a girlfriend, then why shouldn't she just go out and find one for me? So I pushed her into that sea, disguised as me.

At dinner in Manhattan one night, I set up Tinder on her phone, showed her how to operate it, did some right-swiping (even got a match!), and then deleted the app off my phone, the fate of my love life* in the hands of my mother.

*Not to mention my soon-to-be-besmirched reputation on the Tinder Nightmares Twitter page. "Who is Clay Skipper and why is he asking me about snacks?"

Her mission was to spend a few minutes each day doing some swiping and chatting with women who'd already been right-swiped, and right-swiped back. If she made a good enough impression as a six-foot-one, 26-year-old GQ writer and was granted permission to take a match for a drink—or a walk in Battery Park, as it turned out she constantly kept offering—she would give them my cell phone number, they would text me (the real me), and we'd figure out a time and place.

But that was a big if.

We left the restaurant, my brother and his wife went back to their place in Chelsea, and my mom went home to my dad in Connecticut. I went home alone.

Thirty minutes later, I was back at my place. I had two voicemails from my mom. The first from 9:51 P.M.:

"Oh, hey, it's Mom. She [the match] texted me back. I asked if she'd like to meet for coffee or a drink. She texted me she was in bed. Is that code for something?" Here she let out a big laugh, like maybe it was code for "sex" and that was funny. "I texted her back and said, 'Well, it doesn't have to be tonight.' Anyway, not sure what to say. I don't even think we picked Alex*. Did we? Maybe she just picked you, from your Tinder page. Anyway. Alright. Bye."

The second, 31 minutes later:

"This is your mother, calling again with your Tinder replies. I also have a conversation going with Kelsey. She said, sure, she'd like to meet you for a drink. First, she said, 'Molly.' Anyway, I don't know what else to say to these people. I'm soon going to give them both your number. Okay. Bye."

Molly?

Oh, like the drug.

I wasn’t shocked my mom didn’t know what Molly was. I was, however, shocked that she’d been so forward, that it had worked (!!), and that she’d played it off so well. “Catch you then”? Was that a phrase moms knew? Did my mom have better game than me?

I called her. It’d been less than two hours since I installed the app on her phone.

“What do you think we should do with these girls?” she asked upon picking up the phone. “Should I set you guys up, or should I just ghost on them? Maybe we should ghost on them.”

GHOST ON THEM?!

Who are you, and what did you do to my mom?

My mom is 58, has short hair, stands a tiny five-foot-two, and takes no shit. She grew up the daughter of a minister and ran our house with a similar hand—not tyrannical but firm, the matriarch of two boys. Three if you count my dad, and she does. She was almost always bad cop, an imposer of midnight curfews with that uncanny mom ability to be deep in sleep at 11:58 P.M. and, if you weren’t home yet, wide awake at 11:59 P.M. She would call me as I was racing back, only to say, “You shouldn’t be talking on the phone while driving!” when I picked up. Like most parents, she was on the receiving end of much teenage vitriol and almost none of the deserved gratitude.

That started to change when I went off to college and, with some perspective, realized I was stupid and she was smart; when I realized that all she cares about is ensuring that her children don’t fuck up too terribly, and that, since “playing N64 at Dan’s house” really means “stealing all of Dan’s dad’s beer,” sometimes it’s okay to say no—even if your moody teen thinks you’re a fascist. And since she was, in fact, always right, we talked often. I had pressing questions, like “Can I mix these antibiotics with vodka…No, like, a lot of vodka?” and “What’s the best way to get sriracha out of a suit…Yeah, like, a lot of sriracha?”

She had concerns, too: Can you explain to me where the iCloud is? Why does my iPod only play Christmas music? What’s sriracha?

As far as I can remember,* we talked about sex only once, when I was 22, freshly graduated from college, and the two of us were eating dinner on the back porch of my childhood home. She said, unprompted, “You should wear condoms.” Did she think I was having a lot of sex—or none at all? I changed the subject.

Now, four years later, she’s trying to set me up on a date with an Internet stranger.

I didn’t know what was most unsettling about these messages—the spam (“which I think were prostitutes looking for business,” she told me); the fact that she thought “aspiring writer” was a good way to market me as an enticing match (she had to reassure one girl, saying, “But I do have a steady job at a magazine right now”); or her enthusiasm about finding a “good contact in case of job loss!” Does my mom live in a perpetual state of thinking her son is going to be fired? Did she hate my writing that much?