RSSFriday B.S.: Call Me Crazy, But Just Call Me
Jun 08
Relationships dating Comments Off
A weird, irrational desperation kicks in as I watch my close friends one by one get married and settle in the routines of their adult lives. I have started to think, what is wrong with me? Why am I still single? Why do all my dates end like the last scene in Freddy vs. Jason, a severed head and a cutesy wink? Why didn’t I just settle when I had the chance?
In my twenties, conversations about dating inevitably were conversations about settling. Settling, in romantic terms, is finding the most convenient partner who is otherwise currently single and also willing to settle, and mutually deciding that “This is the best offer I’m going to get.” Settling is commonplace, seemingly unfulfilling (I can only guess, having never taken the step) and typically results from one of three scenarios.
Scenario 1: I have never dated anyone else and I’m not about to start now.
Scenario 2: I almost settled with someone else before you came along.
Scenario 3: A weird desperation came over me as all my friends got married and I spent my nights alone eating chicken I made on the Foreman and watching MTV during prime time. Then one day, a guy smiled at me and we talked and even though it was clear we had nothing in common, we slept together and woke up ten years later in a common law marriage not recognized by the state.
Settling, by its very nature, is a negative. Because in acknowledging the act of settling, you are endorsing the idea that there is someone out there who is a better fit for you over the long term and it is only a matter of identifying this person and introducing yourself. So your other options are eternal celibacy (impractical for any number of reasons) or waiting out the time until you find the perfect partner, the one who compliments you and people can see and know that you genuinely fit together, all the while peeling through the dating orange with your game face on because you hate citrus.
Though it seems on the face of it that I sit in condemnation of those who settle and that I made a conscious decision for myself to keep looking, the truth is that being a perpetual bachelor was never an intentional arrangement. Like most everything that happens to me, I sort of fell into it. I make a lot of decisions this way, random, without evidence or investigation, little forethought, accepting the consequences and wondering later on if I ought to have gone down a different road.
I suppose the truth is that there is nothing wrong with settling as long as it doesn’t make you miserable. So what does that say for singlehood? What does it say that the harassment for me to find someone quick and make it permanent is self-inflicted? Haven’t I learned better? Why am I tortured by the idea that I could have done it…not better, but faster? Sooner! The idea that my opportunity is rapidly. slipping. away?
I could say all sorts of bad things about marriage, but I have seen examples that allow me to believe that romance is real, love is possible, and not everyone has buyer’s remorse on their long-term relationships. So the act of waiting itself is no more a negative than rushing to lock someone in (be it contractually or blackmail.) It’s all what you put into it. And even knowing that intellectually, I still “yeah but” myself to death.
These are the kinds of things you can’t talk about to your married friends. The feelings of abandonment and disorientation, the self-flagellation. They get it, but the empathy is gone, squashed by all the emotional vagaries of marriage that I can’t speak to but I know dominate the behavioral patterns of my married friends.
Call me crazy, but I can’t decide which of us is better off. I say that I hate, emphatically, being single because I feel like I’m missing out on some chance enlightenment, but I think that is disingenuous. There are a lot of relationships not worth being envious of, and anyway, I can’t say I would be happier but for being single. All that leaves is the weird, irrational desperation I just can’t seem to shake. Call me crazy, but…call me?
