Single

[Ed. note: Thanks, Almighty Dictionary, for this one this week.]

I am single. As a feminist, it’s unclear to me whether I’m supposed to be roaring with celebration at this fact because dammit I’m only thirty-two and I make a boatload of money and I live in the greatest city in the world so what do I need a man for (fish, bicycle, etc) or desperately seeking my sensitive companionate soulmate with whom to settle down and have two preferably multiracial babies for whom I’d home-make baby food and we’d cosleep and do other weird things I probably don’t even know about, having not yet been inducted into the mommy cult.

I’m doing neither.

I’m sort of just being single.

Friends (and even my grandfather) have asked me when I’m getting back online, which makes sense because if not OKCupid then how exactly does dating happen? But I have no urge to do that. The idea of sifting through endless pages of semi-realistic profile pics and trying to determine, when this guy says he loves adventure, does that mean a two-week hiking trip in South America or going to the West Side to buy heroin?, and thinking of nice ways to tell the bros who live in Hinsdale and work at a bank that I am not interested in hitting up The Apartment with them this weekend and getting cray-cray, and, worse, thinking of nice ways to tell the guys who I have nothing in common with, who seem like they’re probably nice, normal men, but who I can’t even imagine a first conversation with, or, let’s just be honest, the guys who are eighty pounds overweight or have facial hair that speaks of a complete lack of consideration for social convention or have only one photo and it’s them with a plastic cup of beer and serious drunkface and a backward baseball cap, thinking of nice ways to tell these guys, Sorry, I just don’t think we’d click.

Usually, I just type back that sentence and move on. But right now, I don’t want to have to deal with even that.

I theoretically know single guys in real life. For one reason or another (including: already dated him, not attracted to him, and am totally creeped out in his presence), none of them are date-able for me.

I met a (presumably) single dude in a very rom-com-y real-life way. He owns a cafe that I frequent(ed. Past tense). For three weeks straight, we chatted, we flirted, we lived through a bizarre tourist incident together, in which some folks from Ohio started paparazzi-ing me over my breakfast to take photos of a real city girl eating a big pancake for their scrapbooks. That was exactly as successful as most rom-com-y things would in real life. (Except without the stalking and abuse. The result was actually: And then he never called.)

It’s been brought to my attention that perhaps I’ve been making poor choices in dating. Science says yes, because as I am single when I want to be partnered, I’ve obviously been making choices that have led to an undesired outcome. I’m not sure what to do about that. My sister, who learned this from my mother, told me that right up front, like first few dates, you just lay your cards on the table. These are my dealbreakers. What are yours? That kind of conversation. Now, she’s engaged and my mom has been happily married for thirty-plus years, so you’d think this would be a foolproof tactic. So I tried it with the last guy I dated. And that part worked like a charm. However, knowing we were solid on the big, important issues caused me to overlook an important fact: we were pretty bad at just being friends. Like, pained silences over breakfast kind of bad. So. That went predictably well.

When I think about actively trying to find somebody again, I feel like it has to be with some kind of change made to my selection process or my dating style or something. Something to get a different result. I’m thirty-two, and while in New York years that may be young, in Midwest years I’m practically a washed-up spinster. In another few years I’ll have to invest in another cat and probably a housecoat. If I’m going to have kids, I have to figure this shit out, like, now. But I just have no idea how I’m supposed to do that.

Most of my friends being partnered doesn’t really help my cause. Some just say, “Oh, if I hadn’t have met X in college, I would just be alone forever,” or, the least helpful of all, “When you least expect it, it’ll happen.” That’s some patently false romance novel crap. I’m not the sort of person who can sit in a window waiting for a fairy tale to conk me on the head. And a fairy tale doesn’t actually sound all that pleasant anyway. It never seems terribly exciting for the princess.

So I’m not sitting and waiting. I’m just not actively searching. I’m… coasting. And I think I may need to keep doing that for a while. Until I feel more sure of which direction I should be pedaling in, and how fast.