I’m not going to tell you that you need to stop walking around with headphones in. I derive clinical-strength delight from marching to the park listening to “Miss Baltimore Crabs” and imagining that onlookers find me esoteric and mysterious even though I’m really just blasting show tunes because I’m in a weird sad mood again. You can keep your headphones in.

There’s a lot of dating advice out there, most of it bad, like “shrekking” or dating someone less attractive than you because it provides a (false) sense of security that they’ll never leave you because it would be like returning lottery winnings. I bristle at the “men are trash” discourse because I think it’s too broad a stroke and it’s not helpful if you want to date a straight man. I also don’t believe that Gen Zers are willingly locking themselves in Rapunzel’s tower with a bunch of sunny angels and Rhode pocket blushes. I don’t think taking out your headphones is going to make people approach you more. I do believe, though, that dating is incredibly hard and the pursuit of love is arduous, natural, and distinctly human.

I hate giving dating advice because I think everyone secretly has no idea what they’re doing and people who are lucky in love know in their private hearts that they did nothing to deserve it and one day just accidentally blundered into the best thing ever. I think that’s what smug coupled people are trying to say when they tell you “It’ll happen when you least expect it.”

I’ve been single for two years after a year-long relationship with a guy I met on Hinge. In the two years that I’ve been single, aside from one absolutely awful Hinge date a few weeks after my breakup, where he massaged my thigh like he was trying to tenderize a brisket, I haven’t used the apps at all. Here comes the part where I’m going to give you some advice, with an Ina Garten-style caveat thrown in that this is just what I do, and you can do whatever the fuck you want.

You have to kill the part that cringes, and throw yourself into the messy convulsions of the world.

In her commencement address to the UC Riverside Class of 1975, Joan Didion said, “What you ought to watch out for, is the habit of saying no, the habit of not believing anybody or anything. You’ve got to watch out for moving into a world where you don’t think there’s any objective reality, where there’s only you and that tree you just planted. All I want to tell you today, really, is not to do that. Not to move into that world where you’re alone with yourself and your tree. I want to tell you to live in the messy world, throw yourself into the convulsion of the world.”

Last fall, my friend and I went to a speed dating event in a stuffy ballroom, and we had to wear name tags, and they served cheap white wine that tasted like a chemical spill in your mouth, and I don’t care if it makes me sound conceited: I felt way too beautiful to be there. Some guy with an ample beer-belly, wearing a pinstriped bowler hat came over and said, “Did it hurt? When you fell from heaven?” When he laughed I could see every dark filling in the craters of his teeth. I felt like a huge loser.

We left quicker than Shane Gillis got cancelled, and fled to a downtown bar for cocktails and guys our own age. I’d forgotten to take off my name tag, and, while waiting in line for the bathroom, a tall guy with curly dark hair came over and said hi, using my name as he’d read it on my dress. We chatted for a little while until he said, “So. I already got your name, now I just need your number.” I felt like a huge winner. I strutted home like I was wearing the fifty-million-dollar fantasy bra.

I had taken Ms. Didion’s advice. I had said yes to the dating event, even though I knew it was likely to be cringe, because I knew that if I said yes, it would expand my orbit a few degrees more, and the bigger my orbit, the more likely it would encompass someone I might, just might, fall in love with. I could have stayed in my apartment with my sister and my cat and watched Gilmore Girls for the hundredth time and avoided both embarrassment and fun. You can’t really separate the good from the ugly when you throw yourself into the messy convulsions of the world.

Talk to the older woman getting a pedicure next to you. Ask her what she’s reading. She might have a son your age who lives in your neighborhood. Learn the names of the guy at your laundromat, the server, the doorman, and the Uber driver. Say yes to a date with your coworker’s sister who you’ve never met. Hell, ask your coworker to set you up! The girl in the bar bathroom who commiserates with you over your recent heartbreak might have a boyfriend with a hot single friend who happens to be there that night. I once got asked out by a guy after I asked to pet his dog. My roommate got set up by the barista at the coffee shop she visits every day. The barista noticed that a guy with the same name as my roommate also came in every day, and she had him leave his number for my roommate one day. You never know!

Make connections: they both expand your life and stitch it closer together. Before you know it, your real life will be filled with profiles for you to accept or decline. But you have to self-promote a little. Put yourself in the path of good luck, at the intersection of a few of those messy convulsions.

You’re gonna have to get over yourself, basically. You’re not too cool or too beautiful (like I thought) for anyone or anything. Don’t be an island. Don’t be alone with your tree, going to bed early and scrolling through pictures of cute couples on Instagram and obstinately clinging to your belief that you’ll start trying next month, or when you lose weight, or once you’ve started your dream job or moved to a “better” city.

I’m (ironically) going to the launch party for a new dating app tonight. I don’t really want to go. I work until eight o’clock, then I’ll have to race home and change into something that appeases the dress code of sexy all-black attire even though I’m getting over a cold and don’t feel sexy at all. Then I’ll have to take the train to Midtown and race a few blocks to the bar where it’s being held, and I’ll probably be out late, and I definitely won’t get my prescribed eight hours of sleep.

It might be super lame. I might get there and realize I’ve arrived after the crest and most people have left and there are no Jacob Elordi lookalikes. Maybe I’ll go and it’ll be just okay, and then I’ll make extended eye contact with a six-foot-four, brawny guy with a mustache on the subway home, and we’ll be passionately making out by the time we hit the West Fourth stop (just kidding– I am the most dedicated hater of subway PDA alive). But you get the picture— anything could happen if you surrender to the unknown and stop expecting life to go according to your perfect plans. Save your planning for things like your Pap smear and how you’re going to vote.

Be awake to the world around you. Look for openings into it: the extroverted coworker who invited you to lunch or the Partiful invite to someone’s housewarming that tunnels into your solitude. It’s easy to sit at home and imagine you’ll be charming and gregarious next time. You probably won’t be. You’ll probably be a little awkward and assume someone rents their apartment when they really own it and sort of offend them. Go out some more. You’ll get better at it, and what you are good at you often come to enjoy. You don’t have to be a barfly or a social butterfly. Start small if you want.

Go for a walk to the nearest coffee shop. Ask the barista’s name. Sit outside, people-watching for a bit. Maybe a movie-star-hot guy will walk by with his show golden. Ask to pet his dog. At the risk of sounding like Hugh Grant, love actually is all around. Once you see it you happily can’t unsee it.

Aren’t you glad I didn’t tell you to join a run club? I would never do that to you, and that’s how you know I’m legit. Good luck out there. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be the woman getting a pedicure next to you someday, and you’ll ask me what I’m reading, and I’ll tell you my own damn Substack, it’s the best thing on the internet! I LOVE YOU, THANKS FOR READING!

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There’s a little prayer I say before dates. It goes like this: “Please let him be normal, please let him be normal, please let him be normal.” 

Most of the time, this prayer goes unanswered, like the night this past fall when I lounged in bed beside the guy I was dating as he languidly traced constellations across my skin, his fingers grazing the vertebrae of my spine and lower back until they came to an abrupt halt just below my butt. 

“Do you want to hear something weird?” he asked me.

Please let him be normal, please let him be normal.

“This is my favorite part on a woman’s body,” he said, and pinched the roll of skin and fat just south of my buttcheek. 

Record scratch, alarm bell, thunderclap, hot flash. 

There’s a name for that territory, and it’s not sexy or cute. It's not anatomically descriptive or accurate, and in fact it sounds like something you could order with a vanilla latte. It’s called a banana roll. 

Banana roll, muffin top, saddlebags, FUPA, East and West chest, spare tire, love handles, thunder thighs, cankles, bat wings, bingo arms, pool table legs, flabs, cottage cheese knees, and the list goes on. The devils who coined these creatively cruel terms are going to jail when I become president. 

There’s a million ways to describe a woman’s body to make her want to disappear but the adjectives are particularly harrowing when selected by the person you hope finds you sexy. 

An effective way to open the Pandora’s box of body insecurity is to sleep with the wrong people. Someone unkind, ungenerous, or simply unknown to you who sees you at your most vulnerable and describes it, out loud, to your face. It has a strange, slowly corrosive effect over time, those things that people say about your appearance. 

The teacher who told you in fourth grade that you had big feet or the parent who made fun of your teeth in a loving way that still stung, and, especially, that person you were so totally head over heels for that you never got the ick even when they had a visible booger or sauce on their face, who said something so precise and devastating about your physical appearance that you’re probably going to carry it around forever. 

So he’d discovered the fat deposits on me, which, by virtue of being alive, I have lots of. I also have a big butt, which men tend to relish, and which I also delight in, although I don’t think I’ll ever fully untangle whether I like my big butt because I just like it and it’s mine and cuts a satisfying hourglass shape or whether I like it because I’ve been given so much validation about it from men over the years. 

It’s probably a combination of both and it’s a precarious line, a classic life contradiction of two opposing things being true at once, like how I feel about men talking about my body in general. 

Back when I lived in Chicago, I was casually hooking up with a guy who once texted me, “Need your fat ass in my hands again.” I immediately got territorial about my ass, in an I-can-complain-about-my-mom-but-you-can’t kind of way. Part of me felt turned on? I did want his hands on my ass again. But I also felt strangely indignant like, hey mister, that butt you’re calling fat is actually a really nice person with a charming personality. So maybe think about that the next time you call someone a fat ass, jackass! 

My ex complimented my body a lot, but to the extent that I became anxious about maintaining it because it started to seem that, in his eyes, it was the best thing about me. That sucked, because I’m so much more than a gorgeous face, perfect breasts, and a Boteccli butt plus free add-on banana roll. 

There was a time when I didn’t think about my body very much. I don’t think I had any thoughts about it at all until it started being pointed out to me and I mostly mirrored the feedback, with my own assessment entirely guided by that of others. I liked what was complimented. What was scrutinized or ignored, I began to see as unappealing, imperfect, too big, crooked, or missing. 

In one of my favorite books, Anthropologie of an American Girl, the author describes the feeling of walking past a group of men and feeling not like a woman but a “stack of roving flesh.”

I feel that way every time I get cat called, every time I walked from the bedroom to the bathroom at my ex’s apartment and felt his eyes assessing me, every time I can tell, the way women just can, when a man is picturing me naked. It’s confusing because this makes me feel detached from my body as if it’s a dog who refuses to walk and I have to cajole it forward from a few feet removed, but there are times, many, actually, when I like the attention my body gets from men. 

I am currently in Italy with my mom. The other night we ate so much cacio e pepe, supplì, and spaghetti carbonara that I worried the button on my already snug dress was going to burst and ricochet straight into my mom’s eye and blind her. I sucked in to accommodate my ribs and the carbonara and the button so committedly that by the end of the night, my back hurt. 

Back in the hotel room, in the luxurious comfort of a forgiving and abundant terrycloth robe, I scrolled through pictures of the day. I disliked most of the ones of me. The pink tiger striped Proenza Schouler dress I got for a steal on The Real Real accentuated my bra bulges. My teeth looked yellow, and one seemed to be buckling behind the other, snaggling like Nanny McPhee. I should have gotten a highlight retouch before the trip, I thought. 

The next day, as we were walking, a cute guy in a pizza shop called out to me and waved. “Bellissima,” he shouted, and winked. I felt a little guilty for how immediately validating it was, and I’m not sure if it’s because it was from a man or it was simply a well-placed compliment when I needed one. Is it a bad thing that I need to be told I’m beautiful to believe it or a normal function of a fluctuating self-concept? Should I be able to feel beautiful all the time, within my private, inner life? Or am I simply thinking about it wrong? 

I am in Italy, with my mom, thinking about my body and what’s wrong with it. My mom is fifty-nine. “Ugh, these lines are getting so deep,” she said to her reflection in the mirror, but then she shrugged her shoulders and said, “Oh well, arrivederci, let’s go!”

My mom has never had any Botox or fillers, no CoolSculpting or Venus Freeze or body contouring, no Sculptra or Skinvive, and is vociferously against plastic surgery. She loves walking, running, and any activity that keeps her mind sharp including reading, learning, laughing, and endeavoring to get her money back, no matter how little the sum, if justified. She sees her body as a tool, an instrument, and a gift. She takes care of it because she wants it to last so that she can climb all five hundred stairs of the Duomo with me and take care of her three cherubic grandchildren. 

On Tuesday, we did a tour of the Vatican, and our guide, an elegant Roman woman who smelled divine (Givenchy L’Interdit apparently), taught us about two particular sculptures. 

The first was the Apollo Belvedere, a statue of the Greek god Apollo created in Classical antiquity depicting a perfect, flawless god. His proportions are exactly symmetrical, his muscles robust and defined, his expression placid and serene. He is unblemished and beautiful. 

The second was of Laocoön and His Sons. As the myth goes, Laocoön, a Trojan priest, warned the Trojans not to allow the wooden horse into Troy and was punished for his heedfulness with death by snake. His body, our guide explained, is human. It is fallible, flawed, and tells a story. His stomach is taut with tension, his face twisted in anguish, his arms straining to protect his sons. 

The statues, side by side in the courtyard, punctuate the difference between what is perfect and what is real. None of us are gods. None of us has immaculate symmetry. Some of us have banana rolls and saddlebags and a spare tire. So what?

I’m in Italy with my mom. Being here cracked my brain open and poured magic into it. I feel blissfully far away and enchanted by everything. We’re walking nine to twelve miles every day, ardently attempting to see it all, and at night, when I finally lie down, my legs ache in a satisfying way. 

I feel verklempt, a Yiddish word my friend’s brother used to describe her at her funeral. It means overcome or squeezed, emptied out. She had used it all up, every last drop of her intellect, her passion, her talent, her sense of curiosity and wonder. She had done excellently. 

We are spectacularly lucky to be here, to be human, to eat cacio e pepe, to go on bad dates that we laugh about later with our favorite people, to look at art, to make art, to learn about everything that happened before we got here, to be challenged, and to take the force of our lives and love and sublimate it into something we can share with other people. 

That’s the Big Picture. 

Don’t worry about that shitty guy who pointed out that one of your breasts is bigger than the other or the girl who frowned at your waning hairline. Worry about the person who’s going to dutifully clean your period blood off their sheets and rub your back when you vomit, and make you want to be a kinder, more generous, more alive person. 

Spare tires are for the trunk of the car. Saddlebags are for pack mules, exclusively. Banana rolls are to be baked at 450 degrees, and served hot. Go back for seconds. 

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I was running ten minutes late and was, quite literally, running, which was pretty hard considering I was wearing a floor-length dress that was so tight I felt like I was wearing a human-sized condom. I’d also run out of boob tape so I had used bright blue painter’s tape to hitch my boobies together for a busty, Jennifer Coolidge effect. I took a deep breath a block before the restaurant to regroup and check that my chest rash was still concealed under the thick layer of foundation I doused it with.

I texted him that I’d just walked in and saw someone across the bar get up and make his way over. My heart sank.

He was as tall and cute as I remembered but dressed about the same as he had been the day on the street in joggers, sneakers and a workout shirt that was unmistakably made of that material that is designed to be “sweat wicking,” whatever that means. He gave me a hug and we stood for a beat in total silence, blinking brainlessly like fish in a tank. I suddenly felt slow and waterlogged and wished I were also dressed in something sweat-wicking. The silence was unbroken by the room around us which was empty except for one or two people on laptops.

He’d picked the spot, the kind of neon-sign littered, catch-all place with a giant menu that transitions from coffee to wine but is decidedly busiest in the daylight hours. It was also conveniently down the street from his apartment.

“Are you hungry?” he asked me.

“I could eat!” I said, hoping food would give us something to do and/or talk about.

“Would you actually want to go somewhere else and grab dinner?” he asked. Yes, yes, dear God deliver us, yes.

We walked for a few minutes until we passed a random Thai place. “Wanna go here?” he asked. A flicker of annoyance broke through my nerves. This guy had put about as much effort into the date as I had into my taxes, which I completed from bed the day they were due and which resulted in a scary bill from the IRS two months later. He’d clearly put no thought into picking a charming, romantic spot (which New York is bursting at the seams with) and looked more like he was dressed to go pump some iron than make flirty conversation over a glass of wine.

Meanwhile, I’d spent twenty minutes achieving the perfect Patrick Ta blush and highlight combo and yes, the scaffolding happening underneath my dress was pretty nuts, but to the casual viewer, I looked objectively great.

I met this guy, let’s call him Barbell, on–you’re not going to believe this–the street. The week prior, I was walking out of work, chatting on the phone with my sister, when I saw a cute guy coming down the sidewalk towards me. On a second glance, he was really looking at me. Caught off guard, I looked away and then back at him. He was still looking intently, right at me.

When we got to each other he stopped and turned to me as I took an earbud out, thinking he was probably going to ask me for directions, but he didn’t.

“Hi,” he said, “You are really cute.”

“Oh wow, thanks,” I said, and he introduced himself and we chatted for a few minutes while my sister freaked out excitedly in my ear. I told him I was on the phone so I had to get going. He asked for my number and because I am a bona fide single city girl with a robust sense of adventure, I said yes.

Now, sitting across from Barbell at a nondescript restaurant, picking at a chicken skewer, boobs sweating through the painter’s tape, I felt more like the biggest idiot in New York City. I thought it was romantic and thrilling that he’d simply come up to me and asked me out, but sitting across from him, it occurred to me how little I knew about him and how bizarre dating honestly is. That is a stranger, I thought, the thing my parents and teachers and pop culture at large warned me was dangerous!

I took a deep breath and a sip of ice water and tried to relax and think of a question to ask him. I decided to go with the relatively safe category of work. Apparently he worked for some type of HVAC company which was starkly contrary to the results of my internet stalking which had dredged up a personal training business. Huh. So Barbell oversaw people who installed heating and cooling systems. Sexy.

He told me that the woman he’d previously dated was a nurse but left her job to work for him.

“At the…HVAC company?” I asked, deeply suspicious as to how and why a trained nurse would pivot to central AC systems.

“Um yeah,” he said, sounding annoyed. “I had to fire her though. One day I told her it was time to get to work and she said she wanted to sleep in so I let her go. And then she wouldn’t have sex with me for three weeks. So I’m never hiring a girlfriend again,” he laughed. “You actually look exactly like her.”

“Well I’m not looking for a job,” I said, the STRANGER DANGER alarm roaring in my head.

“She wasn’t as bad as my ex wife though,” he went on.

“Sorry what?” I replied, eyes wide, “You were married?”

“Yeah. We got married when I was twenty three and were married for four years but she wanted kids and I didn’t. I think I wanted to be with her so I could get out of my apartment in the Bronx that was a shit hole. She lived on the Upper West Side so I moved in with her and then she wanted to get married.”

Every muscle in my body locked up. I didn’t even know what to do so I just kept guzzling water and I felt like grabbing the waitress when she came by to refill my glass and slipping her a twenty to just sit with me.

“So, how long have you been divorced?” I asked.

“Five years.”

“Can I ask how old you are,” I asked.

“I’m thirty,” he said confidently.

I’m not great at math. I got a 2 on my AP Calculus test and, as the IRS made plain to me, I screwed up the addition on my taxes pretty badly, but I can do basic arithmetic. There are thirty wrinkles around your eyes, I thought, thirty more minutes I’m willing to spend in this torture, thirty chicken nuggets I’m going to comfort-devour after this is over, but you, you are not thirty years old.

“I’m going to the toilet,” he abruptly announced, and as soon as he was out of the vicinity I lurched for my phone and frantically texted my roommates. “SOS girls, it’s going so badly,” I texted.

“Oh nooooo, ugh I’m sorry girl!! Come home and have ice cream and watch Dancing With The Stars with us!!” they wrote back, and I felt like weeping in relief. Now I just had to make my escape.

He was back from the “toilet” and there was nothing on our plates but beige sauce. I felt my exit window opening up. He asked how hungry I still was on a scale of one to ten.

“Two!” I declared and he looked dismayed. He asked if I had an early morning. I pictured my nine a.m. alarm and the three cups of coffee I’d luxuriate over before work.

“Yeah,” I sighed, “It’s gonna be a six o’clock wakeup for me sadly.”

He got the (forty dollar) check (Daddy Warbucks really splashed out on this one, I thought) and forty-five minutes from the moment we walked in, we left. The streets of New York have never looked so beautiful to me. I took giant gulps of the cool night air and quickly texted my roommates that I was on my way.

“Well I hate to cut this short but I have such an early morning,” I said, “Thank you so much for dinner and hope you have a good day of work tomorrow!”

He didn’t say anything, just looked at me sort of stunned.

“Well… bye!” I smiled then I turned on my heel and hoofed it.

Thirty minutes later, I was in pajamas, a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Milk and Cookies in hand, and next to my roommates on the couch watching Connor Wood work the dance floor in a pink satin set.

I live with four other single women in the heart of Manhattan, and no, I did not think that at almost thirty I’d be living with so many people who were not my children, but it’s the most fun I’ve ever had. As I sat beside them, laughing over the disastrous details, I realized I already had the exact thing I was searching for- someone to check to make sure I had made it home safe, someone to watch shows and laugh with, someone to tell all my gossip to.

The next morning Barbell texted me. “So I guess will not see you anymore?” he wrote. Bingo, buddy, you will not be seeing me anymore. Apparently he had correctly interpreted the awkwardness of our goodbye as final.

It’s hard to be single. There are so many choices to make, and every first date feels like a round of Russian roulette. You never know if you’re going to get the sweet, attentive empty chamber or the misogynistic, lying bullet. Luckily the more you date, the better you get at dodging the bad ones and I’ve gotten pretty good at bobbing and weaving. Sorry Barbell, missed me!

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F-O-U-R, O-N-E, F-O-U-R she mouthed through the glass, holding up as many fingers, and he diligently punched them into his phone, his eyes intent. My phone buzzed and I answered. “Hi,” I laughed. “Hey,” he said, as we looked at each other, him standing on the sidewalk, me perched on the bar stool. “We tried to get in but the wait’s too long so we’re going to another bar, but I’ll text you where we end up and you guys should come!”

“Okay,” I smiled. “Cool,” he said, and then he and his friends made their way down the street. My friend and I looked at each other, grinning. “I can’t believe that just happened!” I said, wide-eyed. “Me neither!” she said.

We were getting late afternoon happy hour drinks at Dante Apertivo, a new bar in the West Village that’s tucked on a beautiful side street dotted with big, leafy green trees and stately brownstones owned by the likes of Bradley Cooper and Brooke Shields. We were drinking French 75s and talking about where we’d both be a year from now when a group of two men and a woman walked in and spoke to the host, then walked back outside and stood on the sidewalk in front of us.

One of the guys was tall-ish with dark hair and a perfectly groomed five o’clock shadow. He had on a smartly structured camel coat and quarter zip with a logo just peeking out behind the lapel. “He’s cute,” I said. “Which one,” my friend asked. “Him,” I said, pointing, and before I knew it she was tapping furiously on the glass.

“You!” she mouthed excitedly, “should get her number,” and pointed animatedly at me. He turned his head and looked at me. His face broke into a smile. “Okay,” he mouthed and gave a thumbs up.

And that’s when he called me and invited me to the next bar. I wasn’t sure if he’d text to follow up, but about fifteen minutes later, he did. “Hey! This is Brian,” he wrote, and let me know that he and his friends were at another bar down the street. “We have to go,” my friend said. At this point we’d graduated from French 75s to lychee martinis, and I figured what the hell, it’s New York City! Anything can happen! I’m young, free, confused and a bunch of other adjectives Taylor Swift immortalized for the twenty-something woman. So, we abandoned our barstool and skipped through the rain-streaked streets to Saint Theo’s.

I was momentarily seized by an attack of nerves right before we walked in on this group of true strangers, but thankfully my friend grabbed my clammy hand and we charged in, where we found Brian and his posse hanging at the bar.

As soon as we approached, he jumped up to offer his chair and immediately introduced us to his two friends, a guy he knew from school and his fiancée, both of whom were lovely and friendly. My friend started chatting with the couple while Brian and I occupied the two side-by-side bar stools.

I genuinely can’t explain what happened next beyond saying that we had a blast. The conversation flowed seamlessly, we laughed and joked, and everything I found out about him made me like him more. He’d been in New York for ten years and, confirmed by the logo on his vest, worked at an impressive private equity firm. Somehow we discovered we both love Arrested Development and started quoting it to each other. “If I wanted something your thumb touched, I’d eat the inside of your ear!” I squealed, and we both cracked up.

I told him that one Halloween I went as Tobias from the show (a costume my dad did not understand but seemed to enjoy, as for a night he could pretend he had a son instead of the weirdest daughter on planet earth), and was about to show him pictures when I decided against it. Considering I just met this guy and wanted him to think I was cute, perhaps it was imprudent of me to show him a picture of me wearing jean short cut-offs, a flesh-colored swim cap, and a mustache.

“Actually, I can’t show you,” I said, self-conscious, “I look too insane.” “Okay,” he laughed, “maybe that’ll be date two territory.”

He checked in on his friends and mine to ask if they wanted any more drinks, was an attentive listener and a compelling conversationalist.

“I don’t know how this happened, but I think we randomly just struck gold with this guy,” my friend leaned in and whispered to me.

It was getting late and his friends announced they should probably be getting home. My friend gave me the classic girl code eyes, meaning should I make myself scarce or do you want to leave with me. I hedged, not sure what to do. Technically, I had made the first move to ask this guy out, but he’d unmissably reciprocated. He already had my number, but I didn’t want to leave yet. “Would you want to stay for another round?” he asked me, reading my mind, and I gave him an enthusiastic yes.

We had another drink, just the two of us, and then he announced he was starving and asked if I’d be up for dinner with him. Since I’d had about forty drinks and hadn’t eaten since the cinnamon roll I ate in two bites for breakfast, I agreed. We walked arm in arm to Joseph Leonard, a low-lit, cozily intimate spot in my neighborhood, and sat at the bar and had burgers.

We struck up a conversation with a young couple sitting next to us who were celebrating their anniversary. When Brian went to the bathroom, the woman said, “I can’t believe you two met today! You seem like you’ve been dating forever!”

When the bartender dropped the check, it came with a little Andes Candy, which I told him I love, as he immediately whipped out his credit card. He leaned into the bartender and asked to pick up the tab of the couple we’d been chatting with, and he did it in a subtle way that made me certain it wasn’t something he’d done for attention but out of genuine kindness and generosity.

He offered to walk me home and out on the street he instructed me to open my palm. I did and gasped in delight as he dropped three more Andes Candies into it. “Thanks,” I beamed, and slipped them into the pocket of my leather coat.

We’d barely made it a block before he grabbed my arm and swirled me into a kiss. We kissed and kissed and KISSED, all the way to my doorstep, where we kissed some more. It was like he unhinged his jaw and swallowed my head and honestly, I was along for the ride. Have you ever seen one of those videos of a python swallowing a pig? Well, I was the pig, and I was loving every second of it.

He said goodnight, and I drifted upstairs on a cloud of pure bliss. The next day I gave all the juicy details to my roommates and started mentally planning our future together, watching episodes of Arrested Development between rounds of mind-blowing sex. I waited for him to text but wasn’t worried.

We’d met out on a Saturday so I figured he was waiting until Monday to text. Or, obviously, duh, he didn’t want to come on too strong, so he’d naturally wait until Tuesday. Or Wednesday. Or, actually, I bet he’s going to make plans for the coming weekend, so he’ll wait until Thursday. Or Friday? Surely, by Friday he’ll text, I thought. But he didn’t.

I was beyond Worried. Worried was the gas station rest stop fifty miles ago. I was at Panicked, USA, with an empty tank and backseat full of fast food wrappers.

On Saturday it had officially been one week of radio silence, and I was freaking out. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I texted him. “Hey!” I wrote, “How was your week?” And then I sent an invite to play virtual pool against me because I have something medically wrong with me where I can’t act normal.

He won’t respond right away, I thought, so no need to sweat. Six hours later I could have wrung a bucket of perspiration from my shirt. I went over the pieces of the night again and again. I told my friends about what the girl at the bar had said, and about the Andes Candies and the kissing, and the reference to a second date, holding up the little details as evidence of his interest and proof I wasn’t insane.

He never texted. I never heard from him again.

I’ve been ghosted before, but this time was different. We were just getting started, we were having so much fun, why would he abandon that? It felt like lightning struck and I couldn’t believe the luck of meeting him, especially in the romantic way we did. I just couldn’t accept that all that potential had fizzled into nothing. It seemed more likely I’d hallucinated the whole thing than that what happened really did happen and that he didn’t want to see me again.

I dreamt he was dating my sister and woke up with my jaw clenched. I recruited friends to talk it through, to make sure I wasn’t as crazy as I felt. I went for long walks, checked my horoscope, felt myself veering away from and then crashing into myself, my life, the peaks and valleys of my flickering optimism and subsequent disappointment.

My life went on. I walked to a new Froyo spot and had a nine a.m. ice cream because why not? I watched Dancing With The Stars with my roommates. I put on heels and liquid glitter eyeliner and went out and talked to other guys. I thought about what I could control in my life and what I couldn’t. I made a mental list of all the people in my life who care about me and quickly gave it up, happily unable to bridle the love.

Three weeks later, I was walking across town to a friend’s birthday party. There was a chill in the air, but the sun was shining strongly and I was blasting “You Can’t Hurry Love” by The Supremes. I put my hand in the pockets of my leather coat and felt something hard and square. It was the Andes Candy.

So. I hadn’t imagined it. One borrowed night of magic, granted once and never again. I could torture myself with theories about his disappearance, or I could relish the experience, take it on the pulse for what it was and nothing more. I picked up the pace and turned up the volume. I unwrapped the candy and ate it.

It was delicious.

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“If I were a pervert, first thing I’d do is get on Hinge!” my mom told me. “That’s so helpful,” I sarcastically snapped back, “and such relatable advice since you met your husband at twenty-three and married him a year later. We’re very much in the same boat as I stare down my thirties as a perennially single woman.”

I hate to concede that she does kind of have a point. I’ve met a lot of maniacs on Hinge: handsy weirdos, cocky jerks, catchfishers, misogynists, etc. Dating apps are decidedly in their flop era. Recently, it feels like it’s never been more embarrassing to be on a dating app, with the exception of Raya, which also seems to be rapidly losing its edge as it becomes less exclusive. Par exemple, my downstairs neighbor (who once told me he runs “really fast” and has a “like super hard job”) is on Raya, and he’s a far cry from a celebrity in looks or following, so I’m really not sure what the metric for acceptance is these days.

When I moved to New York City a year ago, I decided to challenge myself to date exclusively in the wild. I wanted to push myself to leave the house, make friends, say yes to every opportunity, and hope that somehow that would lead to dates. I knew using a dating app would be a quicker and easier way to fill my roster, but I also knew I’d be putting quantity over quality.

I watched friends begrudgingly get ready for dates they didn’t seem excited for at all, which is fair! It’s hard to get excited about the prospect of sitting down for a few hours with a total stranger who might treat the server badly and monologue about the virtues of AI ad nauseum. I’ve met just as many maniacs out in bars as I have on Hinge, but at least there was something there when I met them- a spark of attraction, a just-naughty-enough sense of humor, or an Amex Platinum (kidding!) that made me the good kind of nervous for my first date with them.

I only went on eight first dates last year, and probably could have gone on a lot more if I’d used a dating app, but each of those dates felt authentic to my pace and lifestyle. I met them during the busy seasons of life when I was feeling social and extroverted. There were long stretches of hibernation with my roommates during which we baked and watched Off Campus and I pretty much wore either work clothes or pajamas, and yeah, I didn’t meet any guys during those periods, which was a nice relief. Sometimes I’d feel bad about those quiet stretches, like I was wasting my youth or missing out on the cool stuff that is constantly going on in New York City and on social media, but they were necessary to prevent dating burnout. And when I was ready to be back, baby I was SO back.

Through another lens, it’s pretty amazing that I met and connected with someone out in the messy tangles of my life eight times.

Of the eight, four were guys I met while out at bars, and I achieved this through eye contact, which I know is going to make you roll yours, but it’s true. My aunt, who told me that these days people in Hollywood want their underwear to show, informed me that the best way to communicate interest is eye contact, which basically means the needle hasn’t budged since Mr. Darcy unblinkingly stared down Miss Bennett (and her overflowing bosom) at the pianoforte. Great. Maybe the real secret is an empire-waist gown that pushes your boobs to your collarbone.

Much as I hate to concede it to her, my aunt is right. Crucially important, however, is that when it comes to eye contact, less is not more. More is more. A LOT goes a long way.

After grabbing drinks at the bar and settling in with my posse, I’d do a scan of the bar to see a) who was taller than me in my six-inch heels and b) who looked like Jacob Elordi or at least some bargain-bin version of him that I found attractive. When you do this, usually you’ll catch eyes with someone doing the same thing and finding you. Then you really have to keep looking back at him, more times than you think is normal or socially acceptable, like a LOT of eye contact, because approaching a stranger is scary and a guy’s not going to do it unless he’s pretty sure it’s wanted.

Open body language is also important. You can’t use your girlfriend as a human shield; you have to turn yourself out to face the crowd. You can also be proactive and just walk up to a guy and give him a compliment, which works more often than you think it will. Men like beautiful girls walking up to them and giving them a compliment the way dogs like when their owners give them meat treats. Have you ever seen a dog not want a treat that smells like animal carcass? No!

When it comes to meeting guys out at bars or clubs, it’s truly a numbers game. For every time I met a guy I actually liked and he actually got my number and actually texted me to ask me out, there were a million nights where none or only some of those things happened. Nothing is more infuriating than a guy getting your number just to… never text, but it’s happened to me plenty.

He did not enter your number wrong or lose his phone in an Uber. He has a wife and kids and can’t be caught texting you! I kid, but it could be any reason under the sun that has nothing to do with you. I have to remind myself of this often because I’m inclined to assume they never texted because I’m fat, weird, or wore a bad outfit (should have worn the empire-waist dress, dammit!!). It’s none of those reasons; it’s a secret third thing you’ll never know.

For example, I met a tall, ruggedly hot guy out at a club in Williamsburg a few months ago and was dismayed, after some heavy flirting, that he wasn’t asking for my number. Come to find out from his friend that he was engaged. “Diabolical” gets thrown around a lot, but this guy personally knew Satan; they were fraternity brothers at ASU!

The other four guys I met through friends. One was a set-up, two were at apartment or house parties with mutual friends, and one bonus date came from my friend tapping the glass of a bar and signing my number to a guy standing on the sidewalk who I’d seen and thought was cute. Those four dates bubbled organically from my social life, from simply saying yes to things, endeavoring to meet new people, being willing to step out of my usual type, and being curious about strangers. They all started with me looking over, looking back, looking back again and smiling, etc. until they came over to say hi.

Approaching strangers is hard, and I understand why people are reluctant to do it, and flirting requires a self-confidence, intelligence, charm, and subtlety that might be, culturally, in peril. Sometimes I think everything’s gone downhill since men would throw their overcoats over puddles for ladies to walk over. Some guy leaned out his car window and shouted, “Sit on my face and come!” at me the other week. “You couldn’t handle it!!” I shouted back. (Just kidding, I sought refuge in a Sweetgreen and cried.)

There’s a lot of discourse on why dating is declining, sex is declining, no one wants to get married, etc. but I think the reason behind it all is less complicated than we think. Falling in love is scary. Putting yourself out there is scary. Rejection is hard. It’s easier to shout something out a car window and speed off than it is to hang around a bar where the person who just rejected you is standing ten feet away.

Just looking at someone is really brave. Every time I do it, my heart beats fast. When they look back, I can’t smother the smile that blooms across my face. It’s exciting, it’s fun, and it’s terrifying to be seen.

Try it! Make engaged, flirty, Tyra-Banks-smizing eye contact with someone in your proximal orbit and see what happens. They’ll either approach you or call the cops, in which case, call me because I owe you bail money.

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I really wanted it to be good. I liked this guy, and I wanted our first time to be memorable and sweet and, like, safe but dangerous? It was our fourth date and I felt it was time since on date three we rounded the same base and I figured we were nice and warmed up for the full four base grand slam (so to speak). Convinced I’d be stiff and crippled with unsexy anxious thoughts, I reached for the bolster I usually did- in this case, a bottle of Merlot.

Sex has always given me a little bit of anxiety. It’s pretty much the most exposing, vulnerable thing you can do with another person and there’s so much misinformation about what is considered normal, cool, and sexy in bed. I was the late blooming product of strict parents and didn’t lose my virginity until my senior year of college. It didn’t exactly go well.

I remember lying there like prey while my heart went a million beats per minute. I didn’t know what I wanted, let alone how to ask for it and, having never consumed porn, my references for normal adult sex were early aughts romcoms where the woman keeps her bra on and then thinks the guy disappeared in the morning, but he really went out to get coffees and pastries for her. It was equally thrilling, perturbing, and not at all how I thought it would be. I left proud of myself and bewildered by my feeling that I didn’t really enjoy it and I also wanted to do it again soon.

The years post college were littered with sexual blunders and delights, but it wasn’t until I met my ex that I eased into a confident ownership of my sexuality. It didn’t start that way, though. It started with the fourth date, and the bottle of Merlot.

I filled my glass to the brim and drained it, but it did nothing but make me acutely aware that I was trying to trample an emotion. I felt like I was suffocating myself, which only made me more clamorously panicked to breathe. It ends badly, this glass of wine, I think, and, consumed, drawn as if pulled to my legs by both hands, I remember.

I remember his eyes on me as I chugged it in one head tilt and multiple giant glugs. I remember realizing he had just seen and registered me in a new way, wilder than he had initially categorized. I remember being briefly concerned about that, but abandoning the fledgling flicker of worry for a more pressing one. What if I suck in bed?!

Well, I did suck. The percolation of the wine and my anxiety produced a chest rash and a full-blown panic attack which I attempted to play off as chilled shivering. “Maybe you’re just nervous,” he said, and it felt like a needle going through my thorax, pinning me to the cork board. I felt so exposed, so found out, my attempts to obfuscate my anxiety only punctuated it. He was nice about it, but I didn’t want his kindness. It felt like proof that I was something to be pitied, so naive, so inexperienced. I couldn’t find the words to tell him that, to some extent, this was true.

One summer night in my teens, my sister and I walked over to the empty middle school playground and talked on the swings. I remember imagining that sex would feel like swinging, the weightlessness, the stomach lurch. I was shocked by how physical it actually was. It didn’t feel like floating or flying. It felt like Cosmopolitan magazine had been LYING to me for pretty much ever. I remember poring over graphics of cartoon women demonstrating sex positions requiring limb gymnastics I couldn’t fathom commanding my body to do. The basics proved difficult enough.

I experienced every iteration of the awkwardness of sex and then some. There was the time I bled all over my white duvet with my older sister’s crazy hot law school friend. There was the time I bailed mid blow-job and cum shot everywhere, like Old Faithful erupting. There was the time I queefed, to my abject horror.

Queefing destroys the moment, it just does. There’s nothing like a big, loud, tooting sound to take the romance straight out of the room. A queef doesn’t even sound like a fart; it sounds like someone trying to mimic a fart by pumping their arm with their hand under their armpit.

I remember one guy in particular that I used to hook up with when I first moved to Chicago, who I always queefed with, every time we had sex, because he switched positions so often. I couldn’t even get comfortable in a spot before he was flipping me over and tossing my legs around like he was competing against me for state champion in a wrestling tournament, and let me tell you, I was losing. Every few minutes, a big pocket of air would bubble out of me and make it sound like I’d eaten nothing but beans for a week straight. It is imperative, I discovered, that you make a tight seal. Also imperative that you only fuck guys with a sense of humor.

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The only consistent through these turbulent experiences was alcohol. In my early twenties, I always made a pre-date drink or two and I usually made them strong. I was too broke to Uber, so I’d take the bus or train in my Julia Fox get-up and absolutely blast Miley Cyrus or Beyoncé to hype myself up, and I’d be pretty tipsy by the time I arrived, which means that by the end of the date, I could have had five plus drinks. Tepid like becomes potent lust after five drinks. Stilted conversation becomes a comedy set. Nathan Fielder becomes Brad Pitt.

Drinking too much skewed my judgement; it made me unable to discern appropriate storytelling from blatant oversharing, and it made it jarring to inevitably realize I didn’t really like my date without the haze of alcohol.

I remember one first date with a sweet law school student, to whom, keyed up on multiple cocktails, I gave an in-detail summary of an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown I’d seen during which a pig was slaughtered. I described the excruciating gore and how you could tell by the sound of its cry that the pig knew it was leaving this earth. We did not go out again.

I told myself I needed the drink to help me relax, be myself, and be less nervous, but alcohol just made me bad-weird, flustered, and overheated. It took entering into my first serious relationship to finally see and accept that.

There was one night in early spring, when I thought maybe I was in love with him, that I realized I’d been jockeying myself into sexual experiences I didn’t actually want or feel ready for out of a conviction that I was behind and had lost time to make up for. No such timeline existed, outside of my head.

I was in his bed, and the way we were together felt endless, like I could explore the unknowable life between us forever, the way who he was and who I was converged to create something new, other. He pulled my face against his chest, and when I turned he followed, our bodies touching at every point, and I can’t describe the way it felt to be held like that, like you’re so grateful to have been born, like you want to get on your knees and say thank you, thank you, with a wave so overwhelming you want it to end as desperately as you don’t.

At its best, sex can feel like dancing, swimming, or running as fast as you can, feeling both the power and the limitations of your physical self. It can feel life-affirming, exhausting, depleting in a good way, like you’ve used every drop of your force and strength and it was incredible to do that with someone, to need them in order to do it, to be needed by them, too. The price of entry is surrender, revealing yourself completely in all your flaws and anxieties, unarmed, sober, open.

What I want now is to be touched like that again, with feeling, like you can’t believe the person or the power or the body in front of you, kneeling to meet yours. My heart will beat with that specific joy again, and when it does, I want to be there to feel it, with all my senses.

The duffel bag over my shoulder had made angry red welts by the time I was done hauling it off the ferry and up the hill to the hotel. The foundation caking my chest was turning the beads of sweat latte-colored, but I’d had to do it. When I saw myself in the Amtrak station bathroom mirror, I jumped back in horror. It looked like I dumped a can of diced tomatoes on my chest. Then someone had a whole breakdown about both the soap and paper towel dispensers being empty, and yes, I was that someone. Seriously, if this Substack doesn’t work out, catch me clocking in for shifts at the train station; you will always have clean, dry hands. Anyway.

I had just landed on Block Island, Rhode Island, for an old friend’s bachelorette after what felt like seventy hours of travel, and I needed a shower and a glass of crisp, ice cold white wine. I normally don’t mind travelling by myself but this time I did. The train seat next to me was occupied by a middle aged guy who smelled like a guinea pig, and there was no one there to talk me off the ledge when the ferry hit some chop and I became convinced we were sinking and I would die single and alone at the bottom of the Atlantic.

Fortunately, my friends had read my mind, and they had a glass and a hug ready for me the moment I walked through the door, and we melted into a frenzy of laughter and storytelling and sauvignon blanc that made my drowning crashout feel like a distant memory.

Block Island is beautiful. The rolling surface of the ocean radiates like hammered pewter when the sun catches it, and the beaches are sprawling and curve pleasantly into the water like an embrace. The first night, we dressed up and ate pizza and drank wine on the hotel porch, the low hum of our chatter drifting into the night air. It had been a full year since I’d seen these friends, and so much had changed in the space between. Two had babies, one was engaged, and others had new boyfriends. Slowly, putting it together, I realized that in the group of thirteen women, I was the only single one.

A bad feeling crept in as I assumed my usual position as entertainer among coupled women, amusing them with my latest dating stories, cracking them up over the guy who dropped his pants on date two to show me his truly asinine tattoos, and the horrible sex I’d had in early summer. It was nice to be able to laugh at, but somewhere in the back of my mind I resented it. This isn’t funny, I thought, this is my life, the life I actually have to live and endure while you return to the safe harbor and stability of the same man you’ve loved and known across the waning and widening years of your life.

Once the comparison began, I couldn’t stop. I looked around at the group, the giant engagement rings and Cult Gaia dresses, the sparkling Staud bags, how skinny everyone seemed to be, and felt fat and broke on top of being alone. I filled my wine glass and knocked it back, but the feeling was still there, insistent and unstifled.

The next day we rented bikes and cruised around the island to a beachside bar where we ordered mudslides, and I discovered the brilliant ingenuity of combining chocolate shakes with vodka. One of the girls, a friend of the bride’s I hadn’t met previously, came over to chat with me. She asked more about my dating life in New York and, perhaps fueled by the drinks or exhausted from the sun, I confessed to her that it wasn’t going as well as I hoped and certainly wasn’t as fun as I painted it for people.

“Girl, I totally get that,” she told me, “Before my current relationship I was single for ages and dating some LOSERS.” She told me more about her terrible ex and how defeated she’d felt with dating until she was introduced to her current boyfriend. “Actually,” she said, “I have a friend who’s staying on the island right now with some friends who you might like. I’ll invite him out tonight and introduce you!”

Just like that, my luck had changed, all thanks to simply being honest. I finally relaxed enough to drop the comparisons, insecurities, and feeling like I needed a guy to validate my existence. I enjoyed the rest of the afternoon, happy to just be.

Later that night, dressed in sequins and heels, we headed out to a local bar and, sure enough, he showed up. My friend gestured animatedly from across the room and I saw she was standing next to a guy who, at least through the fog of a few drinks, resembled JFK Jr. His look was distinctly rich boy preppy: boat shoes, broad shoulders, and scruffy, thick brown hair like a human chocolate lab. I could picture him sailing around the coastal side streets in a Jeep with the confident ease of a guy who grew up summering at the vacation home.

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He bought us a round of tequila shots, which we downed and then all promptly squealed and scattered, like the 8 ball nailing the target and sending everything ricocheting in opposite directions, so that two seconds after the tequila was tossed back, it was just he and I standing together at the bar.

He turned to face me and looked into my eyes, and suddenly my chest rash was in full bloom again, my body seized by a tidal wave of anxiety. I stared back, mind blank, silent. He launched into a story about how his old roommate only ate rice and soy sauce, and I discovered he lived a few blocks from me back in the city. He seemed really nice, honestly, and funny.

A friend rushed over suddenly and grabbed my arm to drag me to the dance floor for the last call. I turned to look over my shoulder and mouthed a “sorry” at him. I clutched her hand, and we jumped, screamed, and stomped our feet, and I felt all right back in my body again. We stared at each other, grinning, and shouted the lyrics into the air. He resurfaced again, through the crowd, and waved me over, but I leaned into my friend and told her I was too nervous to go over and wasn’t sure why or what was wrong with me. “Just hang here with me then,” she said, smiling, and I did.

I caught him once more, on our way out. He invited us back to his house on the beach where we could swim and have a bonfire. I wanted to say yes, but most of our group was already halfway back up to the hotel, and the rest were drunkenly singing too loudly to hear the proposed plan, so we declined and raced ahead to catch up. At the hotel, we hopped the fence to the pool, shimmied out of our dresses, left them in a pile on the cement deck, and jumped in.

I floated on my back and looked at the stars, so much more vivid than in the city. I felt far away from my regular life. I felt comfortingly small. I closed my eyes and listened to the happy chorus of my friends’ laughter, how much joy we squeezed out of loving each other.

In that moment, it didn’t matter who was getting married or who already was or who wouldn’t be, perhaps for years. I was the only one who’d done a head count of who was single on the trip- no one else cared. I cared because it’s still a label I don’t feel totally comfortable in. Sometimes I like being single, and sometimes I feel like I have to explain or apologize for it. No one’s asking me to do that but my own insecurity.

The thing you’re most insecure about- that you’ve never been in a relationship or that your boyfriend secretly sucks or that you haven’t had sex or been on a date in two years- no one cares the way you think they do. Usually, they’re too preoccupied trying to hide or minimize their own insecurities.

On the train back to the city, I looked at photos from the trip, of all of us cracking up and dancing and letting loose. No one was laughing at me, I realized, they were laughing with me, and at the bewildering and wondrous experience of being a woman. It’s hard to approach the fork in the road of your twenties and thirties where your friends’ lives start to look very different– some are getting married and having kids while others are going on first dates– but we all paused the rest of our lives for a weekend to spend them together because of the love we have for each other.

As I recounted the trip to my roommates in the city, they couldn’t believe I never snagged the Prepster’s number. Listen, I defended myself, my mojo was thrown off by the red paint splatter on my chest! And anyway, who says I won’t run into him some night out…

It all started with a hangover. After a night out where I drunkenly ordered fifteen green tea shots instead of five, I needed an afternoon pick me up, the big and cheap kind, and there’s only one place for that- Dunkin Donuts. I tapped the black screen of the ordering kiosk to no response and realized it was as lifeless as I felt.

“You can use mine,” I heard from next to me. I turned to face the lightly scruffed, well over six foot cutie standing at the kiosk next to me. “I tried that one but it’s broken,” he explained, “but you can use mine.”

“Oh, thanks,” I mumbled, blushing. “What’s your go-to order?” he asked. Extra large iced cinnamon toast vanilla sprinkle cake latte with extra cake syrup. “Iced latte!” I answered, craning my head back to meet his gaze.

As we waited for our drinks, we kept chatting, and I noticed how well-dressed he was for a Sunday afternoon in suede bucks and a blue suit jacket. “I just came from church,” he confessed, “and I recently moved here from LA so I haven’t found a good local coffee shop yet.”

“Well you’re in luck because there are a ton of great local places,” I told him, “I just like low-brow, truck-stop coffee.” “Fair enough,” he laughed, and then asked if I’d want to get a coffee, truck-stop or otherwise, sometime with him. A tall, handsome guy from LA with great style and a caffeine habit to match mine?! And they say dating is dead! Well, ha, miracles do happen!!

A few days later, we met up at a cute coffee shop (sorry, Dunkin) in our neighborhood.

We hugged hello and made nervous small talk until we sat down with our cappuccinos. “So, are you religious?” he asked, in a pivot so sudden I short-circuited slightly. “Oh, um, sort of?” I stumbled, “I was raised Christian, but I honestly don’t go to church much now, except for when I’m home.”

“When you go, is it performative, like you just go to go, or do you actually believe in it?” he asked. Whoa buddy, I thought, alarmed at how doggedly determined he was to probe my religious status.

“I guess the latter,” I answered. “So why did you leave LA?” I asked, attempting to get the conversation back into the realm of acceptable first date topics. “Well, I was working for this vitamin company but it turned out to be a pyramid scheme, so I decided to try being a stand-up comedian until God called on me to become a pastor. So that’s what I’m doing here, studying to become a pastor and planting a church. It’s actually a good deal because I live in the church dorms for free and I have a roommate but it’s not like I’m going to have anyone over so it works out great.”

Were we playing lunatic mad libs?! I felt every muscle in my body lock up in an attempt to keep my expression neutral, but it wasn’t the coffee making my blood pressure skyrocket. Becoming a pastor?! Living at the church dorms?! Planting a church?! PYRAMID SCHEME?!?!

“Well, that’s… cool,” I said, stunned.

“Thanks!” he smiled, totally at ease, “So what’s your relationship with God like?”

“Sorry?”

“Your relationship with God! Has he called on your heart?” I gripped the table for support. “I don’t… know if… what that… means,” I replied.

He happily clarified for me, launching into an animated monologue on how lost he’d felt before he found God and his plans for building a congregation, while I contemplated the seemingly improbable but perhaps totally fitting stand-up-comedian-to-pastor pipeline.

He certainly liked to talk, and as he droned on about how so many people these days go to church for attention (???) and how those vitamins actually were really effective, I contemplated how wrong I’d gotten the interaction. What felt like a romcom meet-cute had taken the wildest pivot I could imagine. I thought it was a date, but clearly, this guy just wanted an opportunity to expand his congregation, one single, hungover girl at a time. Let this coffee shop burst into flames, I prayed. Release me from this torture.

The last dregs of my cappuccino were cold by the time I finally got a word in to say that my sister was having some crisis with her cat and I needed to, sadly, leave immediately. We said an awkward goodbye, and I practically ran home, bursting at the seams with the story and thanking the good Lord to be outta there.

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Later that night, I gathered my posse and was regaling them with the tale over margaritas, when a text from him came through. “If you’re open to it I’d love to meet up with you again and share with you my testimony and answer any questions you might have about Jesus or religion. Or your relationship with God.”

My relationship with God? My extremely personal, entirely private relationship with God?! My vision field clouded red. I drained my margarita and bit the keyboard. I‘ll give this moron something to testify about, I fumed. I’d been patient on the date, letting him talk at me and ask overly-personal questions while I politely redirected the conversation as best as I could maneuver but now I was full-blown offended. This complete stranger from Dunkin Donuts wanting to answer any questions I might have about Jesus?!?

“NOOOOO” I replied, “I thought this was a date it is so deeply uncool to try to convert me.”

“It was a date. But I still care about your soul,” he wrote back. “No worries. If you’re not interested in Jesus that’s perfectly okay.”

At this point, I wanted a cigarette. My girlfriends and I sat in stunned silence until someone said, “At least he cares about your soul?” and we started cracking up. “True,” I conceded, “Which is more than I can say for most of the guys I’ve been out with. And if he wants to pray for me, he can knock himself out. Honestly, I need all the help I can get.”

The laughter was the pressure release valve I needed to evaporate my indignant anger. I told him thanks and good luck with everything, but I think we’re looking for different things, and then I blocked his number, returning him to the world of strangers, the graveyard of bad dates that make you question who the hell you were sitting across from. And then I put my phone away and looked at the girls I was sitting with, the wonderful friends who’d been there for every date, no matter how exhilarating or bizarre.

I said a little prayer of thanks for my girlfriends, for the ability to find humor in life, for summer nights and margaritas, and for Dunkin Donuts being on every block so I could still get my extra large iced cinnamon toast vanilla sprinkle cake latte with extra cake syrup without ever having to return to the one where I met my disciple.

I tried it for a month. I told my roommates I couldn’t watch the “Vines that keep me from ending it all” YouTube compilation and locked myself in my room. I lit a candle. I cracked the spine on the thirty dollar, handmade-in-Spain notebook I bought at the paper store down the street. I wrote it down, in hyper-specific detail, as I’d been instructed.

He will be kind, generous, and thoughtful. A good listener. Close with his family. We will be aligned in our Big Values. He will think I’m funny and laugh readily. We will read in bed together when it snows. He’ll be smart and well-educated but not smug about it. He’ll say, “Thanks man,” to the bartender with the confident ease of a guy who has a lot of friends. He’ll carry my purse and heels when I’m tired. He will be over six feet with brown hair and a Tom Selleck mustache. He will make me feel loved and safe and special.

I put the pen down and looked at my list. What am I doing, I wondered.

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For the past few months, I’ve been inundated with videos online about manifesting a husband, and after one too many awful nights out at the bar where I spent too much money, tried unsuccessfully to hear my friends over the music, and talked to zero men, I conceded to try it. In one particularly convincing video, a self-assured woman sporting a crisp brunette bob and a Peter Pan collar said that one month after she wrote her list, she met her husband. She visualized him and then bam, there he was, smack dab in the middle of her life, just as her manifestations foretold.

There’s been a curious lack of mustachioed men in my life this past month, which is odd, because I specifically requested a mustache, even delineated the color! The only reading in bed has been done exclusively by me, alone, and either I confused the tenses and should have listed everything I wanted as if it already happened, or, as I’m beginning to suspect, that list was a futile exercise in attempting to exert control where I have absolutely none.

Dating is very fucking hard and sometimes extremely unfun. Dating apps are basically creature soup, and the bar scene isn’t much better. Last weekend, I returned to the bar where, a few years prior, a guy came over and told me, spraying flecks of spit in my face with every vowel, that he was going to fuck me without a condom unless I was from Jersey, because he decidedly did not fuck girls from Jersey. Then there was the guy who, mid chatting, abruptly asked, “What’s the deal with the eyes?” “Excuse me?” I asked, afraid he had clocked me glancing around for the nearest exit. “You have pretty eyes,” he said, clarifying nothing but the fact that men are from Mars and I fundamentally don’t understand them.

The first date I went on after my breakup was with my coworker’s boyfriend’s best friend. During the date, he called me babe twice and told me that when he saw a picture of me he said, “HUBBA HUBBA!” Feeling uncomfortable and unmoored, I downed three lychee martinis, we kissed in the elevator, and when I got home I had a breakdown that registered as a 7 on the Richter scale. I genuinely could not quell the anguish and confusion I felt about my ex’s decision, one I had no control over, to live a life without me in it, thus casting me back out into the bottomless sea where all the fish were weird looking and wore flip flops to nice restaurants and were not him.

See, my ex came out of nowhere and scrambled my life up beautifully and then painfully. I knew from our first kiss that I was a goner. When he didn’t text me for a few days after our second date, I worked grooves into the floorboards pacing back and forth and cursed the gods that I would never get to see him shirtless. I felt powerless and nuts until he texted to ask me out again, and I realized how badly I wanted him and how I was going to have to accept I could not manipulate him into wanting me.

It felt like miraculous, unearned luck that he did. He called me Cutie and took me to restaurants I had never tried and rubbed my head while patiently listening to me gossip about people he’d never met. He dutifully put water by my side of the bed and turned down my covers each night, he made me pasta and tea, and once licked every square inch of my butt, which I never would have asked for but, to this day, is one of my favorite sexual experiences ever.

I could never have manifested that. It was better than anything I’d known before, and it rearranged something inside me in a way I couldn’t have imagined. I would never have written “Energetically licks my hiney without being asked” on any manifestation list, but you can bet your ass it’ll be on every one from here on out. I didn’t pull him out of the ether with a vision board. He just happened, like a bolt of lightning that I could do nothing but be grateful for and enjoy while it lasted, because just as I was powerless to make him want me, I couldn’t make him stay either.

I couldn’t preserve the magic between us that, in the end, was brief. This will last forever, written on the vanity mirror. I will always be this happy, repeated again and again to my reflection. Nope. He dumped me, and I was Big Time Sad. I sobbed on my bathroom floor and almost every day on my walk to work for about a month.

You can’t protect yourself from suffering or predict what it will teach you. I am a better person for losing him. I would never have asked for that pain, but it was only through enduring that loss that I discovered reserves of strength and resilience, renewed appreciation for lifelong friends, empathy for what people are privately going through all the time, Gracie Abrams’s music, Southern Charm, and the bolstering brilliance of Nancy Meyers’s and Diane von Furstenberg’s Instagram accounts. Who knew?!

Now every time I see a generic picture of an unearthly good-looking couple with that infernal butter yellow font overlaid describing the dream man and his attributes, I get depressed. It feels empty to me. It feels like a gesture at the Real Thing but not the thing itself. The Real Thing is faith. Faith is different from manifestation. While manifestation is an antidote to lack of control, an itemized, step-by-step accomplishable, faith is an embrace of and surrender to it.

I get the appeal of manifesting. When I get cornered at a party by some asshole who “just read an article” about how “85% of women who don’t get married by thirty will never marry,” I’d like to be able to go home and write down everything I want in a partner and be certain that if I believe in it fervently enough, it’ll all happen, just as I wished. Wouldn’t that be nice?

But your life, and the best things wrested from it, can’t be summoned on command. They don’t exist on a piece of paper or in the words you say to yourself as you brush your teeth. They’re out there, in the wide open unknown that only becomes known by traversing and exploring it.

Sometimes you find guys who spit when they enunciate (that one’s not your husband). Sometimes you find guys who you trust enough to give your heart to, and then they go and break it (not your husband either). Sometimes you find a six foot four brunette with a Tom Selleck mustache. Leave a little bit up to chance. Have a little faith.

“Have you found Mr. Manhattan yet?” my uncle jeered at me. This is the same uncle who, a few months prior, told me I looked pregnant, so my hackles were raised and I was already plotting a devastatingly clever retort. We were standing in the church basement after my nephew’s baptism, the kind of all-beige, straight out of the seventies room I, having been raised Lutheran, am implicitly accustomed to.

“Ha ha, no,” I laughed airlessly, “Not yet!”

“Well maybe that’s because he’s in Milwaukee,” he cracked, and clapped his hands before rubbing them vigorously together while laughing so manically I wondered if he had shaken a screw loose. Why should my failure to procure a boyfriend in my first year in New York City be so hilarious? I seethed, immediately allowing the comment to make my skin itch.

Your forehead is bigger than the windshield on a Buick, I thought, fuming. God could have brought three of every animal aboard if the ark were as big as your head. You wear your pants four sizes too big, you’ve never heard of Jane Austen, and you have a revolting smear of mayo on your upper lip!! I took a deep breath and pivoted toward the buffet table.

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I stared at the sandwich platter I’d helped my mom make the day before in the humid kitchen. I touched every single gelatinous piece of lunch meat on these, I thought. I have no baby, I thought. No Mr. Manhattan, no Mr. Milwaukee, no mister, period.

I moved to New York City almost exactly a year ago. It was my biggest dream for as long as I can remember, and it’s been a curious experience, getting my dream. I had this romantic idea that I would be someone different in New York. The cosmopolitan version of me would be stylish, clever, a ruthless man-eater, independent, effortlessly cool, quick. I felt certain, and sometimes, against the pile of failed dates, still do, that my person is here. I just feel it.

But when my uncle probed into this secret belief, I began to doubt it. What if the person I’m supposed to be with, my fated true love, is somewhere else. I soothe myself with mantras that what’s meant for you won’t miss you, but maybe it does miss you. Maybe all it does is miss you, standing on the bank of the opposite shore, looking across the water, missing you.

When you get your dream you give up your expectations of how you thought it would be and surrender to how it is. I walked out of my apartment this morning to find that someone had pooped and smeared it all over the front door of the nail salon next door. Then I got on the wrong train and ended up in the pouring rain racing to work on foot. My mid-afternoon coffee was $9.57. The fledgling belief I would find True Love began to flicker and dim with every bad date, every night out during which I talked to zero men and trudged home defeated.

In Girls, Lena Dunham justifies Shoshanna’s reticence to leave Japan because of her burgeoning crush on a coworker, explaining, “Part of the thing that keeps any young woman in any place is a romance.” I’m a little embarrassed to agree because I’d like to posit that I’m more independent or have bigger goals and priorities than a guy, but it’s true.

Part of the reason I left Chicago, where I spent five years, was the failure of a relationship that was profoundly impactful and painful, and part of the lure of New York was the promise or idea of love. Yes, I have my wonderful friends here, my job, and the city itself, which, like Carrie claims in Sex and the City, is a boyfriend of sorts. I wonder, though, how long that will satisfy me, especially as friends leave to get married and start families, as my job fails to provide adequate purpose, as I become deeper set in my ways and unpracticed at sharing my life with a partner.

At the end of five years there, I had no unbreakable bonds, nothing really rooting me. I had a feeling that the best of what I had was what had already passed. I remember walking by the bar where, one winter night, my ex had put his arms around me and forgiven me generously for some error I had made. A year later I was still passing that bar as I schlepped bags of groceries that weighed more than an eighth-grader home from Trader Joe’s and up the four floors to my apartment. Usually by the time I got in I felt despondent, peevish, and gypped in some sense. Wasn’t something better supposed to have happened?

At the end of my first year in New York, I don’t feel that hollow disappointment, exactly, but there is an exhaustion and disillusionment blended with the enduring love. I have this desperation to recover the magic I felt when I first moved, which has given way to a harsh reality of just how hard it is to live here. Part of me recognizes that the beauty of that time was predicated on a necessary transience. It was beautiful because it was fleeting.

I remember crying on the phone to my sister while walking the perimeter of Washington Square Park again and again because I couldn’t face returning home to four roommates. I remember getting so lost on the F train that it took two hours to get to work. I remember walking to the West Side Highway to catch the sunset on my very first night here and not quite fathoming that I could only be at the beginning of this once. It’s just the way of life that nothing will feel quite like that again.

For a while it felt like every time I found my footing, I lost it again, and as soon as I made my mind up about any part of life in New York, it changed. On a third date with a tall, muscular blonde who’d moved from a rural town similar to the one I grew up in, I imagined a life with him, spending weeknights reading books together in bed and bringing him home at Christmas to meet my family. He ended things shortly after. In one year I’ve been to two going away parties for friends who claimed and contributed to this city and then left to return to where they came from or to prioritize a relationship. New York is great for reminding you that all the things you think you have, it turns out, you borrow from somewhere.

The central contradiction I find myself poised at the intersection of now is a desire to preserve thrill and a weariness of change. I think what I want more than ever now are tethers, people and connections that keep me anchored to an identity and a life. I want to be in a relationship in part because of the security it lends. I want one of the big questions of my life to finally have a permanent answer. I never feel this more powerfully than when I leave New York and go back home.

One year to the day I got on a one-way flight that turned my life upside down, I’m back where I started, at my childhood home, right-side up again. I go to the beach, and when I look out at the horizon, it’s more of the same, more unknowable vastness. When I turn to face the shore, it’s as if I’m looking at my life from afar, willing it to stay together just as I wish, a little bit, it would fall apart completely. What then? The flashy lure of starting over, of detonating what I’ve built to make something different, purged of all the ways I’ve failed, a pure, blank canvas. It doesn’t really exist, does it? I needed every lesson I learned in Chicago to be able to stand on two legs in New York. I needed this year in New York for whatever’s coming next.

I used to be afraid of irreversible decisions, and now I think I’m more afraid of a life without any permanence. I watch my sisters with their babies, the tangible force of love radiating around them, and I’m envious of their certainty and the beautiful gifts that came from it. How did you know, I want to ask, that this was definitely what you wanted? I look at my mom and dad, and consider how our happiness in this moment, our family, can be traced to the yes she gave him over thirty years ago, and his question that, once asked, was answered forever.

There is nothing keeping in New York. I could quit my job, get a subletter, and be back in Wisconsin in time for the corn harvest if I wanted to and there wouldn’t be a Mr. Manhattan begging me to reconsider. I think about the wide-open sky, the beaches, my sisters, my perfect nephews, the shadows the trees make across the lawn in the late summer light, my aging parents, the peonies, now pruned, that won’t flower again until next June. I am aware that time is my scarcest resource.

Knowing this cleaves my certainty from my doubt and overthinking. It answers the question of how I know that this is definitely what I want. Nothing is keeping me here but my own belief that it is where I should be now. I don’t want to drop out of this life, scrap it, and start over. I want to stay and keep trying to be the person I envisioned. Embracing your liberty isn’t about prioritizing freedom over stability, as I once thought, but about making choices under no authority but your own. Every decision you’ll make in your life is a risk, which makes it brave to choose anything at all, to pick a lane and hit the gas, and allow your life to move forward.

On a balmy evening two days before the Fourth of July, I went with a girlfriend to a dinner party at a loft in SoHo. It was one of those apartments where the elevator opens directly into the foyer, which means you pretty much had to invent and patent a washing machine part or start a spaceship company to afford this place. Even though I was dripping with sweat and wearing a dilapidated Victoria’s Secret thong from 2016, I was excited to sit on furniture that cost more than my monthly rent and drink tangy red wine I can’t pronounce.

I have a bad habit of immediately sweeping rooms I enter for the hottest guy and had been at the party for about thirty minutes when he walked in. He was six foot two, had big, sexy hands (critical), and a wide, easy smile. My friend introduced us and we hit it off immediately. I discovered he was in his thirties, loved scary movies, had lived in New York for ten years, had a great job in tech, and coached middle school lacrosse on the side (green flag, surely).

We were inseparable the whole night. He was funny, loquacious, and down-to-earth. When I came back from the bathroom, he left the woman he was conversing with to resume our conversation and got my number before we left. Out on the cobblestone street with our friends, he leaned in for a hug and whispered in my ear, “I would kiss you if we didn’t have an audience.”

He texted me that night and smoothly asked me out the following day. I liked that he picked a romantic wine bar conveniently located in my neighborhood, and when I walked up, he was standing outside waiting for me, looking handsome in a crisp blue button-down.

Now, if you’ve been following along with my doomed quest to get a boyfriend, you’ll remember that a few weeks ago I had genuinely terrible sex and got bacterial vaginosis as the cherry on top. I was still on antibiotics by the time my first date with my new guy rolled around. You are not supposed to drink on antibiotics, and you are definitely not supposed to drink Vesper martinis.

The martini was down the hatch and the conversation was flowing as we chatted about attachment styles, and parents, and how many kids we want (he said as many as financially possible, plus one) when I felt a creeping wave of nausea come on. I tried to concentrate on his story about getting arrested for skinny-dipping in high school, but the evil vodka had percolated with the metronidazole to disastrous effect, and I felt like I could upchuck at any moment.

I’d opted for a beautiful silk slip dress the color of bluebells for the occasion but discovered the silky fabric revealed the contours of my belly fat with horrifying precision, so I’d wrangled my midsection into a pair of Spanx that were even older than the Victoria’s Secret underwear. By now, the Spanx had rolled over at the seam and were around my stomach like a tourniquet, ratcheting my nausea to find-me-a-bucket urgency.

Excusing myself, I fled to the bar bathroom and yanked the stupid shape wear off and decided there was nothing to do but pitch them in the garbage and go commando.

When I got back to the table, he asked if I was okay and, spurred by a confessional instinct, I shamelessly admitted I was not okay, had just stripped in the bathroom, but it did nothing to alleviate the sloshing in my gut, and we needed to leave immediately.

His eyes widened in concern, and he immediately asked if the Spanx were expensive and if I wanted him to retrieve them from the trash (green flags abound!). Since the Spanx were older than Millie Bobby Brown, I reassured him that the trash was their new and permanent home, and he got the check and walked me home, his hand interlaced with mine the whole way. At my door, he kissed me goodnight, and I can’t say it was particularly good, but I chalked it up to the nausea and ran upstairs to get in the fetal position on my bathroom floor.

Apparently this display of my signature blend of chaos and oversharing did not deter him, and one week later we went on a second date at an Italian bar in his neighborhood. Over espresso martinis I told him more about my three sisters all getting married and pregnant in the same year, and we laughed over his story of his friend rescuing a dog from Mexico City. Through the haze of the lovely, antibiotic-free martini, I sized him up, watching his eyebrows furrow in concentration and his big hands make exaggerated gestures. I genuinely could not decide if I found him cute. I tried to remember the night he’d walked in at the party and I’d been hit with that gravitational whoa. Where had that gone?! Was I so fickle, my attraction faltering so fast?! Or was my own overthinking muddling my gut instincts?

He asked if I wanted to grab another round at a different bar, and I agreed, but as we walked, we found everything to be closed, so he suggested we go back to his place for orange wine. His place was… interesting. From the moment I crossed the threshold, I transformed into Law Roach as a judge on Project Runway, my brain feverishly churning out ungenerous, creative variations on “I hate it.” He had cranberry red bedsheets. The bathroom was unkempt. Most glaringly, all his books were displayed page-forward, with the spines against the wall. Puzzled (and trying to reassure myself this did not mean he was some kind of psycho), I asked him why. Apparently, he found the titles too distracting and claimed he couldn’t finish a book if he could see any other book titles.

The wall above his couch was decorated with a gallery of photographs and prints, and he gave me a tour of them. “This one is actually a tattoo I have,” he told me, pointing to a rudimentary sketch of a cactus. “Really?” I said, “Where?”

“Do you wanna see?” he asked. I shrugged why not and before I knew it, he was standing up and dropping his pants! I quelled furious thoughts of ‘I AM ABOUT TO DIE, THIS CRAZY PAGE-FACING-OUT BOOK FREAK IS GOING TO KILL ME’ with a generous glug of sour orange wine.

The first thing I noticed was his boxers which were so oversized they were more like bloomers or colonial-era pantaloons. I felt like I was on a date with Paul Revere. If I’d known the British were coming, I would have called an Uber to get the hell outta there!

Still reeling from this sartorial discovery, my eyes took in the tattoos. Underneath a thicket of copious, dark body hair, in the dead center of his quad, was the cactus drawing, roughly the size of my head. On the other thigh, equally as big, was a massive seventeenth-century ship (maybe the one he arrived in America on when he settled Plymouth).

My face must have looked plainly horrified because he hiked the britches back on (thank God, I live to see another day) and sat back down on the couch. Lubricated by multiple martinis and the orange wine, we started kissing. Then we started really kissing, and he was using a LOT of tongue, like a cat licking up milk from a bowl. It was the final nail in my tenuous attraction to him. I started getting in my head, picturing an imaginary audience watching us kiss when, whether fueled by nerves or discomfort, I burst out in hysterical laughter mid-kiss. It was a full-body, all-consuming crack up.

He asked if I was okay, and I tried to recover myself and told him I wanted to take it slow, which he was very understanding of, so we went back to the goddamn orange wine.

My uncontrollable laughter was followed by irrepressible yawning, which he noticed, and so he very kindly called me a car home. As the car soared over the Williamsburg Bridge I tried to untangle my feelings. I thought I really liked this guy. I liked that he was self-aware and regularly saw a therapist, that he wanted a big family, that he was generous and kind, but I didn’t have a good feeling when I left.

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I hadn’t been at his place for twenty minutes before he took his pants off, and we hadn’t been kissing more than fifteen minutes before his tongue was grazing my larynx and he was trying to finger me. It all felt rushed, desperate, and overfamiliar.

Sometimes I think the hardest part of dating is deciphering your own feelings and those interactions that land you somewhere in the grey area of indecision. I wish someone would just tell me what to do, whether to cut this guy off or give him another chance, whether to relax and enjoy singlehood or keep trying to put myself out there, but the decisions are mine to make. I don’t always make good ones (see: chasing antibiotics with vodka) but hopefully each experience brings what I’m looking for into sharper focus.

“How many sexual partners have you had in the last six months?” the doctor asked me. I was lying on an examination table, legs splayed in the air, in the back corner of a CVS. I didn’t even have to think about my answer. “One,” I said, not missing a beat, and then she shoved stainless steel salad tongs up my vagina.

Let me take you back to this time a week ago. Date number three with my younger man. After meeting out at a bar, we’d been on two fun, flirty dates and I was starting to like him. He was sweet, thoughtful, and an attentive listener. Date number one was drinks and for date two we had a picnic on his apartment rooftop and I was touched that he made the effort to make a charcuterie board and Aperol Spritzes for the occasion. Afterwards we went back down to his apartment and watched Love Island and, perhaps spurred by the various challenges, which include semi-nude group make outs, we started kissing. It was good. I liked kissing him and was starting to really get into it when his hand slid up to my bra. That’s when I noticed it. His hands were tiny.

I typically love men’s hands. I love when they’re big and calloused, I love when men wear a crisp button down and roll up their sleeves to clean or do the dishes and you can see the veins in their arms and they look strong and make me feel dainty and feminine. I come from sturdy Midwestern stock and I am not remotely close to petite. I had the wingspan of an adult male eagle in fourth grade. My type is big, hot guy. There’s nothing I love more than a man with a head like a battering ram and neck like a redwood. When I see a skull shaped like a Mike and Ike I go weak at the knees.

So the sight of his tiny hand on my boob turned me suddenly and powerfully off. “We’re missing the show!,” I told him, and readjusted myself on the couch to leave room for the whole Love Island cast to sit comfortably between us.

As I walked home I made a mental pro/con list. Pro: he made me laugh. Con: tiny hands. Pro: he had a big family he was close with. Con: tiny hands. Pro: he communicated consistently and clearly. Con: tiny little pterodactyl hands.

I gave myself a stern talking-to about being mature and judging men on the right metrics such as their character and not stupid, superficial things like hand size and said yes to date number three.

He picked a cocktail bar close to his apartment and after a few drinks, back to his place we went. As soon as we crossed the threshold his miniature mitts were around my waist and steering me up against a wall where we started furiously making out. My stomach flipped and my mind finally shut up about measurements as we staggered into the bedroom.

The last time I had sex was eight months ago so I was ready to burn off my sexual frustration. I felt like Charlotte in Sex and the City, griping to a shocked luncheon audience about arduously wanting a headboard-rocking fuck. Our clothes and the lights were off but as he put on a condom on my mind lurched back from a warm, horny haze to a harsh reality. The tiny hands were the harbinger I feared they would be. As we rolled around I couldn’t really feel… anything. Then, in less time than it takes to hard boil an egg, it was abruptly over.

“Did you come?” he asked me eagerly. I know you’re not supposed to lie about this and I’m too old to be faking an orgasm but it’s not like my hand was on a Bible and I was so disappointed by the velocity of the whole situation that I knew no effort on his part would get me there. So I lied and we went back to the couch to watch Melanie and Sincere scream at each other on TV.

Two days later I woke up with what felt like a forest fire in my cervix and that is how I ended up at a CVS Minute Clinic (which is ironic because that’s about how long it took to get infected). After breaking my eight-month dry spell, I was left with tattered dignity, a prescription for bacterial vaginosis, and a renewed reticence toward sex.

It’s rare that anyone asks me point-blank how much sex I’m having but if it circuitously winds up in conversation I’m immersed in a bath of panic akin to when I go in for a physical and the doctor asks how many times I poop in a day and it’s like I can’t imagine what the right answer should be. Three seems like a lot? Obviously it shouldn’t be zero but I definitely think I have days where I don’t poop? (Really hoping others have similarly spiraled because if this doesn’t resonate with anyone I might have an anxiety disorder.)

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It’s the same with having sex. If I have sex frequently and with new partners I know I’ll be judged for it. But if I have sex too sporadically do I seem like I have no game or am prudish and un-fun? Aren’t these my best years? I’m single, I live in the heart of Manhattan, and older women with expensive sunscreen like to tell me my skin will never be better than it is now. Of course the right answer to how much sex I should be having is how much sex I want to have, but what if I don’t really want to have sex outside of a relationship? I haven’t been in a relationship for two years. Am I supposed to go that long without a good bang?!

I’ve found it difficult to navigate sex after my first serious relationship. I liked sex with my ex. It was very known to me in a way I still miss. I understood how to do it and what it meant. Sometimes I resented that it occasionally felt routine and obligatory, and I remember wishing our sex life was more inventive and expressive and surprising. Then I became single again and there were a lot of bad surprises and I missed the predictability.

It’s daunting to learn a new person with all of their preferences and insecurities and unique definition of what is sexually normal. It’s even more daunting to share your own with someone new. In my experience it’s impossible to do without a lot of trust. So why do I try?

It wasn’t just the abruptness of sex with Pterodactyl Hands or the size of any body parts involved that made it so disappointing, but the lack of vigor and passion. There was no inventive fun or arduous expression of feeling. It felt perfunctory and almost like an anatomical relief. Hadn’t I gone there for exactly that though? I wanted a sweaty, cathartic climax and probably could have gotten a better release from a good cry. We’d only known each other about two months, and didn’t know each other enough to trust each other. There was no meaning to it beyond physical enjoyment of each other’s bodies, and when that faltered and failed, I felt the jagged, uncomfortable sting of regret.

When you go looking for yourself and for love, sex you regret can become part of the collateral damage you incur along the way. The good news is regret is a powerful teacher. Waves of remorse shift and mold the rules you set for yourself. They change the outline that defines you from not you. Sometimes the more painful the lesson, the more permanent it is.

I don’t want to have sex again with someone I don’t really like or trust, and I can’t guarantee I won’t slip up and miscalculate or misjudge again, but it’s good to know and determine for myself. I don’t want to have sex because I feel pressure about how long it’s been without it or because my friends are seemingly getting a lot more action. Those don’t feel like good reasons to me.

Sexual blunders are inevitable and embarrassing but don’t constitute a final, damning verdict on your character. And even though a vaginal infection during a heatwave feels like a punishment from God, I’m deciding it’s just a redirection, like a sign splashed across the sky instructing me to make better (or at least different) choices. It’s like Bridget Jones says, why waste time making the same mistakes when you could make totally new ones? So I’m back to the dating pool, poised at the brink and ready to plunge in, armed with my IUD, a pack of condoms, and the personal cell of my guardian angel at the CVS Minute Clinic.

On the eve of my twenty-eighth birthday, I decided to take a walk. It was a bitterly cold twilight in late March and I wandered over to the river where I sat, bundled and breathless, taking in the beauty of the night, the sky so cold it looked like it was about to crack and the ice caps bobbing on the rolling surface of the Hudson. I felt older, I did, and I was thinking about Joan Didion’s essay, “Goodby to All That,” which had been on my dashboard for the past year as a reminder of what was coming for me. “In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later, but perhaps you will see that as we go along,” I thought to myself. I was no longer at the beginning– of my time in New York, of my life, and I felt that acutely and accepted it as well, with something like relief.

As I sat there shivering and pondering, out of the corner of my eye I noticed a guy approaching and before I could gather what was going on, he was upon me and gesturing for me to take out my headphones.

“Hey,” he said, “I saw you from over there and thought you were beautiful and just had to come and say hi. What are you listening to?” he asked.

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Now, normally I would encourage this kind of boldness and self-assured bravery that seems to be dwindling with the scourge of dating apps that have crippled people’s ability to talk to one another, but, I am always slightly wary of someone so boldly breaking social convention. It’s like being asked out at the gym or the airport– nice in theory in a rom-com sort of way, but in actuality, when that’s happened to me, the guys have, without exception, turned out to be very strange.

I told him I was listening to Gracie Abrams (is there a better soundtrack for despondent reflection?) and we started chatting. As he spoke I took him in. He was cute, or was he not? I couldn’t really decide. He was tall, with nice hair, but was wearing a lot of silver, turquoise, and leather jewelry, like the Jack Sparrow of Manhattan. I was still wavering on whether I was going to give this character my number when he bluntly asked my age. Funny you should ask, I thought, and told him, on the last day I could, that I was twenty-seven.

“Oh cool,” he said, “I’m twenty-two.”

Twenty-two. It was like the stunned silence that happens in the moments after a server shatters a bunch of glassware in a crowded restaurant. Twenty-two! Oh, and his name was Buster. Buster is the name of the cartoon bunny from Arthur, not the guy you want to tell your friends you’re dating. I thanked him for coming over and wished him a good night and then pressed play on “I Love You, I’m Sorry.”

That’s not the first time I’ve been approached by someone younger. In fact, in the last few months I’ve been getting approached by exclusively younger men. In the fall I went out with a twenty-five-year-old who carried himself with the swagger and confidence of a much older man. He pursued me with such certainty I felt compelled to give him at least a shot and then, to my surprise, we ended up seeing each other for a few months. In my early twenties I never would have considered dating younger. I was married to the Mr. Big fantasy, the romantic idea of an older, financially secure, experienced, capital-M Man.

At the same time as I was going out with the twenty-five-year-old, I was also seeing a Mr. Big type. At forty years old, he was thirteen years my senior, which is a lot of years. He was twenty-three when I was ten. He was thirty-five when I was walking across the stage to collect my college diploma. He was navigating middle school clique politics when I was born, and lots of other perverse configurations. Still, I thought my younger man would pale in comparison to the older guy’s appeal. He owned his absolutely massive downtown apartment, had built an impressive career and was a thoughtful and honest communicator thanks to past relationship experience. He was also OLD, like old-man-old, like I-have-to-be-in-bed-by-nine old and no matter how much I liked talking to him over luscious, expensive wine, I couldn’t imagine him coming over and hanging out with my four roommates or traipsing around the Lower East Side for another and then another round of drinks. I’m tired of this grandpa, I wailed to myself, and hopped in an Uber over to my younger man’s waiting biceps.

My younger man was endearingly eager and surprisingly sincere in his interest in me. He texted me back immediately, made plans consistently, and never left me guessing. I was puzzled. Weren’t young bucks in need of training? Wasn’t I going to be collateral on this guy’s path to becoming a fully formed adult who knew how to treat a woman? I thought I’d do all the work of whittling him into a decent guy just for some other woman to reap the rewards when he inevitably ended things but he seemed to have graduated from boot camp and was treating me with respect and care. I was initially wary of his lack of relationship experience but when my older man started drifting back into his ex-fiancée’s life, I was grateful that he didn’t have any significant past loves to complicate things.

Things were going so well between us that I cut things off with my Mr. Big. I was having fun and starting to see myself with him, picturing a life where I wore his hoodie to breakfast and he came over to watch Summer House with my roommates, but I got ahead of myself. As I tried to crack his veneer and really get to know him I discovered the gulf in our maturity and the mismatch in our life experience. He seemed more interested in my boobs than anything I had to say, and the dates he coordinated were consistently on his turf and at his convenience.

One night, after having the type of sex I had in college (bad, one-sided) I couldn’t fall asleep. I looked at the person curled by my side, the straight line of his clavicle and the face he made while he slept that made him look much younger and thought who are you? Then I turned on my back and stared at the sterile, white ceiling and thought what am I doing here? and the second I thought it I knew I would never spend another night in that bed again. I had caught a glimpse of something I couldn’t unsee, the undeniable truth of how momentous a thing we were doing, how intimate, how irrevocable. I felt suddenly certain that he didn’t recognize the seriousness of what we were entering into. Perhaps it was due to the blissful ignorance of being too young to predict the ways a person you love can hurt you. In a way I was envious of him, of what hadn’t happened yet, the unimpressed placidity you get so ephemerally, before the pain of loss textures your life. I felt sorry for him, for everything he had still to discover, but resigned. Your turn to learn it, I thought, my turn to leave.

I am currently seeing another twenty-five-year-old. After my last go-around with my younger man I was admittedly reluctant to take him seriously. Probably unfairly, I keep underestimating his interest in me and his seriousness about our burgeoning relationship. In some ways dating has gotten harder as I’ve gotten older. My starry-eyed romantic buoyancy has waned, and in its stead is a guarded wariness that I’d like to relinquish. My younger man had me over the other night for a picnic on his rooftop. He made a charcuterie board and Aperol Spritzes and he brought up things I’d told him on our previous date that made me realize how carefully he’d been listening.

From his rooftop I could see the tips of buildings scraping the summer sky, the inky black Hudson reflecting the lights of the city in the distance, and I felt it for a moment again, the hopefulness, the optimistic sense that something wonderful could happen at any second. I looked over at him looking at me. At any second, I thought, maybe even happening, right now.

A few weeks ago, a friend of a friend of mine got engaged. I am at the age I’ve been forewarned about, where it suddenly seems engagements are falling from the sky in a dizzying domino effect of one after another. Girlfriends with whom it seems just yesterday I was bemoaning bad dating etiquette, getting ghosted, and investigating the most effective predictors of male-pattern baldness are all suddenly spoken for—and in spectacular fashion, with absolutely massive rings.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed an uptick in eye-widening boulders on friends’ ring fingers, so ostentatious as to verge on vulgarity. A coworker of mine was recently proposed to, and the diamond is roughly the size of my apartment– so grandiose she doesn’t even wear it to work. When I regained my vision after being blinded by its sparkle, the first thought that formulated was how much dough, exactly, does it take to get a diamond that size. I took a wild guess that her fiancé doesn’t make as much as the founder of Amazon, and yet she sported a sparkling behemoth on her ring finger that rivals Lauren Sanchez’s.

There’s a stark difference between cheap and inexpensive. I’ve seen some lovely, modestly sized, uniquely designed engagement rings that look quite expensive and singular because of their brilliance, style, or the touching meaning behind them. I’ve also seen soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo’s fiancée, Georgia Rodriguez’s, ring, which is visible from space and looks like a mystery-flavored Ring Pop. Apparently valued in the millions, the ring looks like the single-digit-dollar ones my sisters and I used to play dress-up with.

The incline in ring size coincides neatly with the rising popularity of lab-grown diamonds, an ethical and equally authentic counterpart to natural stones. The ethical appeal is understandable to me, and it doesn’t hurt that the price tag of lab-grown diamonds is staggeringly less than that of natural ones. I understand being limited by a budget and still wanting to get on one knee with a beautiful symbol of your great big, boundless love. What’s the onus, though, for buying the very biggest ring you can afford?

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The engaged coworker of mine is now in the thick of wedding planning and told me she’s hired a photographer, a videographer, and a content creator for the big day. There is simply no purpose for a content creator unless you plan on posting your nuptials for your followers, so everyone you went to high school with or worked with or met at a friend’s birthday party five years ago can see it and get clobbered with a pang of envy or awe.

In Gone with the Wind, when Rhett finally manages to coax Scarlett’s mouth into the shape of a yes, it comes with a 10-carat-sized caveat.

“A diamond ring– and Rhett, do buy a great big one,” she insists.

“So you can flaunt it before your poverty-stricken friends and say ‘See what I caught!’” he says, correctly identifying the motive behind her costly demands.

“Very well, you shall have a big one, one so big that your less-fortunate friends can comfort themselves by whispering that it’s really vulgar to wear such large stones,” he continues, skewering people like me– the ringless girls scrolling Instagram who scoff at the tackiness of giant rings as a sort of pressure-release valve for my rising jealousy. Am I one of those girls who can’t be happy for other people? Am I afflicted with a resentful and incurable covetousness? Maybe if I were in a long-term relationship and a ring was becoming less a hypothetical and more a please-don’t-get-me-something-ugly reality, I’d feel differently.

As the story goes, when Princess Margaret saw Elizabeth Taylor’s 33-carat Krupp diamond ring, she declared it “the most vulgar thing” she’d ever seen. That is, until Ms. Taylor let her try it on. “See? It’s not so vulgar now, is it?” she quipped.

Still, there is something abjectly soulless about a made-for-Instagram moment. It’s like those conveniently posable and postable restaurants that typically have at least one faux-grass wall with a pink neon sign that says something kitschy and alcohol-humor adjacent like “Let’s make pour decisions.” They almost always have bottomless mimosas on the menu and pretty bad food but are good for groups and parties like, let’s say, a bridal shower or bachelorette brunch.

The posting impulse is not one that is comfortable to me. I don’t have Instagram, and neither does my little sister, who got married in my parents’ front yard last June. My sisters and I wore off-the-shoulder blue floral bridesmaid dresses that made me feel like I’d walked off the set of The Sound of Music in the best way, and I ditched my heels and walked barefoot through the grass during the reception. They served vodka lemonades, and the wedding cake was made by a guy from my parents’ church. The peonies were in full bloom and the weather was pristine. People went to the bathroom in a porta-potty parked in the driveway. It was awesome. It was just a blast, and it felt so authentically them and brimming with all-consuming, electric, sky-colored love. There was no wedding hashtag. There was no content creator. I wasn’t sent a giant gift box with pajamas and Rhode under eye patches when asked to be a bridesmaid. Her ring is beautiful, simple, and bright. It looks a lot like my mom’s, which I love.

Really happy people don’t need to prove it to anyone. I’m not saying that anyone who posts their proposal or wedding is secretly miserable and living a lie. After all, two seemingly opposing things can be true at once. You can be indescribably in love with a person and secretly a little smug about the opportunity to show off to your friends (and followers). I wonder, though, when weddings became so tailored to social media. I can’t count the number of bachelorette trips I’ve been on where we had to dress in “sunset colors” not for fun, but for pictures. Neither can I chronicle the number of nuptials in Vogue Weddings I’ve gaped at, only for the couples to quietly divorce a few years later. No splashy Instagram announcement then, I’ve noticed.

To fall in love is so astonishingly lucky. Finding and sharing true, time-tested love is incredibly rare. It doesn’t require photo evidence or a ChatGPT-written caption. When I stood at my sister’s side and watched her husband slide the wedding band on her finger, I was moved not by the glinting band of gold but by the promises he made to her. A ring is just a symbol. It means I love you, and I’ll rub your back when you throw up, and I won’t complain about your wacky, overbearing family, and even if you invest all our money in something stupid and bankrupting, I’ll laugh about it with you later. It means in sickness and in health, in riches and rags, in good times and grim ones.

It’s true that I don’t know anything about marriage, or the kind of love that makes you buy a ring. I just haven’t gotten there yet, but if I ever do, I’d hope the man I love knows I’d sooner marry him with a lentil-sized piece of glass on my finger than something you could throw the first pitch with. But that’s just me. If you want a different answer, as they say, ask a different girl.

“These days their hair is longer than their skirts,” an elderly woman whispered to her friend as I walked by, although it wasn’t really a whisper, more like a from-the- diaphragm shout that I pretended I didn’t hear as I went by. I was arriving for an interview at The Margaret Residence, a memory care nursing home where I hoped to spend the summer working. Nineteen years old and back home after my first year of college that I spent partying and making a series of escalatingly bad decisions, I was determined to do something tangibly good for humanity (and beneficial to my pre-med major). Shaking off her comment, I swanned in and aced the interview which was conducted by the owner’s son, a burly frat boy who asked what bars I liked and oh, did I know that all the residents had dementia or Alzheimer’s and could I change a diaper? Yes and yes, I boldly claimed.

I was gathering my things in the lobby when an older gentleman addressed the family visitors and residents in the vicinity and asked if anyone drove a white Volkswagon. “Um, I do,” I answered, a slow panic rising in me. He rushed over, anxiously apologetic. “I am so sorry but I lost control of my father’s wheelchair and it crashed into your car and left a few dents, very minor but visible on the left side. I’m so sorry,” he gushed. “Oh my gosh, don’t worry about it,” I reassured him while internally my worry ratcheted higher and I pictured the irate lecture I would get from my mom, the owner of said brand-new car. The next day I had the pleasure of driving it over to Acci-DENT and begging them to fix it for less than my last paycheck.

And that was just the interview. Somehow undeterred, I launched into the job. While my peers got swanky internships and drank beers under Midwestern starlit skies, I spent the summer wiping adults with varying degrees of memory loss. I had to wear an unsightly blue smock that was an affront to my teenage vanity which was bolstered slightly when one day the janitor, at least twenty years my senior, asked me if I wanted to “catch a movie sometime.” I worked the five-to-eleven p.m. shift which covered getting all the residents to dinner, feeding them, getting them all bathed and into bed, then doing their laundry. This may not sound like much, but I was responsible for eight to ten residents every shift and I don’t know if you’ve ever wrangled a picnic- blanket-sized diaper onto a semi-paralyzed person but it is not easy or quick work. Just getting a resident from one chair to another, or changing their shirt, or spoon-feeding them dinner could take the lion’s share of an hour. Bedtime was the worst. Some nights I would spend an hour cajoling and coaxing a resident into bed only to later find them in another resident’s closet as I put away their laundry. If I had a dollar for every time my heart restarted when I found a resident silently standing between hangers I could have quit the job.

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It wasn’t glamorous work. It was physically taxing and often frustrating, alarming, and sometimes just scary, but also very intimate and humbling. It wasn’t necessarily the time I spent with the residents that made me love them so much but the intimacy of where I was meeting them. At nineteen I had never been tasked with helping someone almost entirely dependent on me. I quickly realized I had no idea what I was signing up for and could not have predicted how profound and lasting the lessons would be, or how fiercely I would come to love each of my singular, astonishing residents.

There was Lucille, a copper-haired woman who loved vodka, candy, and men, and stringently declared they were in that order. She had lived in Greenwich her whole life but came to the residence to be near family when her dementia escalated. When her husband died, she told me, he looked so fragile in his bed that she was afraid to touch him, but the nurse encouraged her to. “I held him so tight,” she told me, “I’m glad I did.” A few seconds later she told me the story again as I helped her into her pajamas, and then again as I settled her into bed. Once when I was giving her a shower she told me that in her girlhood she hated her breasts and insisted to her mother that she was going to “chop them off” but her mother wouldn’t let her. “Love your breasts!” she told me with wide-eyed urgency, and you know something, I really do.

There was Larry, who was on a liquid-thick diet, which meant all his food had to be puréed and I won’t lie, it was a harrowing experience feeding him, particularly if the menu featured any kind of egg or tuna salad. I sat there in my stupid smock spoon- feeding him at a painfully slow rate and tried not to look at the slop but rather imagine how I’d feel if I had no choice what I ate for dinner and no ability to physically put it in my mouth so some random teenager home from college had to do it.

There was Dottie, who had a glass eye and an affinity for birds and John, who was slightly problematically in love with her.

There was Marilyn, who hated me with dedicated passion until she found out my uncle was the pastor who came to do her home visits, and trust I milked that connection for all that it was worth. The reward for earning her favor was that she allowed me to give her her whirlpool baths with marginally less yelling and correcting where I put her ointment (the details of which are best left undisclosed).

Then there was Dorcas. I know you’re not supposed to have favorites, but I loved Dorcas. Dorcas was pretty much entirely unable to move her body on her own which meant I spent proportionately more time with her than any of the other residents. She had late-stage Alzheimer’s and I don’t think she ever really knew where she was but she was always happy to be there. She had two singular teeth like telephone poles on opposite sides of a street and loved cookies. Her husband lived in the assisted living facility across the street and I used to push her over every day to visit with him. I remember wondering, when my mom’s car got hit, how one “loses control” of a wheelchair. I learned the hard way one evening when, as I pushed her over to see her man, the edge of her wheelchair got caught in the groove of a manhole and I watched in abject terror while it lurched perilously on one axis and for a horrifying second I thought I was sending Dorcas to meet her maker. But it was not her time.

It was two summers later that my mom, visiting her own mother at the assisted living facility, discovered that Dorcas had died. When she told me, I shocked myself by bursting into tears. I immediately recalled a time I’d spent ages getting a fresh Depends on Dorcas only for it to rip in half as I was almost done securing the tabs. “Shoot I’m so sorry Dorcas,” I told her, frustrated beyond comprehension, “We’re gonna have to start over.”

“Cookies!” she shouted in response, a huge grin on her face, and we both laughed.

It was Dorcas who taught me that difficult people are fun. I was endlessly surprised that summer to find that my favorite residents were the most mercurial, temperamental, stubborn, feisty ones. When everything else had swum away they still had some essential steel, a sparkling flint of character that made them resistors and defiants and I loved them for it even if it meant I heard the same story fifteen times in a row or had to put them to bed five times in a night.

Her death put me back in that summer, one that was punctuated by death in a way I had never experienced before. It was an inescapable reality, that our bodies and minds are constantly moving toward decay and death. I was learning that in specific, unavoidable truths. I remember tucking rolled washcloths under the residents’ hands at night to prevent worsening arthritis. I remember blasting Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” with the windows down on my drive home to blow out the smell of urine. I remember discovering that urine has an odor but urine in a diaper has a particularly pungent and distinct odor similar to but more chemical than the butter topping they put on movie theater popcorn. I remember fighting a lot with my family that summer, and wondering why people need so much.

I remember one night in particular, when I walked into a resident’s room and my heart rate hit the triple digits as I took in the scene. He’d had an accident and there was poop on the duvet, on the carpet, on his pants, in his hair, on his hands, the scent of it suffocated the room. I thought about calling the other caregiver to help me but then she would get off schedule putting all her residents to bed. I was so overwhelmed I wanted to cry and so perturbed I felt frozen in place. I wanted to pretend I hadn’t seen it and walk out of the room and the residence and back into a normal teenager’s life.

The residence had a slogan, which I believe is a Mother Teresa quote, that “Nothing is beneath you and nothing is too much for you when you’re doing it for someone else.” I took a deep breath of the shit-scented air and rolled up my sleeves. “Okay Paul,” I said, “Let’s get you ready for bed.”

“Why are you calling me Paul?” he asked.

“Oh I’m sorry,” I said, “Mr. Brenner.”

“No,” he said, “Why don’t you call me Dad?”

There are experiences that take you out of your life and then put you back in it as someone different. I didn’t leave the room because I simply couldn’t leave Paul, a person whose dignity and safety were entirely at the mercy of someone else, a man whose intelligence and personhood had been atrophied by one of the cruelest illnesses there is. I wondered what his daughter would want me to do in that moment, and did that. Then I went home and boiled myself in the shower.

I learned a lot that summer but the lesson that was the hardest and most permanent is that the work of taking care of another human being is the only work there really is to do while we’re here. It can take myriad forms, but we cannot avoid it. When the opportunity comes, don’t flinch. Don’t go find someone else to get you out of it. Engage with it, like up-to-your-elbows-in-bath-water-and-someone-else’s-poop engage with it. When you do, the gifts are manifold. I learned patience, a sense of humor about the ugly bits, respect for the body I need to last me, and tremendous gratitude for every time I was on the receiving end of someone’s generosity, gentleness, or care.

When it’s just you and another human being who looks up at you, totally reliant and asking for help, there’s a circle drawn around it. It’s an experience that belongs exclusively to the players in it and in some essential sense can’t be translated. That’s the story, as best I can tell it, but it was just he and I in that room, in that specific moment. We shared something ephemeral and singular and very brief. Our two lives, started at widely separate points on the timeline and still astonishingly, distinctly converging, then diverging again. It’s something, that nine years later I still think about that summer and can’t quite figure out what it meant or why I feel it all happened exactly as it was supposed to.

I live in Manhattan now, which at nineteen I thought was the most glamorous thing a person could do (very satisfying to find out- it is). People are always doing glamorous things like getting eight-hundred-dollar “creamy vanilla” highlights or going on a date with David Harbour (in the thick of his scandal) or having a personal shopper select their spring wardrobe. I toured Equinox the other day and caught myself wondering if I was being influenced by the materialism of Manhattan when I could run for free ninety nine on the West Side Highway. I spend too much money on clothes and fancy dinners and have had quite a lot of fun getting lost in the glitter of my new life.

I rarely talk about my old brush with care work (hard to naturally segue into denture cleaning and whirlpool baths) and sometimes actually find myself a little embarrassed, as if the experience were beneath me. Nothing is beneath you, when you’re doing it for someone else, I sometimes have to remind myself.

Who knows, maybe I’ll wind up spending my golden years in memory care back in the Midwest, babbling about my days running around the Lower East Side and how it took me a few extra years to pay off my college loans because cocktails were twenty-five bucks while a college freshman rolls her eyes and spoon-feeds me pudding. Maybe I’ll get as good as I gave, and I’ll discover what it’s like to be totally at the mercy of someone else. I’ll finally understand why people need so much and be better for it.

The untouchable, everlasting, impervious feeling that dominated my teens has evaporated with age. I didn’t understand it then but I do now, how scary it feels to express a need of any kind, a necessity that risks standing defined but unmet. There was no point after I left that job when I felt my life had clicked back into normalcy. Normal life has suffering in it. Accepting that tempers the bitterness a little. It frames the good moments, in all their sparkling, painless joy. It’s good to need. It’s good to be needed. It makes us both fallible and beholden, and that makes us human, which we are very lucky to be.

Now I’m gonna go throw on a push-up bra and make myself a vodka martini with a candy chaser. Cheers to you for making it to the end of this essay! Thank you endlessly for reading.

Sometimes the only way to find out who you’re dating is to dump them, and the breakup becomes a pick your poison fiasco: meltdown, cry, demand stuff back, threaten, demean, beg. Suddenly the lovely boyfriend you’ve been enjoying devolves into a toddler-politician hybrid nightmare.

After a punishing winter, an unseasonably warm day blessed New York City, so my friend and I decided to meet for dinner. A few hours before she sent me a sheepish text admitting that, she would fill me in when she saw me, but she broke up with her boyfriend of four years and wondered if, since he lives a block from the restaurant we agreed on, we could go somewhere else.

I met this friend in a funny, circuitous way after a guy at my sister’s wedding asked me out and because I was about to move (and he sort of looked like one of the cast of The Hobbit), I declined. He took the rejection exceptionally well, owning that he had to shoot his shot and if I wanted, he could set me up with a good girlfriend of his from grad school who had also just moved to New York. He was so sweet about the whole thing it (almost) made me reconsider, but my height policy regarding dating is that of amusement parks -you gotta be over five feet to ride.

So my friend and I met up for froyo and a walk to the West Side Highway as she unspooled the breakup story. He had been putting minimal effort into their relationship for a while and meanwhile she had moved to New York for him. When she got here he began bemoaning the city and declaring he wanted to move to Michigan, moving the target once again. He scarcely made time for her and she was hurt when at the last minute he bailed on both a close friend’s wedding that she was in and a family vacation because of work. They’d discussed their issues and promised to work on things but he never did.

So, her mind made up, they went for a long walk in the park (ominous) and she broke up with him. First he cried, then he begged, then he became hostile and started slinging insults at her. See was selfish, thoughtless, and uncaring. She was a bad girlfriend and a bad friend. How would her friends feel if they knew how she spoke about them behind her back? His tantrum escalated until he threatened to actually text her friends and reveal the (harmless) gossip she had trustingly shared with him.

At this point in the story I was positively clutching my pearls, shaking my head at the horrendous way men can behave. “This is awful,” I said, and “Please do not worry about him texting your friends. If I got a text from a friend’s ex boyfriend saying she was talking shit about me I’d assume he sent it from the curb outside her apartment where he stood sobbing and that it was an outright lie.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with men,” I told her, “My ex was also so disrespectful when he broke up with me.”

Overhearing me, a man on the street walking by nodded and shouted, “Men will do that!” (Gotta love New York.)

Thinking I could be shocked no further, she proceeded to drop the final bomb. At the end of their walk he insisted they go back to her apartment so she could return the gifts he’d given her during the breakup. I stuttered and gasped. “What on earth!” I choked, “What did you have to give back?!” A few purses and some jewelry, apparently, and the idea of this man getting on the subway with a lady’s handbag and then, what, taking it to a pawn shop, had me in hysterics.

When my ex broke up with me he had a similar meltdown which is odd considering he was the dumper not the dumpee. He delineated a list of things he was not going to miss about me (selfish, greedy, ungrateful, thankless, immature, and treated him like an ATM). On the last count I can’t help but defend myself (I feel like Mr. Darcy writing his defense of character letter to Lizzie) but I’m sorry, I didn’t exactly strike gold with the intern, which he was while we dated.

Because my mother raised a lovely, classy girl I didn’t shoot back but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my own list (too much forehead, not enough dick, poor vocabulary, unkind, self-centered, Jordan Belfort wannabe).

In all seriousness, it felt horrible to have insults added to the devastating injury of the breakup, and I wondered where his anger came from and why he felt the need to scorch the earth on the way out. I also find it interesting that there’s a certain type of man who reaches for a financial upper hand in a breakup. My ex tried to guilt me for the money he’d spent on me, while my friend’s ex lorded the gifts he’d given over her and demanded them back as if to show her how generous he’d been and how she was losing that generosity. “Imagine him in a divorce,” I told her, and thought about the women who hitch their wagon to a man’s success, trusting they’ve found safe arms to build a home in only to have it yanked out from under them, dismantled and divided brick by brick.

I felt so much better about my breakup talking with my friend about hers and I think she did too. A nasty breakup is deeply unsettling. It makes you question your reality, and question the relationship. Have they always had this capacity for cruelty? Did I miss the signs? And scariest of all, who even is this person? As we talked I felt more connected to her by our pasts, and less alone with a relationship I look back on with confusion, regret, and pain. It wasn’t something wrong with me, I realized, because there is nothing wrong with my sweet, kind, unselfish, caring friend. Hurt people hurt people, as they say, and insecure people struggle profoundly with rejection. I think my ex was always a little fearful that I didn’t really love him and there was nothing I could do to unwrite the narrative in his head that it was because he was unworthy of love in some way. Self-esteem is exactly that- a journey we take with ourselves alone, and something we have to work on every day. How you react in a breakup, whether you’re on the giving or receiving end, is a direct reflection of your self esteem, regard and respect.

I have no qualms about how I handled myself during my breakup and I know my friend has none either, but somewhere out there are two sad, lonely finance guys who I suspect carry a burden of regret for how they treated a person they once cared about, even if it’s buried under a few layers of bravado. As my friend and I sat on a bench facing the sunset on the Hudson river I realized we were entirely free, and that our ex’s bad behavior was perhaps the best gift they ever gave us. He can keep the purse.

“Do I hate men? No.” It’s one of actress/author/multi-hyphenate Julia Fox’s most memeified moments (no I’m not talking about Josh Safdie’s meuhusssssse). During a lie detector test for Vanity Fair, Julia is asked if she hates men. “I hate the patriarchy. There’s a lot of really good men,” she replies. The conductor prompts her to answer the question directly. “Do I hate men?” she asks, and “No,” she answers decidedly, but it registers as a big fat lie.

I agree with her, and the fact that the clip ricocheted to the top of the internet heap for a while signifies its resonance with other women. She tries to diplomatically move away from a harsh binary. There’s a lot of really good men. I agree with her there, too, but only theoretically because I’m not sure that I could rattle off a list of ten good men quickly. Ten bad men? Easy. I could sing the ABCs of bad men, twice, and despite my pronouncement that I don’t hate men, that rather I hate the systems of power in place skewed towards men, I wonder if that isn’t quite true. I wonder how many of my friends, if hooked up to a die detector, would all confess the same sentiment. Do we all kind of secretly hate the boys we’re contradictorily trying to catch and hope to one day date and marry? Is that even the goal anymore?

Two weekends ago a hometown friend came for a visit. She’s an old friend I grew up with who knows my family well and asked if my sisters (all three of whom are pregnant) know if they’re having boys or girls. The older two, who found out the gender, are both having boys, so I’m going to have at least two nephews, I told her. “Ugh, tragic, just what the world needs,” she vented earnestly, “more men!” Taken aback and slightly stunned I took a big draw from my well of wine and moved the conversation to another topic, but the moment clung to me in a way I couldn’t shake off. I’m thrilled to be having nephews and delighted by the imminent arrival of healthy babies, regardless of gender. I’m equally excited and reassured by my confidence that my sisters will raise exceptional, thoughtful, brilliant young men. My friend’s assertion capitalized a growing sentiment I’ve detected among my female friends for some time now, a gnawing and all-consuming negativity surrounding straight men and the endeavor of dating them.

As defined by Asa Seresin in her explosive 2019 article “On Heteropessimism,” “Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience.”

The heteropessimism of seven years ago is markedly different from the strain currently on the rise because of one key distinction: heteropessimists of today are not dating. My nephew-condemning friend conceded she hasn’t dated much in the last year and one of her friends revealed she hasn’t been on a date in two years. What’s wrong with this? Nothing, unless you want to be in a relationship, even one with (perish the thought!) a man.

When people find out I live with four other straight women (five of us in total) they are often curious what our policy is for having guys over and I tell them we have none, not because we’re a freewheeling group of type Bs but because we haven’t really needed one. In the seven months I’ve lived there, I’ve never had a guy over and neither have any of my roommates but one, once. Yes we’re having sex, albeit not on home turf, but with fairly low frequency. If I extrapolate this sampling of five Manhattan women to New York or hell, the state of things in the country generally, I’d say with fair certainty that single women aren’t dating in large numbers. The data backs up the anecdotes.

A 2020 study from the Pew Research Center found that “nearly half of U.S. adults – and a majority of women – say that dating has become harder in the last 10 years.” Additionally, a 2025 “Singles in America” study surveyed 5,000 single people through the dating app Match and The Kinsey Institute found that “63% of singles say there’s more passivity in making the first move, as relationship dynamics are more ambiguous now—with people unsure of what the other person is looking for in terms of traditional vs modern gender roles.” Gen Z is more sexually conservative and strikingly “69% of Gen Z respondents say they’re not ready for a relationship” while “only 49% of Gen Z participants say they want children at some point.” Millennials are defined by higher incidence of sexual activity and higher interest in a relationship (64% want a committed relationship) but only “39% are open to casual dating.”

The culture also reflects this shift. Chanté Joseph’s, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” for Vogue blew up as did South Korea’s 4B movement, hallmarked by its participant’s refusal to date, marry, have sex or have children with men . The frenzy over Heated Rivalry similarly ignited questions about heteropessimism and highlighted an incongruous female obsession with men– notably gay men. It seems part of the appeal of Heated Rivalry is the opportunity it provides women to enjoy men in a way they perhaps haven’t in a while. You can hate men and still desire them. On the heels of the show’s popularity, the current controversy over the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team underlines why women might singularly prefer the men of a fictional show to an exhaustingly sexist reality.

Of my roommates, I’d say I’m the most active dater and the reason has nothing to do with my looks or my luck. I have the energy and motivation for it because I’m new to the city, I have a column to write (bonjour, dear readers), and, perhaps most crucially, I’m not on the apps. Dating burnout is real and it is exponentially exacerbated by swiping on the apps where (a lot of) men act trashy which reinforces women’s “men are trash” rhetoric. The trouble is when this narrative becomes self-fulfilling, when the expectation that men will act badly precedes their actions. As Randa Sakallah put it in “Why Are All Men Trash?,” “You expect men to be trash, so you look for reasons why they aren’t good enough. Doing this might be tempting because of the real power differential between men and women, but I think it would be helpful to stop.”

Enduring ghosting, pen-palling, breadcrumbing, love-bombing, gross overly sexual behavior, and even harassment is demoralizing and it’s only natural that women should respond to this by removing themselves from the dating game. When I got ghosted after sleeping with a guy I had gone on two (I thought very good) dates with, I benched myself for seven months. Unsurprisingly, I did not meet anyone when I wasn’t looking (contrary to what coupled people love to advise *insert eye roll*). Dating is a play-to-win game. In order to be in a relationship, you have to date. You have to participate. But it’s hard not to hate the player when you hate the game.

So where does that leave us but skewered at an impasse? Maybe women are guilty of flattening the nuance, of looking for confirming evidence of men’s reprehensibility and dragging that back to the brunch table echo chamber where the disillusionment multiplies. Maybe deprioritizing dating is a final liberation from a culture that allows women a very limited definition of a successful life. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

Let’s play a round of would you rather. Would you rather date a sweet, nice guy who gets along with your friends but is irritatingly addicted to watching football, or a pompous, self-important guy who has a fascinating job and a killer apartment?

When I touched down in New York City seven months ago I had four overflowing bags, no idea what to expect, and a boiling determination to conquer it all, including diving headfirst into the Manhattan dating pool. I had my Midwestern optimism and my Aries certainty that dating here would be easier than it was in Chicago, that I could get asked out simply waiting for a train or getting a late night bodega burrito. Turns out, I was right and wrong about that.

I distinctly remember my first girls night out with a new friend I’d made at a dinner party (thank you ). We went to Due West and I sipped a bitter, watery vodka soda while I gaped at the most gorgeous women I’d ever seen sashaying up to men who stood coquettishly on the sidelines. The men seemed to have a lackadaisical reception of these models, passively accepting what fell into their lap with apparent apathy. We left when the ice in our drinks and our spirits melted. I stumbled home bewildered and disappointed. This, I thought, is not going to be easy.

I was used to the dating scene in Chicago and quickly realized how spoiled I’d been. Strapping, over six foot tall Paul Bunyon’s were a dime a dozen there, and although they may have had the IQ of a golden retriever, they also had their easygoing demeanor and affinity for people. I got approached a lot thanks to a Midwestern ideology that men should make the first move. Picture a bar full of Travis Kelce’s. When standing next to a six foot five man with biceps the size of baseballs you start to wonder how important it actually is that the guy you’re dating can spell the word squirrel.

The Chicago dating pool was predictable (verging on boring), homogeneous, and friendly. Chicago is a Big Ten pipeline so there were a lot of guys who moved with their friend group, lived in a house together in Lakeview, and operated under a very “Saturdays are for the boys” maxim. If you are detecting trace notes of conservatism, you’re dead on. The poster boy for the Chicago dating scene is a six foot, brown haired white guy who went to Indiana University, lives with two college buddies, spends weekends day drinking at Butch McGuire’s, would never consider living outside the Midwest, has a blonde ex-girlfriend and works at Salesforce. He’s really nice, uncomplicatedly happy, sort of likes his friends more than you, isn’t getting promoted anytime soon, is in a kickball league and never reads (unless you count the half-finished Dale Carnegie book).

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The exception to this rule is the guys who are in Chicago for school. This group is more interesting and more dangerous largely because they’re in town only temporarily until they go back to the coasts they came from (read: not looking for a relationship). They usually fall into the medical, law, or business school camps. The med school guys are by far the top of this pyramid but good fucking luck finding them. I ran around Chicago like a truffle pig for five years looking for a med school student and ended up alone in a field surrounded by my own manic tracks. The law students are smart (FINALLY) but insufferably conscious of it. The business school guys are cocky, confident, and keenly aware this is their last low-stakes chance to party which makes them fun but dangerous (bonjour my ex!). When these guys graduate and land their first big boy job, you add obscene income to this equation and that is how the evil breed known as the Finance Bro was created.

The Manhattan dating pool is much more heterogeneous: diverse, unpredictable, cold, and entirely fascinating. It’s hard to cleanly categorize the men because of the variability but there are a few distinct hallmarks of dating here that I’ve noticed. Upon introduction, people are job and neighborhood forward. What you do for work and what neighborhood you inhabit are character-defining. Yes, there are a LOT of finance guys. They do investment banking or the more well-regarded private equity (if you step foot in Soho Grand you’ll find out what IB and PE stand for). Then there are the cool jobs. Last weekend I attended a birthday party at an impeccably decorated one bedroom Tribeca apartment owned by a gallerist. In the fall I went out with a professional sports better. A few weeks ago I went on a date with a comedy writer (who promptly ghosted me). There are bartenders, comedians, venture capitalists, painters, novelists, and entrepreneurs who contribute to the hustle culture so famous to New York. The downside is that a lot of guys prioritize work over dating, even if they don’t necessarily want to.

The New York attitude is also different. It’s less nice, more self-assured and edgy. It’s less implicitly trusting and more inherently suspicious of outsiders and newcomers. The worst guy to get cornered by at a bar is the New York snob who is decidedly not from New York (though he’ll try to say he is) and insists it’s uncool to live above 14th street and that Kith is “so chopped.” In my (albeit limited) experience, the sleaziest guys are the ones from the New York suburbs who speak about the city with unearned authority and invent rigid “in versus out” lists. The best guys are the ones who came here from somewhere else to pursue a great personal or professional opportunity and are welcoming and continue the generosity and openness to new people and experiences they relied on when building their lives here. There are surprisingly a lot of guys (and people in general) like that here.

There is an easy come, easy go mentality to dating in New York, and a definite reticence to settle down because of the possibility of some shiny, dazzling, perfect and, most importantly, new person just around the corner. When I was juggling a few different guys in the fall I was personally prey to this ideology. There are just so many astonishingly cool, strikingly unique people here. There are just so many people, period, so many potential options, it gets hard to pick just one. This non-committal ambivalence isn’t specific to New York, however. Dating is hard everywhere.

I wouldn’t say dating is particularly easier in either city. I got approached more in Chicago but I’ve had an easier time meeting people in New York. Dating in Chicago is more predictable but dating in New York is more fun. I’ve gotten ghosted in both cities, run into my same old dating hang-ups and insecurities, been the rejector and the rejected. I guess wherever you go, there you are- on a bar stool, sipping a gin martini next to the guy who you hope loves you more than anything, looks great in a suit, makes six figures, and knows how to spell.

“I’m going to go, do you want to come with me or…are you good here,” my roommate asked with a smile and a sidelong glance at the guy I was chatting with.

“No I’ll go with you,” I whispered back, “Gimme one sec.”

Turning to the guy in question, a twenty eight year old satirical and comedy writer with his own marketing agency and incredible head of wavy brown hair, I let him know I was leaving and let it hang in the air for a second, waiting to see what he’d do with it.

We met at a birthday party at a bar in Brooklyn that had a refreshing number of cute guys, so my roommate, friend and I got a drink, steeled ourselves, and launched into the crowd, determined to mingle. Spotting three guys in a small group for the three of us girls, I steered my posse over and I believe I opened with, “Hey! I like all your shirts.” Subscribe for more similarly witty, show-stopping pickup lines.

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Turns out, a compliment (no matter how trivial) was all that was needed, and the three boys invited us into their conversation about the word of the year which they had deemed “indulgence.” The cute brunette writer, with the aforementioned very nice shirt, turned to me and asked what my latest big indulgence had been. I told him I had recently gone to Brandy Melville, a store I haven’t been to in years, and was pleasantly surprised by how much cute stuff they had, as well as puzzled by a large sign on the wall I encountered that said “John Galt,” paired with the same name inscription on a few of the tags, which I found intriguing.

“At first I thought they were almost making fun of the shoppers,” I said, pointedly not explaining the reference, “But then I thought, well, who would be a greater proponent of consumerism than capitalist John Galt!”

He didn’t miss a beat. “That’s so bizarre,” he said, “But I guess it makes sense, they’re a huge for-profit retailer and John Galt would approve of anyone who had a good idea and took it to market. I’m impressed you’ve read that, by the way,” he smiled.

Touché, I thought, equally impressed that anyone under thirty and not my dad had read Atlas Shrugged and came away with a cohesive thought about it. From there we chatted expansively about topics from our high school jobs to favorite cocktails to roommates and siblings.

“So, I think I’m going to head out, my roommate just called an Uber,” I trailed.

“Well, it’s been so fun chatting,” he replied. Oh GOD, I thought, is this guy really not going to seal the deal?!?!

“Could I get your number? And would you ever want to grab a coffee sometime?”

Yes and YESSSSSSS I privately shrieked.

The next day he promptly texted me and we arranged plans for drinks at Employees Only, a trendy, low lit bar conveniently in my neighborhood for the following week.

The day of the date rolled around and I drifted through work with a vague background whir of excitement and nerves, my makeup already done and my outfit laid out on my bed at home. I waited for a text from him to confirm we were still on but was sure he would soon. By four o’clock I was less sure. By six, even less. I beelined home from work and straight into a big glass of wine with my roommates for an emergency powwow. “I’m just going to have to text him, right?” I said and they agreed, mutually also agreeing he should have been the one to do it. (Reader: I am curious to know your thoughts on this piece of dating etiquette. Should a guy send a day-of confirmation text and what’s the latest cutoff?).

I swallowed my pride, texted to confirm, which he affirmed, and made my way through the king sized snow piles to the date. It was great. He was warm, open, much chattier than I’m used to, and funny. His prince charming hair was flawlessly coiffed and he had on a gorgeous cream-colored cashmere sweater. He talked about his childhood growing up with three brothers and his feminist mother and how he doesn’t have social media. He asked about my three sisters and what I do for work and if I like it and how I’m finding New York. Our conversation was as verbose and sweeping as it had been when we first met.

He walked me home, steering me around snowbanks until we arrived at my front door. The moment of truth. The kiss was… awkward. But sweet? I stood on my step while he was planted on the sidewalk, but mid-kiss I realized this choreography was not working so I attempted to step down onto the sidewalk (while still lip-locked) and consequently kind of fell (??) but into his arms (??) however he sort of stumbled backwards. Let’s just say, we gave passers-by quite a show.

He made sure I got into my apartment and when I couldn’t find my keys in my purse I dug out my wallet and asked him to hold it. He pretended to take off with it, making me laugh again, and then we said goodnight.

That was Thursday. Today is Tuesday. I have not heard from him. No text, no call, no follow-up, nothing. I am extremely puzzled. I trust my radar for a good date and would soundly categorize this as a really good one. The conversation flowed, we both seemed interested, we kissed. I can’t figure it out and I feel kind of nuts. Was that totally one-sided? Am I genuinely bad at reading people? Am I a hideous, un-fun loser?!?

It was only one date and I really don’t know this guy and he doesn’t really know me so I know it’s not as personal as it feels. It’s not as if I feel like my husband just got away, but I am left with a deeply confusing plot twist that I can’t explain and probably will never be able to. On to the next, I suppose, but I won’t be able to shrug off the pangs of anxiety that are lodged somewhere inside and will resurface the next time a guy takes a while to reply and I’ll feel crazy again, like I’m overreacting, and friends will assure me that of course he’ll text, but sometimes people do the opposite of what’s expected for no good reason at all.

Plausible reasons he never texted or asked me out again:

1. He got hit by a city bus and ricochetted into a snow pile where he expired

2. He fell down the subway steps on his way home, hit his head and, riddled with amnesia, can’t remember me or the date

3. He thought I was a hideous troll and hated the date and is just very good at seeming polite and interested

4. He had a girlfriend the whole time and post-date was flooded with guilt and resolution that this should go no further

5. He was turned off by the awkward kiss and felt we lacked sexual/romantic chemistry (not sure I’d disagree here)

6. He is casually dating someone else who he decided to pursue further

7. Alternatively to option 6, he is locked in a toxic situationship and only asked me out to get revenge on her but then felt bad after

8. He is worried about coming on too strong before Valentine’s Day (I’m reaching, I know)

9. He is crazy swamped with work and/or family stress (Sure Jan)

10. He will still text me and is just a dumb boy and doesn’t realize he is causing me to lose hair and the will to live

11. He simply didn’t feel a connection, or felt there was a mismatch in our personalities and/or interests and didn’t see it going further (can’t be this one)

She was seen on the back of a motorcycle with a DJ, spotted smooching international dream boy Harry Styles, sported nude snaps with Eric André, and sat court side with perennial boyfriend Pete Davidson. There’s no question about it- Emily Ratajkowski is a certified casual dater. She’s a woman about town, exploring new guys and looking good doing it. At thirty four years old, the model and author is single following her divorce from producer Sebastian Bear-McClard, but she seems to have shirked the label of divorcee in favor of one far more fun- dater.

I confess I was filled with pathological jealousy when I saw the blurry photos of Emily on the back of a motorcycle with the hunk of the week. It was even worse when I encountered her and (my husband) Harry Styles locking lips, but after I recovered, I realized we can all learn something from Emily’s approach to dating. She’s going on lots of dates and, at least from the outside, seems to be having a blast.

EmRata’s ex notoriously cheated on her and, from what I’ve heard, is frequently spotted with younger girls around Manhattan, having seemingly learned nothing from the blundering loss of one of the hottest women of all time. Miss Ratajkowski, however, does not seem bothered. How could she be, she’s too busy sampling from the smorgasbord of celebrity men.

EmRata is a slightly polarizing figure. I know a lot of girls who don’t like her, who think her social media presence, which features a lot of boobs and a big bottom lip, is too much, maybe too obvious and showy. Flaunt what you’ve got, sure, but not that much. I loved Ratajkowski’s My Body, a collection of essays that ponders how women are viewed in the world and how she herself was occaisionally complicit in the patriarchy. Haven’t we all been there? If you’ve ever used your beauty or femininity to get or get out of something, you’re guilty of this. If you’ve ever flirted with a guy for free drinks or felt relief to be pulled over by a male cop rather than a female one. In her book, she writes that when she was cast in Gone Girl, she was typecast as a woman that men love and women hate, and there is a type of woman that other women hate- usually a very beautiful one who is perhaps beautiful in a smug, vain way, too sexual, too aware of her hotness, too willing to pronounce and capitalize on it.

But why shouldn’t she? Why shouldn’t we? I think vanity is one of the most underrated characteristics in women. It’s easy to tell myself that if I had a sixteen inch waist and double Ds that I would have an easier time dating. Sure, to some extent that’s probably true, but dating is still hard no matter who you are and your beauty will not be helpful to you if you don’t believe in it. Women who carry themselves with poise and self assurance move the rooms they walk in. They have presence, that magical, almost undefinable thing that draws people toward them. That isn’t about looks, it’s about attitude.

No one proves it’s not about looks more than EmRata. There was a wave of horror that went though brunch circles and wine nights when she got cheated on, similar to the ripple that shook women when Beyoncé got cheated on. If these women, titans of beauty and femininity, could be the victims of infidelity then none of us are safe, we exclaimed, basically confessing an underlying belief that if we were hot enough we would never experience betrayal or heartbreak. If our boobs were bigger and lips were fuller and hair were glossier we could keep a man in love with us forever. How ridiculous it sounds, but I remember doing this with my own ex, holding myself very carefully, working hard to be pretty and accommodating and basically perfect in a misguided effort to keep him.

A lot of eyes were on her after the cheating scandal, and in the wake of it she posted a topless selfie displaying her divorce rings, a modification of her engagement ring into two isolated diamonds, no longer bonded. I remember liking that she got married in a mustard yellow suit from Zara and really liking her engagement ring, which inspired countless copycats, but I really like that she kept the ring but changed it to mean something different.

I like Emily Ratajkowski’s style, her vibe, her attitude. I like that she is in measures sexual and political and refuses to pick a lane despite the endless stream of vitriol she gets for it. I’m inspired that she yanked those diamonds apart and started causally dating some of the most notorious celebrity bachelors, never letting her past define her. It’s hard to even recall her ex’s name, particularly when the news cycle churns up photos of her at dinner with Austen Butler. She has her baby and her dog and her book and her massive modeling career and she doesn’t seem to be looking for anything in particular from a man except fun, and I think we could all take a page from that book.

Maybe the key to playing the dating game, and even winning it, is to shift your expectations. There’s no magical man who’s going to arrive into your life and in one fell swoop reel you out of the murky depths and into the dazzling sunlight, fixing every problem you’ve ever had. As Anais Nin said, “Don’t wait for it. Create a world, your world. Alone. Stand alone. Create. And then the love will come to you, then it comes to you.”

Create a world, your world, and just have fun with dating in the meantime. You can have your Harry and your Pete and Eric too.