The second or third coffee I ever had on the app ended with a woman crossing a road at something close to a run. This was June, I'd been on the app for about a fortnight, and I still thought the point of the coffee was the coffee.

Rii was the first one who made me understand the calibre of woman on the platform. Her photos were good. Her photos were, it turned out, an understatement. She walked into the café and every man in it did the thing men do when they pretend they haven't noticed, and she sat down opposite me with the absolute composure of someone who's watched that happen every day of her adult life. Someone has since reported her profile pictures as fake. I can confirm, from across a table and then from across a street, that they weren't. Or maybe the report meant, "her pictures don't accurately portray just how hot she is".

The coffee itself was fine, I thought. She asked about my work and my band. We spoke about her work - she works in a veterinary clinic and loved animals. The coffee overall seemed fairly normal. I finished my cup, slid over the envelope and we started getting ready to leave. I was pleased with how it had gone

Here's what I didn't do. I didn't mention terms, because I didn't know I was supposed to. I didn't ask for her LINE info, because I was somewhat worried that she'd be offended if I asked first. I didn't say what I was looking for, because I thought that was what the second meeting was for. I sat there for forty minutes being a pleasant older man having a nice chat, and she sat there for forty minutes waiting for the part of the meeting that was the meeting, and it never came.

She said she had somewhere to be. She thanked me. And then she left at a pace that, from the window, I can only describe as a sprint, and I remember thinking, oh, she must be late, and then thinking, a bit later, on the train, oh.

I sent her a message afterwards. It's still there. It's still unread. That would be less remarkable if she'd left the app, but she hasn't: her profile shows she logged in yesterday evening, and the numbers on it are the most instructive thing she ever gave me. Nearly a thousand men have written to her since she joined last autumn. She's replied to 91% of them. She replies to everyone. Rii answers nine men in ten, and my message from July has sat in her inbox unopened for two months, and that's not an oversight. On an app where she reads everything, not reading me is the block she couldn't be bothered to press.

I don't blame her. I was a waste of an afternoon. She'd done her hair.

What I took from Rii, eventually, is most of what the Board is built on. That the coffee has a structure, and both people know it, and if only one of you does the other one is wasting her time. That "hot" and "available" are different columns, and a woman who answers 91% of her inbox is available to everyone, which is not the same as available to you. That the sprint was the kindest possible verdict, because the alternative was a second coffee with a man who still didn't get it.

And that every entry since has been, in some small way, an apology to Rii, delivered to people who aren't her.

Now - the interesting thing I ponder sometimes is that I suspect that Rii may well have ended up being another Noa or Momoe: lots of nice dinners that went nowhere, simply because I don't know how it could be any other way if you're still responding to 90%+ of inbound messages for months at a time. We'll never know. Looking back, I never would have messaged Rii in the first place, but in those early days, I didn't really understand what that 90% reply rate meant.