Three Dates a Week

Three friends on a date a week.

[twodatesaweek]

new moon, new leaf

It’s a new moon in September, the perfect time for new beginnings, like returning to this blog after a long hiatus. I know it’s been a while, friends. While I was not writing to you, I dated someone with bipolar disorder on/off for a year, worked with a love coach for 8 months without actually really dating, and then took an official break from dating that I’ve been fighting to end. With astrological forces allegedly in favor of starting new relationships in this new moon in Libra (or so that’s what people tell me), I’m really hoping to turn this abstinent ship around. 

While it’s been Dairy Week on the Great British Bake-Off season 7, it’s been PMS week here in the trenches of thirtysomething singlehood in New York City. Which means I’ve been angry at everything. Some ancient feminine lineages say that the monthly bleed is a woman’s way of releasing all the negative, toxic energies she’s absorbed throughout the course of the month and it’s actually quite a cleansing detox (energetically speaking) despite the physical appearance of the opposite. Some say that the emotions arising right before the bleed are indicative of what is arising to be released; others say that it’s a bullshit-cutting time when a woman finally feels zero inhibition in speaking out her truth. Whatever the fuck it means, I’ve been feeling dark, very dark, and what better solution than to sign up for a new moon cacao ceremony with a sound bath?  

For the occasion, I’ve put on my goth look replete with translucent black negligee over opaque black negligee and black eyeliner, because fuck. Tbh, I actually wear this pretty often, but usually pair it with an ex lover’s eyeball pin that he made himself to give the monochromatic ensemble a splash of quirk and color. I decided to go without it tonight because I needed to be robed only in my own things. This was me as it pleased me in the moment. Love me or not - I’m not trying to please you anymore! 

I appreciate this particular new moon ceremony because Sarah, the leader, is so structured and somehow creates these rituals that exude palpable power. I know exactly how much magic I’m going to get and it’s relaxing to just sit back and follow instructions. When she asked us to look at our neighbors in warmth and connection, as per protocol, I looked straight across the room at this cute white dude, whom I had made glancing eye contact several times before. I usually get anxious about my attractions, doing the middle school thing of avoiding the objects of my desire at all costs. I’m slightly better at it now than in middle school, but I could only glance at this dude before flicking my eyes quickly to his companion, to disguise any undue attention I might be paying him. He seemed to have no trouble looking at me. My usual routine with IRL attractive strangers is to get flustered, avoid them, then get resentful that they’re not approaching me and asking me out (as they inevitably don’t), and then tell myself a story about all the reasons why they didn’t approach me culminating in my core wound belief of how unlovable I am. Self consciousness contracted my body as I spoke my intention of “love and forgiveness” in the circle, and I found myself performing my usual shy persona in this cute dude’s presence. The age old battle of love vs. fear raged on.

As the sound bath began, I imagined myself walking through a door I mentally carved into the face of my favorite tree in Fort Greene Park, when Sarah asked us to imagine being in our “safe place.” I imagined myself emerging into another city park. I saw a man-made pond next to the tree from which I emerged and a park bench, on which sat an old white lady. Since Sarah was talking about meeting the Cacao goddess, I decided that this was the form she’s taking with me tonight - as an old Polish lady feeding the ducks. I then started actively imagining that all my anger, resentments, jealousies, compulsive eating habits, every darkness I was carrying all week congealed in the form of a dark liquid that I was casting out of my mouth. Large dark globules popped out, like eggs. Sarah told us to release what no longer served us into the earth, so I imagined the black bile sinking into the grass with a sizzle, like acid. I imagined the earth swallowing it all, like you see in horror films. In my mind, I kept vomiting all the negative thoughts, stories, and feelings I’ve ever had about my life, about love, about relationships. Which is really all about what it takes to be loved. Jarrod, the sound bath guy, created sounds that were like hammering on different pieces of metal, a persistent tinkering. I imagined him hammering all my stories loose from my mind. Clink clink clink! Tink tink tink! Notch by notch, my emotions loosened their grip and moved on.

At one point, I saw a scene in which I was naked and facing Daniel Craig, as his James Bond character. I was all serious and displayed all my darkness up front. So did he, in his expressionless hardness. It was incredibly sexy. The scene was set up on a completely black background, like when Eleven goes into her mind to psychically search for people in Stranger Things. There were mirrors all around us and a large white bed in front of us. I imagined us fucking hard and was getting turned on. And then I had the thought: this is like representative of my sexual attraction to emotionally unavailable men. FUCK! When I next heard Sarah talk about letting go, I decided to smash the scene like breaking a hall of mirrors with a giant hammer. Images of me and Daniel Craig naked together splintered and fell all around me, revealing only blackness underneath. I had the thought that I was smashing up all my romantic illusions in dating. Later, when I tried to think about what was so attractive about Daniel’s character, I realized that it was his strength. I am strong and I need a strong man to hold all of me. He doesn’t have to emotionally unavailable, however, but all the images we have of masculine strength are about hard men suppressing all their feelings so they can perform acts like murder with aplomb. 

Later, Sarah told us that the second part of the ceremony was going to be about manifesting what we desired, after we’d let go of what no longer served us. She suggested that this could be some love relationship or self-love or whatever. I paused and realized I couldn’t imagine anything. What is love? My imagination failed me. Except to play the lyrics “what is love?” in my head over and over again. Strangely, I couldn’t remember the next line. (after the ceremony, I realized they were “what is love? Baby don’t hurt me.” eeks) My mind started to drift and I thought of random shit as Jarrod’s gong loosened my conscious control and I daydreamed through the sonic shards. When Sarah announced that we had about 10 min left, I tried to rally. What then came to mind was a totally different kind of scenario than Daniel Craig. It was now a romantic comedy, where the partner was like my best friend. I recalled feelings of being loved by my friends, of them taking care of me the few times I’ve let them. He was not glamorous, like James Bond, but he would be there for times like if I had diarrhea, cooling my forehead and making jokes. I felt like a young child, with a child’s trust and sense of wonder and vulnerability. I saw children running through sunlit wheat fields and felt absolutely no irony, just their joy.

I opened my eyes in a completely different state than when I had closed them. My anger was gone. I felt lighter. I wanted to talk to people. When Sarah asked us all to hold hands in a circle (as per protocol), Jarrod walked over to join hands with me and then recognizing me, greeted me with a kiss on the cheek (not part of the protocol). I looked across the room at the cute white dude and felt zero stress about my attraction to him, even after I realized that he was standing next to his girlfriend. It was all good. There was enough love to go around.

~ X. 

[twodatesaweek]

love is cruel

a quick run down of my many dates this summer and my current psychological state which is a MOOD

A -- a short guy who squirmed in his seat too much and felt like he was nineteen. agreed with everything i talked about, including when i was incredibly wrong. wore a manatee shirt. had a weird voice.

M -- was sweet and reminded me of a good friend but made me read very sensual poetry he’d written about his ex at the table and that was pretty much it.

C -- a hunky chinese guy i was really deeply into before we went on our date!!!! then i got on the date and he was so racist i became completely despondent and blacked out most of what happened except for when he asked if i considered myself ‘whitewashed.’

S -- someone i literally would never have in a million years imagined being into whom i have now been out with three times and am feeling pretty devastingly about how much i am crushing on!!! crush level is ‘regretting drunken things i said or talked about,’ ‘maybe he isn’t into me like that,’ ‘maybe i’m finally mentally ill,’ with heavy emotional work toward ‘jesus calm the fuck down, you’re always just being yourself and that is okay and preferable’ 

MG -- an editor and writer naturally fitting in the art/intellectual circles of nyc who activated the ambitious successful part of myself, which made me feel good, until it didn’t bc it made me feel like a phony or uninteresting or generally not good enough 

i declared this upcoming week to be a date free week, which i think will likely be the case esp given the fact that i am going to LA for a long weekend but honestly if S and i happen to be free before i take off, it’ll be hard for me not to see him. i’m staying grounded by continuing to book dates. when i’m back from LA i’ll be going out w D, a jazzy guy from Maine who apparently added the lobster emoji to the emoji library. 

phew! summer’s a KNIFE!

- W

[twodatesaweek]

better on paper

a thread of my last two weeks has been a guy i met at a party i didn’t really expect to go to, or at least stay at, for as long as i did. he was tall, dressed like  young professionals newly released into new york often do, in dark jeans and a nice button down. his hair was tousled, curls fell into his eyes, giving him a sort of sheepish posture when he talked, pushing his hair to the side when he smiled -- i saw him watch me when i walked in the door, but i immediately thought to myself: not at all the hunk i had in mind after tripping on psychedelics in france and envisioning my future partner. and also there was a bleary-eyed girl in a purple dress sitting next to him. girlfriend, i thought, then later, sister? as i noticed him leave her to filter around the room and chat with the other guests. by the time he made it to me, i was sure they were just friends, or something like friends. 

people were filtering out, i was just hoping for one last glass of champagne, but i also didn’t want to leave without trying my hand at chatting with the cute boys (including the guy) standing around with the bottle. i wasn’t so interested at first when the guy started speaking to me, and felt a little self-conscious at how aggressive his attention seemed, directed solely on me in a group of people. he was british, his accent thick enough that i had to narrow my focus to make the words out. and i tried to move the conversation around the small group we were standing in but it became impossible after i said i liked ferns and he revealed himself to have studied plants in school -- he began typing into his phone, pulling something up for me to look at. you’re going to want to sit down for this one, he said, guiding me towards a nearby couch. i sat down and we were conspiratorial peeking at his phone screen at an adorable bryophyte that grew like miniature palm trees. we chatted wildly about various realms of the plant kingdom: ferns of the loire valley, moss, books on moss. he leaned in close to me, my face felt red, and i thought about how i’d been working with my soy fermentation project all day.

i feel self conscious that you’re sitting so close to me, i said

oh don’t worry, he responded a little too quickly

no no, i said, seeing that he might have thought i was addressing the closeness of our bodies -- that, i liked. i feel self-conscious, i said, because i probably smell like soy sauce. i’ve been fermenting it at home all day

he laughed. i used to make wine, he said and we were back to chatting like children do, me adjusting myself to sit curled up with my knees on the couch so i could face him to tell him about how there were new moderators of the fern subreddit, he began to tell me how much he loves r/whatisthisplant. the girl in the purple dress suddenly barged in to tell us they were leaving to go to a bar in the city, and i said there was no way i was going to the city. i was a little let down that he’d be going so soon, i could feel, for the first time since E, the desire and the ease of desire that comes when you would just like very much to kiss someone. but i saw that it wasn’t my story that night and turned back around to play with some tarot cards that another party guest had placed in my hands. 

on his way out, the guy got my attention. how will i talk to you, wei? i asked him if he’d like my number and he gave me his phone to plug it in. i asked if he’d be around the following day and he said unfortunately no, that he’d be on his way back to England then. 

--

before i fell asleep, i’d found him on whatsapp and sent him an article i’d written long ago on ferns, not thinking much of it. by the time i woke up, he’d sent me a beautifully composed note about a story regarding fern flowers he’d heard once in estonia. so elegantly romantic, i couldn’t help but feel thrilled.

and yet -- since i’d left the party, a wild suspicion that i’d been gamed. how could we have had so much in common? how could he have been so handsome? how could he have been so immediately interested in me? i fear i have something like truman show delusion, but in particular when it comes to love -- to feel that something so sweet, so coincidental, so romantic, couldn’t be anything but a set up. in my mind that evening, the near certainty that he was a fabulist. i assume he’s the sort of person who can make anyone feel like she’s the only person in the room i said to another guest who asked me what had passed between the two of us, what i thought of him. still, i don’t think it’s ever wrong to be a weary, so long as you aren’t rude. it can be so difficult to tease out your own projections from another person’s!!

it seems too uncanny, then, that it was around this time i realized that the girl in the purple dress from the previous night had been an instagram influencer with an immense following and a habit for trump-like behavior -- lashing out at her ‘enemies’ regulating what her followers commented, deleting anything that was at all critical. i sat aghast, reading through countless posts she’d made in the past week since she’d met him in england and then flown home early to meet him again in nyc. her story started out as a meet cute -- hitting it off at a cafe, spending a night together at his cottage, the wild promise of another night in new york. she wrote in treacly anticipation of his arrival, calling him her lover. even i was at the edge of my seat by the time i arrived at the post where she sat posing in her purple dress with flowers in her hair, hours before bringing her new friend to the party where i’d inevitably meet him.

i was hooked -- reading her write about falling apart after something happened between them that night. i laughed out loud, joking with my friends that i was now in a love triangle with this influencer. hubristically, i assumed that she’d gotten upset that he asked me for my number, and felt a little thrill at having lured him away from her. but as the days passed, the posts she wrote felt more alarming -- that perhaps something non consensual had passed between them.

the guy kept texting me every day -- on whatsapp we chatted warmly about our interests, pacing through the farthest, vaguest reaches of the vast territory that two people might populate together with time and proximity. it can feel so safe to do this without the physicality of another person’s body, to surrender to affection and a belief that the cosmos has encouraged two people to make the seemingly arbitrary decisions that lead them to each other. i tiptoed around it, softening to how hidden it was, how all of it could be seen and interpreted in any way: the morphology of ferns, where we might be in the upcoming months, the ways in which science is attempting to solve the problem of dying. all the while i don’t even know his surname, all i have is a tiny square profile image of his figure, cross-legged on the floor, his face in profile. 

--

by the time the influencer had revealed the guy’s betrayal towards her, i was picking out what to wear for the day, given that i had a date that night with an attorney from a dating app who seemed promising.

she wrote that the guy had asked her to ‘fuck without kissing’ and i felt gut punched and a little defensive. the same guy who kept googling my writing to talk with me about it? it felt unreal, but then again, what did i really know about either of them and the spell was wearing off some. i had become so curious -- as had all my friends, maybe of whom were now following along with the influencer’s retelling romance of which i was inevitably a part. 

before i left for my date, i wrote to the guy and asked what exactly had happened? what had he done to make this poor influencer to inspire her to wage character assassination on him. 

my date, J, was also from tennessee and had made a point to say that he had served as legal aid for migrant workers in the tomato fields of my old hometown. his parents had moved to the south to contribute to the civil rights movement -- his father was a mental health professional, his mother an attorney, too. he’d gone to all the right schools, was working at a white shoe law firm. he picked out a romantic cocktail bar nearby where i’d be taking french class and came down from the city during a torrential downpour. he was sweet and curious about my work when he arrived, a little out of shape but he had a nice face and was tall. 

but after a drink, he started to fall apart, talking to me about his stress and depression from working twelve hour days at his law firm. disclosed that he’d been laid off, that he was on lexapro. you could just...leave I kept suggesting to no avail. he had five drinks over the course of the night, increasingly grew messier and messier until by midnight he was asking me to have a cigarette outside. there was something too familiar about all of this -- me captivated in some whirlwind of talk and fun, without being listened to much, myself. a couple nearby was making out aggressively and i observed that they seemed as though they’d been together for a while. oh i thought it was a first date, J, said, sidling next to me. we kissed a little, and it felt like a relief just to be kissing anyone else but E, but it also felt like being twenty-two and not quite in my body, being somewhere else.

the guy messaged me while J was settling up, and though i was scattered and hazy from drinks my attention immediately shot to it. J came back and I waved him away to read what must have been a 3,000 word explanation of the guy’s side of the story versus the influencer’s. 

--

in the end, i didn’t want to see J again, and i felt that though the influencer had been insane in her depiction of events, the guy was also not entirely innocent of it. peering into the gap between their two tellings of the story, i felt as though i was witness to something of the fearsome mystery i have lately come to know a little bit, through my work in therapy and with psychedelics. there are so many invisible things that should be obvious, as definite as objects, yet they are also so simple to reject -- for your own benefit, or because you really are so oblivious to them. 

i told him twice that i thought he’d been at best stupid and at worst cruel. he defended himself in a way that felt correct, but it’s not my place to really know much besides my own feelings. in the midst of those conversations we also started to chat about his work, attempting to create a company that addresses care for diseases that greatly foreshorten life -- i asked him how he came to it and he mentioned something about having worked as a patent attorney right out of school. 

last week, drunk from tequila with L, i felt mushy and messaged him that hearing about it made me think of my parents, watching them grow older. it also made me think of how reinventing ones life so many times can be such lonely work. you just keep shirking off layers of yourself -- from your perspective, you are letting go and growing past your circumstances. but others are often hurt and confused by it. though it wouldn’t have been out of malice, you have abandoned them certainly. how to stay the balance? how to love those who cease to fulfill your needs, your desires? is it possible to tease apart the two? 

in the morning, i felt embarrassed for having let slip how much i’d considered this -- the real emotional questions i wanted to know about, the things i would like to learn from a partner, speak to them about. at brunch today, a friend suggested that part of my embarrassment must have been derived from my feeling as though I’d crossed a boundary -- that felt right. previous to that last message, we’d been charting territory, outlining topics, but not filling them in with ourselves. my questions about loneliness and desire -- they were really my request for him to begin showing me himself, coloring in the lines. 

he suggested we skype and in my hungover state i responded quickly in the affirmative. but as the week went by i felt stranger and stranger about it. i liked the romance and the fantasy of messaging with this guy -- the affection of a handsome stranger, knowing we were still happy projections for each other. the intimacy of even a phone call risked materializing a kind of relationship with edges and corners, with expectations. now what do i have: a reminder that i am desirable, that i am lovable as myself. how could it do any good to attempt to fill that in, when the object is so far away, only as real as my imagination. i wrote to him yesterday then to say that i didn’t like the idea, that i’d rather stay penpals. “being penpals has been rather sweet,” he said, and we agreed that we would very much like to have drinks if we were ever in the same town again. 

--

it doesn’t escape me, after a long journey though my psyche, that the guy is a version of a relationship that i have always had. at a distance, safe enough for my internal alarm system to be deactivated very slowly. yet i am also seeing that anyone who allows me to take a year to grow comfortable w the idea of intimacy most likely has intimacy issues themselves. or, that has certainly been true now, boyfriend after boyfriend. 

my goal, after E broke up with me, was to investigate my patterns, to attempt to learn once and for all what is happening with me. it has been two months and i have become so much wiser about myself, and yet, i also see how broken i am. i don’t say that as a way to victimize myself, just plainly. it’s a fact about me. i have never had a close friendship that hasn’t sent my brain into mental acrobatics, simultaneously surveying the relationship for phoniness while also building an argument for why i do not need it -- what is the worst case scenario and can i handle it, is what i am preparing for. ‘an insurance policy’ my therapist calls it. it will likely never go away, but i can learn to understand it, to calm it better on my own. i know now that the relationship i want will likely terrify me, it will not feel good. if my friends do not notice my pathological push and pull it is only because i can take time on my own when it happens. 

‘i don’t know why this came to mind, but you know crabs?’ my therapist said to me this week. 

“crabs?” i said.

“yes crabs,” she said. “you know how they walk sideways?’

“kind of,” i said, bemused.

“so they walk sideways on the beach, but they still know which way is forward and they go there.”

“okay,’ i said.

“that’s you. you might move sideways, but you have enough love within you that you know which way is forward. you just have to keep going forward.” 

- W

[twodatesaweek]

first date since E

my first date with E went like this, this past monday: a guy who seemed fine off the bat, and very cute in his photographs, messaged with me a little. name dropped the words ‘emotional intimacy’ and bell hooks and i thought to myself, wow, this sounds great. he said he had to leave for mexico for work for two weeks and immediately asked if he could buy me dinner. in my head, i thought, what i am learning is that this is the baseline. the conversation is easy, i am attracted to the person, and he asks me out like his life depends on it! 

i had dinner with a friend beforehand and we laughed about how likely it is when someone seems really great online that you show up and they are short or have a weird voice. it put me in a better mood about the date, which i had been anxious about all day! i had to speak to the anxiety while i did laps earlier and ask it what it was doing there? was i anxious bc i felt myself getting excited? because it seemed too good to be true? still unclear, but probably a mix of those things, or maybe just a gut feeling that something was off.

i arrived at the bar and he looked...dissimilar from his photographs. he was short AND had a weird voice and at that point i just had to laugh. so i laughed from the time we met throughout the 45 minutes i could stand to sit there as he chattered at me, squirmed in his seat like a toddler, agreed voraciously with everything i said (after confessing that he loved animals...he was wearing a black shirt with a manatee on it....he’s 31...vehemently agreed with me that people who own dogs are emotionally damaged) attempted to impress me by saying how much he likes to knit, and eventually got so unsettled that he broke down and told me all of his emotional issues...that he had been single for so long, i don’t know, other really performatively sensitive things that made me want to tear my eyes out. 

my therapist yesterday read me to death in a way i have never experienced...it felt like the first time i became myself, the first time i received the parenting i was always so desperate for as a child. i was explaining to her a dynamic i’ve recently found troubling in some of my professional friendships, wherein i move on from them and the other person freaks out at me in sort of overblown ways. one, for instance, made me get on the phone to say how neglected and unsupported he’d felt after i’d declined to join in on bashing another writer we both dislike. in my head, i’d narrativized these situations as men needing women to take on their emotional burdens, that actually i had just become friends with people who were selfish and narcissistic. but my therapist pointed out that at some point, i’d become friends with these people because i wanted something, and she pointed out that i held space for them...performed a level of emotional intimacy for them...because i could sense that that was their vulnerability. ‘so they could probably sense when you pulled away after you stopped needing them.’

‘oh,’ i said, feeling as though a question i’d forever asked myself was finally, improbably in the air. ‘that sounds emotionally manipulative.’ she just kept looking me in the eyes. 

‘how does that make you feel,’ she asked.

‘really sad,’ i said, ‘of course that would be so painful for them to experience.’ 

she offered that i couldn’t help it, really, my parents and brother were emotionally manipulative so in order to exist at all and make life livable i would have had to adopt some tools of emotional manipulation too. but they i pointed out that in relationships, i’ve found that it can be hard for me to even recognize if intimacy is true or performed -- with e, for instance, it was a year later that i realized it was all a performance. 

‘i would guess that you have maybe never felt true intimacy in a romantic relationship.’ i protested, but the truth is i think it’s probably correct. i have real intimacy in my friendships, but many of those friendships took years to develop and my newer ones often freaked me out so much in the beginning (me, paranoid about whether or not my new friend was genuine, whether they could be up to something) that i would spend months pulling away and pulling back in. and, at the end of the day, there is no particular professional achievement, social power, or thing that i want from my friendships aside from just company. 

i’ve been thinking about this all day -- my aptitude for seeing other peoples’ vulnerabilities, my aptitude for getting what i want by using emotional intimacy and empathy as a form of currency. this month -- cancer season and mercury retrograde -- have thrown these sorts of relationships back in my face, have forced me to confront the consequences of this transaction that i learned, somehow, so long ago, that i’m only now speaking its name.

relationships, boyfriends, a husband, a life with a person....these are all things i want explicitly that i am ambitious to find. have i sought those out who are unable to take care of their emotions on their own to pay for their commitment with my empathy? and isn’t it easier for me to begin relationships with them, precisely because they are distant? my old therapist used to caution me against my description of relationships as ‘easy’ -- i think i see now that she was right. 

i finally forced my date to settle up so we could go -- it was too painful to sit there, feeling like i was wielding all the power and he was regressing back into a small child. jonah hill walked past me as he was paying but when i turned back to my date to ask if it was really jonah hill, he was lost in thought, clearly playing back the entire conversation in his head anxiously, and then anxious again when he had to answer in the negative to my question. i felt sorry for him and also in some ways a little confused about myself -- should i have been nicer? my desire for the date was to be myself rather than catering to him, and yet it was painful or at least to watch him freefall. dating is hilarious and horrible, i guess, and i couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the entire thing, on my way home. 

- W

[twodatesaweek]

Dreams

After A and I broke up, I had constant dreams where we’d be together again and he’d be the partner I wanted him to be, and it’d be such a relief. Lately, my dreams are signaling to the same brokenness in my emotional cycles --

Last night, I dreamed I was in the back of a cab with E and somehow I knew he was who I wanted him to be -- emotionally engaged, prioritizing me. I’ve been missing him more lately and seeing him felt so correct and like I knew he was the right person for me, regardless of the issues we’d had before. I sometimes had this feeling during our actual relationship. We’d have an issue, it might take a few weeks of hurt and conversations to come to a compromise, but when we did, I’d almost feel silly for having been so worried that he was not the right partner, or that I had my doubts. That was always a good feeling. Remember this, I’d always tell myself, when things become hard again. 

But I don’t think, in the end, we were able to remember that we were on the same team. My brain circles in “whys” pretty frequently on hard days, and one of them is attempting to make sense of how my wanting him to express that we were on a track toward moving in and marriage was any different than him wanting to be ‘happy’ first -- It is hard to untangle the central argument of a breakup from the things the other person is not saying, will not recognize about himself, is attempting to protect you from. 

- W

[twodatesaweek]

Back in the Saddle

ROAMING THE VAST TERRITORY OF SINGLEHOOD AGAIN WOW it has been a very long year of many kinds of relationship ends and beginnings. I feel very stressed out to know that though I have become more reflective and curious about my interactions with friends and lovers, at no point will I probably feel like I’ve scaled the mountain and have arrived to a cocktail party of people in my life who will never change, who have risen above all their issues, who will make me feel good and valued and safe indefinitely. In fact, I will never feel that way, and the best I can do is to continue to be curious and awake, and to consider all of the above (good, valued, safe) as my own responsibility. 

I’d like to use this down period to answer some questions on this blog:

What did I learn in my year of dating E? What projections did I manifest, and how did they create challenges both in our relationship and my ability to take care of myself while in the relationship? 

What have I learned about dating, from my friends, in the past year?

What patterns have I been able to identify amongst the men I have dated, all for appx a year, then woken up to see that they were not who I thought they were!!

What patterns arise from reflecting on my most complicated and hardest female friendships? 

What am I looking for NOW? What circumstances can I be aware of that lead me to project my insecurities or desires on others? 

A thought pinging around my head this morning -- an old friend whom I’ve never been particularly close with -- a industry pal whom I used to shit on all kinds of folks with, when I felt deeply insecure (I made a conscious decision to stop doing that last year when I went freelancer) -- I see him maybe once every few months at most and never feel great afterwards. He performs intimacy with me, without actually being a good witness. All the emotional interactions feel transactional or that I’m trying to prove something to him. On top of this I’ve often felt like he lords professional favors over my head in exchange for expectations of friendship that he definitely hasn’t earned with me!! 

Anyway, he has, in the past, held strange grudges with me for my falling out of touch for various reasons, so I’m often a little defensive already in our exchanges. Anyway, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from him for a while and I thought to myself, you know, maybe it’s for the better if I don’t ever hear from him again! And like clockwork, he texted me to find time to hang out, and as soon as I landed a date he immediately wrote “I want to talk about our last exchange -- it left me pretty sour.” I told him I’d rather talk about it immediately and he called me to say that I hadn’t supported him or responded to him in a way that felt good to him, after he texted to say he didn’t get a job and clearly wanted me to say the person who did was bad and talentless -- which i DON’T believe and expressed that I didn’t believe in that exchange. 

THIS WAS AT LEAST SIX MONTHS AGO!! Anyway, I tried to be as active in hearing why he was hurt as possible, and it turned into a litany of grievances he had against me: that sometimes I cancel our plans together (usually because I’m not in an emotional state where I feel like seeing him isn’t going to make me feel horrible), that sometimes I don’t reach out for a long time and he’s ‘worried about me,’ that i make him feel like i’m ‘hard to schedule.’ As if any of that is my responsibility!

I heard things coming out of my mouth like: you’re really important to me! maybe i can be more aware of when i haven’t seen you in a while! honestly texting is not the best form of communication for me! all forms of attention that this person does NOT DESERVE TO HAVE FROM ME. 

he ended by feigning interest in my family issues and the fact that E broke up with me, and i just realized that i didn’t need to be open to him in that way at all. we hung up and i was spiraling

--

i walked across the wb bridge to attend an event later that afternoon and was so preoccupied by what had happened on the phone with this friend that it felt like i’d arrived in the east village moments after i’d stepped outside of my apartment door. (my attention to listening to music or feeling joy for having wrapped up a hefty revision of an important article were all blunted) 

i thought about why the conversation had affected me so much -- in part, i think ever since E broke up with me, I’ve been seeking guilt and blame wherever possible, perhaps desperate to correct little social problems, to find blame for myself, thinking if i can fix it or accept guilt for logical things, it will make me stop feeing sad and confused about my break up. Speaking to my friend was certainly like this, i listened to him air out his grievances, paraphrased them back to him, and came to see from his perspective how my behavior had hurt him. But that didn’t make the situation any less lopsided and ridiculous. It’s just what I wish I could have done in my relationship -- made sense of the argument and conflict -- in some dumb wish that we could have stayed together.

The other feeling this conversation with my friend made me realize, is my indulgence in feeling guilty and being blamed. That I’m doing something bad and wrong even if I don’t mean to.

My mother certainly reinforced this feeling in me, and I am coming to see that it is bottomless and familiar. That it gives me boundless energy and ambition to fix a problem. I fail to see that I deserve good things, good treatment, that I don’t need to prove that I deserve it. 

My friend makes me feel as though I need to earn an easy-going/non judgmental friendship with him, I think, and while it may have felt devastating before, now I feel very annoyed by it and like I definitely do not need it in my life. I can also see why I felt so wrapped up in it given my breakup. From the beginning, I did not behave as though I knew I deserved an easy, giving, and supportive relationship. E did not make me feel as though I needed to prove myself to him, as my friend does, but he couldn’t give me the baseline and I took that to mean that I needed to earn it.

I felt I needed to earn it by going to his place all the time, by accepting the fact that he had bad manners, by cooking for him, buying gifts, being an active listener and participant of his life. My lesson is that I did not need to do any of those things to deserve them coming back to me. Someone who is emotionally robust and engaged gives readily because it brings them joy to give readily, not because the perceive another person having done enough for them to deserve it. 

--

I agreed to see this friend in two weeks for a drink and I know that he’ll guilt me for showing up and only drinking a seltzer, but I will do it anyway, and the only reason I’m not canceling on him and telling him directly how I feel is because he has knit a web of inextricable professional contacts between himself and his entire social life, including me, because he is too insecure to just understand how to have a genuine friendship with people. The truth is, that because I pity him, I give him power over me, because I know he can’t be at my level emotionally or professionally. But I cannot be scared to embody that power, especially when this friend actively takes advantage of the agency I give him to hurt me, with no self-awareness.

- W

[twodatesaweek]

Back in the New York Groove

After documenting everyone else’s romantic escapades in Mazunte for a month, I got back to the city and quickly located some of my own. I’m unemployed, I thought, might as well try to use the time off to look for love. A friend texted me one afternoon to say she wanted to set me up on a blind date with someone who she thought was ‘physically’ my type, wasn’t a writer, and didn’t have a motorcycle. She gave me a time and a place to meet and then about an hour to drinks, my date texted me his name, the color of his pants, and the fact that he was going to be about fifteen minutes late. So, I hung around with a glass of lager and felt my expectations dip to dry-season-low levels.

E walked in, vaguely academic-looking in a goofball outfit, a pair of red chinos and a shirt that was probably a size too big for him. He had a nice smile but I thought he was a little square. Definitely a one-drink date, I thought, wondering if he’d still pay if I conspicuously asked to go home after an hour. But it’s hard not to feel a little wabi-sabi after five weeks in the jungle, so I asked him some questions about how he knew our mutual friend and chattered about an upcoming assignment. Hours passed before I knew it, and I found myself attached to E’s face and its little fluctuations as he told a story about something I’d be too tipsy to remember in the morning. We walked out, we were both a little wobbly about finding another place for a drink and a snack and a place to charge his phone and I suddenly was surprised at myself for feeling something like tenderness about him.  

He was going to Italy later in the week and asked me out for dinner before the trip. I planned out a cool outfit and fretted over how I’d feel if he came in bad shoes, again. But the joke was on me--I felt nervous and self-consciously shy for the first thirty minutes, he told me about his sisters, his best friend, the fact that he could be a little irrational about text messaging. I talked about a friend and editor who was always upset at me for my untimely texting, and E pointedly said that it sounded like there was something a little sexual going on. I protested unconvincingly, then had to reneg when I realized I had always really avoided thinking about the fact that there was something romantic I liked to ignore. I liked that he went there and we spent half of dinner dissecting the relationship, my other relationships with men who probably have a thing for me, and the silly ways the both of us had tried to establish relationships with crushes when they weren’t really interested in us at all.

“Do you want dessert here, or should we take a walk and find something?” E said. I asked for the walk and we wound around Fort Greene for a while until I started talking about popsicles and he said we could just swing by his place for one. I felt a little incredulous that he’d really be whisking me back to his apartment on a second date--was he totally dense or was I mired in a clumsy plot? Probably some of both, in the end, as we stayed up too late playing dumb songs on Spotify for each other and talking about our exes, about our insecurities with finding relationships. I stayed the night and the night was fun and genuinely sweet, no strange corners for my anxieties to roost in, no second-guessing my impulses. 

In the morning, on a walk to get coffee, E spotted a recent ex across the street, an Asian woman in a sweet Madewell-esque outfit--think stripes and jean jackets--and he flailed a little bit trying to decide how to handle it. First, he wanted to leave me alone for a bit while he said hello. (What?) Then, he said I should come. (Also, no). We crossed the street and lingered for a few minutes. I did a mental check and was glad to not be dressed like a dirtbag, which, given my current state of unemployment, isn’t always a given. He finally apologized and gave up on attempting to find a solution and said a little too much about their relationship and how they see each other twice a day at the dog park and are still friendly, but he did let go of it pretty quickly as we turned the corner from where my blogmate lives. It’s hard for me to know what to think about anything, given my bewilderment at the situation, in the first place. 

**

In the meantime, I’m going on a date with an ASIAN ER DOCTOR tomorrow for BOBA (we can watch the sunset, he said.) Also, earlier this week, M and I were having a drink at SuperPower, in Crown Heights, and as I was settling up, I turned and saw that the guy I went on a date with in CDMX was sitting there. We both looked at each other gapingly and when I introduced him to M, she was also a little dumbfounded. Whatever exotic Mexican light had drawn me into a nice afternoon light totally dispersed, and I felt awkward and too obliging. I told him I’d have lunch with him on Friday, but I am just waiting for it to be late enough to be convincing to cancel last moment, for no reason at all. 

[twodatesaweek]

tuesday, wednesday stay in bed

a nice korean boy i texted with from Hinge asked me if i had a recommendation for a bar with a good jukebox. i told him about Robert, in Boerum Hill, and he asked me if I might want to grab a drink there sometime. so we did. he was fine, he was shorter than he said he was, i thought he wasn’t very...proportional. i wasn’t attracted to him, i guess is what i’m saying. but we had a nice time, he bought my drinks (i only wanted one, but lord if i’m ever going to learn to say no to another glass of wine after a stressful day at work) he was a classic Enneagram Type Nine -- i probed him about his relationship to authority (very pliant!) and ambition (not very much of it!). i was the raconteur of the date, but he was very curious about me and i felt that i could be myself. fine. fine. fine.

i texted him immediately after to say i was feeling more of a ‘friends’ vibe and he didn’t take the hint, texting me a few days later to hang out just as ‘friends.’ 

[twodatesaweek]

mean streets

i ran into the mean nerd while heading to meet my blogmate to watch twin peaks recently. i was listening to taylor swift (something he thought was really stupid) and as soon as i saw him, i ripped my cap off, confusing that action for taking off my headphones. ‘oh. hi!’ i said, ‘i thought i was taking off my headphones, and took my cap off instead.’ i kept smoothing my hair down and thinking about how unattractive i must have looked with my hair all mussed, in a dirty sweatshirt and sneakers, and no make-up. 

he looked so damn cute -- impeccably dressed even on that terrible cold monday, in a nice puffer coat and a cozy black turtleneck. he was saying he’d just met with some woman about helping w a diversity initiative that had to do with city planning. we talked about a bar he was throwing a party in and when i made a lukewarm comment about how it was a...nice spot, he immediately shot back, ‘i think it’s actually kind of corny.’ my heart raced to win him back. what the fuck is wrong w me, a parallel part of me thought, examining the broken part of myself that was activated by this.

i blabbered, forcing too much cuteness, too much information that i was trying to impress him with. finally i pulled my cap back on. and he pulled his out of his pocket -- it was the same brand, Carhartt, literally the same brand of cap literally everyone in brooklyn is wearing right now. “I got mine at the actual factory store in Detroit, tho, he said.” “Cool,” i said, too genuinely. “Well, I’m about to go to Mr. Mango...” he said, trailing off, an invitation to join. “No, I’m going to a friends, sorry, see you later” I said turning and walking away, my rational self pushing my broken self around and pushing her up the street, and around the corner. 

**

my first date of 2018 happened the next week. i’ve been having a lot more luck on a new dating app, called hinge, and met a guy, D, an architect who was cute and chatty. we met for a drink at minibar, and within about fifteen minutes, he’d already told me that he wasn’t a ‘typical asian.’ what is it with asian guys (see my last asian guy experience) and needing to bring it up like it’s their entire ethos!!! it was all downhill from there, but in a list of bulletpoints, here is what i didn’t like:

• complained about his job, a lot, and how much he has to work -- seems seriously rudderless, mentioned wanting to start a photography business on the side and about doing studio art in college

• lived in the neighborhood for a few months already but didn’t seem curious about anything in it, or exploring it

• chatted ad nauseum about stuff without really asking me much -- i interrupted him at one point to talk about the song that had just come on (merry-go-round by the replacements, during their alt-country phase) and he thanked me for cutting him of?????

• talked about doing ketamine regularly with his ‘techno asian’ friends and seemed really enthusiastic about doing cocaine, but called it ‘yay’

• when i finished my drink, i said i was going home, and he seemed surprised and then corrected himself - “oh yeah, okay, yeah that’s FINE”

• he asked me if i wanted to meet up again and i said no, that i wasn’t into the drugs and he said, “it’s not a big deal!!!’

**

A came by today to finally return my rice pot, which I have been asking for, for months. he used to send me, by using this form of logic:

me: hello, i am communicating idea #1 

A: why would you communicate idea #1 without asking me how i am, how i’m feeling? communicating idea #1 is hurtful, you’re hurting me why would you hurt me, why are you putting up boundaries???

me: oh my god i’m so sorry look i’m really just trying to communicate idea #1 because i need it for my fucking mental stability it has nothing to do with you and here is a mess of feelings that now i feel obliged to give you in addition to an apology for making you feel what you felt

A: oh i’m so sorry that you’ve been feeling those feelings, here are some other terrible feelings and things i’ve been going through because i really relate and i this proves that i still care about you and further that i understand you in some specific way that i’m not articulating but trust me on this one

me: thank you, okay, but idea #1 again, please?

sometimes it was even longer, but that was the gist! anyway, i prepared, told him to just drop the damn thing off and he tried to draw me into some longer conversation about my feelings, but i just gave him the facts and sent him on his way. progress!

[twodatesaweek]

red wedding

seven years ago, during a summer in montreal, i was walking down a quiet residential street ogling the lush vines smothering windows and the morning glories that caressed people’s fences when i heard a voice behind me. a man wearing sunglasses and riding a bicycle asked me if i spoke french, complimented me on my style, and then asked for my number. he said that he was a film director, but that this was a “cliche” in that neighborhood, where apparently filmmakers grew like the daisies i’d been eyeing just a second earlier. this was how i met M. i had a boyfriend at the time, but M grew more and more interesting while the boyfriend stayed the same level of dull made tolerable only by smoking weed together every night. perhaps it was only a proper part of my french education that i should have had an affair. 

when M emailed me on the last friday of 2017 saying that he was in town, it was the perfect thing to happen at the perfect time. at that point, i had not had sex for about six months. my desire was steadily culminating into a boil so that i found myself talking about how i had cobwebs “down there” randomly to someone I had just met at a party. in that same month, i texted another friend that my vagina was haunted. i tried to milk that neglected house metaphor for all it was worth because, to be honest, there wasn’t much other milking happening (though who knew the haunted house would soon become a slaughterhouse, but i’m getting ahead of myself). 

i immediately arranged to meet him that evening and felt elated for the rest of the work day. i didn’t even try to dampen my joy or do anything so silly as manage my expectations. the thought that maybe he wasn’t going to sleep with me (we had last seen each other five years ago and had had zero contact in between; i had no idea if he was not even now married with kids) didn’t dare cross my mind. i just didn’t have time for such silliness. i was going to fuck him and that was it. it was the perfect scenario - i already knew i liked him and that he liked me. i didn’t have to tolerate a series of insipid dates just to figure out if i wanted to be touched by some dude whose first move was some online opener like “fire walk with me” (true story; his profile pic consisted of what looked vaguely like a studded gimp mask, no face; and no, of course i didn’t reply, dear reader!). M came pre-packaged with history, context, and hence, romance, which is as crucial in satisfying my hunger as a functioning dick. fucking him wouldn’t even lengthen my fuck list, since he was a repeat, a recyclable, so to speak. 

as soon as i saw him at the bar, i knew i was right. before, the reason for my happiness was just an abstract idea. now, it was a blue-eyed bespectacled cutie, cuter than i remembered and as courtly as ever, asking me questions about myself as was appropriate, talking about himself with some self-awareness, saying enough interesting things to keep me as intellectually stimulated as i was already elsewhere. basically, he knew how to have a conversation with a woman. who knew that was going to be such a high bar in this town? but i’m not going to lie - the accent helped. at one point, i felt my pulse throbbing in my pussy on the bar stool. i’d never felt that before because i didn’t used to be as aware of my body or my desires. i never used to allow my desires to expand to this degree. i would’ve shut them down long before they got to this point of arrogance, stuffing them down neatly, locking them up and throwing the keys away. better me than someone else to disappoint and hurt me. i liked M enough to allow him the privilege of being able to disappoint and hurt me. no walls. 

when he came over, i was really glad i’d been confident enough beforehand to have prepared my apartment for his coming, including taking down all my soulmate affirmation post-its from the bathroom wall and hiding them. that night, the apartment lost its virginity, as nary a man had dared share my bed since i moved in almost year ago, though it was only in the morning when the blood came. i pretended that this doesn’t happen to me almost every time i have sex (due to some lunar hormonal conspiracy, i was also on my period last time i had sex six months ago) and fussed about the sheets and over-apologized. he was nice about it and fussed over my sheets with me, though did express that he had “never” had period sex “like this” the second time we hung out and went back to my apartment two nights later. i asked him about what was the most striking part about this, and he answered “the amount” [of life-giving flow]. the second time, i made us take a shower together so we could continue fooling around without accumulating residue. “this is just like Psycho,” he said, while we watched the red waters spiral down the drain. 

“love without fear” was the mantra for my week with M. i knew he was leaving, and yet my heart opened up to him as if he were going to stay forever. it was strange, as if my mind surrendered to delusion for a week. i didn’t want to keep managing the stream of feelings anymore, checking each infant infatuation with caution, fear that feelings won’t be reciprocated or that i’ll be humiliated, always trying to protect myself from being hurt. i am always hurt anyway, so why not just let it flow freely, heavily, as scary and as messy as that may be? it’s only natural. i want to learn how to love without expectations. 

and so i held that mantra inside me as the depression and sadness rushed in as soon as M left my apartment the first morning. as the obsessive anxieties overtook me as i compulsively checked and then studiously ignored checking my phone every quarter hour like an addict. as i found myself crying like a disappointed child on new year’s eve, after he made it seem like he would meet me but then didn’t. as i found myself forgiving him easily as he explained himself the next day, only because i was simply happy to be back in his presence and could see that he was happy in mine. as we met for breakfast the second morning in a row because his flight was cancelled the day before due to the snow and i had to work during the days, i asked him about online dating and he told me. as i felt myself spiraling back into sadness while listening to him talk about meeting girls on tinder while visiting LA, no one special, mostly complaints about how he couldn’t meet anyone in montreal because it was too small and he knows everyone already (but he wasn’t talking to me as if i were his one and only and that was apparently the only acceptable thing to hear that would have prevented the sadness in that moment). we kissed assiduously on every parting. “let’s keep in touch,” he said. and that was all. 

one week later, i feel as if i’ve woken up from a fevered dream. who is M really anyway? how much do i really know him from our fling seven years ago and now, a fistful of encounters? all i know is that after i last saw him years ago, after we fucked in an alley in montreal when i visited, i never expected to see him again. and so every encounter this time was a gift, a bonus from the river of life. and perhaps, a lesson. he entered my life this time as unexpectedly and suddenly as a storm. and now the storm has passed, the cycle is over, the moon is waning. i am back to myself. 

[twodatesaweek]

2018

I contracted strep a few days into 2018, probably related the all the intensive therapy I’ve been doing, lately. Plumbing the depths of your heart weakens the immune system, apparently. Anyway, it’s making me realize how truly extroverted I am. Being cooped up in my apartment for the past four days has given me the worst case of cabin fever, compounded by the fact that the only thing that escapes my throat right now is a kind of sad animal wheezing. I have to stay quarantined in my apartment and I can’t even talk on the phone?? 

anyway, being alone like this is pretty peaceful, but you start frantically circling your to-do lists without actually making progress on them and missing things you otherwise don’t miss. to catch myself and my blogmate up to date, here are some bullet points from the past month or so, to wrap up my relationships from 2017:

• sent some cordial emails back and forth with A, about his dog dying, about his birthday. it felt like...an end. i told him i was glad for the time we spent together, and i guess i truly am, given that i learned a lot about myself, and if i was going to unravel, at least it was wild in some respect. getting onto hinge required me to sign onto facebook, and of course i drifted over to his facebook page, where there were some very handsome looking photographs. damn! and yet...in the same way dating him always felt like some cruel joke, looking at those photos did, too. 

• g texted me with a flyer to some party he was dj’ing in detroit? and then a few days later, asked for my email address and invited me to a show he’s dj’ing in bushwick, which for the record, i helped set him up with, and yet...why would i want to know or why would i care? stir-crazy me would go for a drink with the guy again, just to see what the story is, but thinking of sleeping with him again seems insurmountable geez louise. i told a mutual friend i’d rather stick my hand in a fryer than go see him play records at a bar A and i used to frequent. those last sputtering moments are good for closure, at least.  

so where does that leave me, january seven with a painfully sore throat and so many non recreational drugs in me? well, i finished the final season of lovesick, i’m on my way to finishing all of terrace house, i sent a lot of emails i was supposed to send, i canceled a lot of plans i didn’t need. i don’t have any dates on the calendar, but i do have a checklist pinned to my mirror that i look at every morning that reads, ‘what can i do to take care of myself, today?’

[twodatesaweek]

my first marriage proposal

i scheduled a date two sundays ago on the stiletto heels of a two-day conference on female empowerment only because he offered carnegie hall tickets for that evening and i wasn’t going to pass that up, even though i’d never met the guy and thought that offer was a bit much. after being in an arena of 2500 women, whose emotions ran through my body in the form of an urge to cry every 15 minutes or so, as woman after woman rose to share inspiring stories that bound us all in the sisterhood of our shared experiences of trauma and resilience, i would have much preferred to go home and take a bath and not talk to anyone for the next 12 hours. for better or worse, i was to meet a strange man off the internet two hours later, but what better opportunity to practice my newly learned skills of the womanly arts? 

to kill time until date time, i sat in a cafe a block away from carnegie hall, a pink rose at my waist from the event, trying to learn how to think about my pussy at each move i made (which was one of the exercises they had taught us). i thought about it as i went for the almond croissant instead of something with protein. i thought about it as i attempted to sashay a few feet to retrieve a lid for my latte. then i took out my kindle and proceeded to continue reading about women following their desires. out of the corner of my eye, i noticed a young man going from customer to customer seated at this cafe, asking them something. the only words i caught were “my girlfriend.” his speech sounded like an entreaty of some kind. a part of me felt some admiration for him for doing so much work for this girlfriend, mixed in with some jealousy and wondering why she wasn’t doing the asking herself. what did she need so desperately that he had to ask it of every stranger there? money? food? did her phone break and they needed to make an emergency call to her grandmother, who was dying this very moment? i waited for him to reach me, not lifting my eyes. finally, he came to my table. he took the chair next to me, placed it away from us, and then faced me. i watched as he knelt down on one knee and asked the question that perhaps every woman secretly wants to hear at least once in her life: “will you marry me?” 

i was completely confused. i had no idea what to say. something to the effect of “who are you?” slipped out of my mouth as i heard people applaud all around me. “what is this??” i must have also said. he raised his hand up as if to high five me. i almost raised my hand to meet his until i realized that i still had no idea what was going on. i noticed that he was casually dressed in something nondescript and was wearing what i later learned were bluetooth headphones, but which at the time simply looked like the headphones i was used to seeing only without cords, two white earbuds dangling out of his ears like forgotten fruit. this only made me even more confused and wonder if he had cut off the cords and was therefore...psychotic? before i could think more, i saw his body lean alarmingly close to me in what became apparent as an attempt to kiss me. in that moment, my only thought was: do i want this? and the answer from my pussy was: NO. an image of a woman raising her arm to signal a “no” flashed in my mind from a simulation i had observed just hours earlier at the conference about how to ward off unwanted male attention at a hypothetical club. at that time, i was half paying attention and felt like i would never need this, since i never went clubbing and no strange man has ever tried to dance with me in public. now, as i saw this strange man get closer to me who i was pretty sure i didn’t know (but which, incredibly, i also doubted if i knew at the same time, probably due to the sheer surprise element and the fact that everyone was clapping, as if they were expecting this and knew something i didn’t but ought to have known), i raised my hand in that same blocking gesture and pushed him smoothly away. 

i turned to the people around me in the cafe and asked them all, “what did he say to you?” the people i happened to see first were all women. in that moment, perhaps because i was fresh from the conference, i didn’t see them as strangers, but as sisters. from all the loving support from female strangers i had experienced just an hour earlier, i somehow expected the same from them. they didn’t disappoint. 

“he told us that you were his girlfriend and that he was going to propose. he told us to ‘support him’ by clapping,” they said. 

“i’ve never met this person in my life,” i said. i repeated this several times in the few seconds it took for all of us to digest what had just happened and to realize that we had all been duped.

“you handled that really well,” a young blonde woman told me from another table over. 

“i’m sorry that i supported this - i didn’t know,” another woman told me who was sitting on the couch to my right. “are you okay?” she asked, in accented english.

“yea, i’m fine,” i said slowly, trying to figure out what i was actually feeling. and then it started dawning on me that this was akin to attempted groping or forcible kissing, a fresh example of everything that’s being exposed on the news on an almost daily basis, except perversely packaged in this romantic gesture that incorporated the non-consensual complicity of others - something i’ve never heard of yet and thus never expected. 

“where is he?” i asked, now suddenly panicked and looking around the cafe, realizing the danger i was just in and what else this man could have done. 

“he left,” a south asian woman said, who was sitting two tables over. i looked around the room and noticed that all the men acted as if nothing had happened. they were all silent and looking down into phones or other devices, even the one who was sitting closest to me and who must have heard, if not seen, everything. an older woman wearing dark eyeliner walked up to me from farther away and asked me if i had known this man. i told her the truth. i realized that all the women in the room, an international consortium of all ages, uniformly appeared concerned and were engaging with me, while all the men not only didn’t ask what was going on, but continued to act as if nothing had happened. it felt as if they were all just bystander witnesses to, say, someone trying to steal someone else’s phone or punch them in the face, and they just kept on calmly checking their email, a foot away. half the room acknowledged one reality, while the other half lived in a completely different reality. 

as everyone returned to their roles as fellow urban strangers, a part of me wanted to get the hell out of there as soon as possible. i found my mind starting to go down the all too familiar rabbit hole of self-blame: was it because i wore makeup and flattering clothing that i was targeted? was it because i was thinking sensual thoughts and he somehow picked up on that and that’s why i was targeted? a part of me knew this had absolutely nothing to do with me, that this train of thought was simply a relic from a lifetime of patriarchal conditioning wherein women blame ourselves for everything, because what’s the use of blaming external forces when we have no power to change them? i also realized that it was an attempt for my logical brain to make sense of what seemed completely nonsensical, even if it’s at my own expense, because self-blame imparts some sliver of cause and effect to an otherwise utterly senseless violation. fear soon superseded everything when i thought - what if he was lurking just outside the cafe, ready to pounce? i hated the fact that despite having just attended one of the most inspiring feminist events i’d ever attended in my life, all my old fears of men returned so quickly and strongly. i was in no mood for a date at this point. this fear competed with my desire to get the hell out of dodge as i suited up in my winter layers and walked cautiously outside. but not before the young female barista also asked me what had happened and i told her. i advised her to keep an eye out for this man, now that we all knew what he was really up to. she pledged to do so and a feeling of sisterhood rose up inside of me again. in this war of the sexes, i realized that all women are allies when it comes to a question of basic physical safety, the integrity and preservation of one’s own bodily boundaries. the fairy tales tell us that men are supposed to protect our persons and be our champions in battle, but in reality, it is the women themselves who have risen to protect ourselves and each other. i hope that the men may follow, but i’m not going to wait. 

outside, the bracing cold air was refreshing and helped re-focus my mind away from what happened and on how the coldness felt on my body. i walked up and down in front of carnegie, waiting for this date that i now had almost zero desire to meet. i couldn’t wait to be able to just sit inside, basking in the music, and not talk to a man. later, when i told him this story, his first question was not “are you okay,” but “was he wearing red swimming trunks? was it performance art?” i could tell that he was trying to be clever, but it fell completely flat as i realized that he just didn’t get it, despite his work as a special ed teacher supposedly well-versed in the art of non-verbal communication. deleting you from my phone now, “Okc Steve Autism!” 

i have since wondered a lot about why someone would do what this person did, about what he was trying to achieve. was he psychotic or a psychopath? my answer tipped into psychopath not only as soon as I realized those earphones are totally legit and actually bluetooth (also - what the fuck was he listening to? was this stunt being recorded somehow?), but when i considered how perfectly manipulative it was. the fact that he set it up so that everyone was clapping to support the reality of his delusion that i was his girlfriend to whom he was proposing was like classic gas lighting - i am being made to seem like the crazy one if everyone else believes the same story i don’t subscribe to. what is madness but a difference of consensus belief? he was relying on the element of shock and everyone else’s social expectations in the form of applause to disorient a woman and make her comply with what was expected of her, isolating her to be the only one “not in on the joke,” so to speak, hoping to exploit the very cultural conditioning of women to continually comply with and accommodate others at the expense of her own feelings and desires that this very conference i had just attended was trying to reverse. had I not just come from the conference before encountering this same situation, i very well may have allowed him to kiss me before i was able to come to my senses and react more appropriately. how many times has he done this before? how many confused strange women’s lips did he actually make contact with in this way? even this time, a part of me still doubted myself enough that my reaction was not an immediate one of repulsion or anger. all of those feelings came later, much more slowly, contrary to what one who has never been in this kind of situation may expect. in the moment, i had to deliberately think through what i was going to do. protecting myself was not a reflex, as I had expected it would be. but then, as someone later pointed out, his action was not one that’s coded as stereotypically dangerous by our brains, unlike, say, someone lunging towards us suddenly with a knife. instead, the way he leaned in to try to kiss me was so smooth and seemingly socially appropriate that no one looking at the scene from the outside would have known that something very wrong was actually happening. in fact, nothing observable could be said to be wrong except for the lack of consent involved, and the only way we would ever know that there was no consent would be the subjective experience of the person being touched in this situation, which was me. everything turns on the (most often female) subject’s own experience, the very experience that has been so demonized, distorted, doubted, and dismissed in patriarchal culture. 

no more. 

[twodatesaweek]

soulmate wish list

the gatekeeper of my soul, my star-crossed lover, will be totally awesome. he’s going to be somewhere between six and seven feet tall, have a shock of dark hair covering his entire scalp with no speck of salt or pepper, and have blue eyes that just suck my soul in like a tidal whirlpool each time we make eye contact. which we will be making like 99% of the time we’re together. he kinda looks like a young man but behaves like a seasoned, mature gentleman whose days of wild grain sowing are far behind him and who’s now ready to settle down with the woman of his dreams (me) and incubate babies together, while still remaining a fun adult. he’s so fun that i never have to fake laugh with him, because he’s as hilarious as a stand-up comedian except without the emotional baggage - that thing where stand-ups use jokes to mask their deeper feelings. he’s just as comfortable and competent schmoozing at company parties or meeting parents as he is running through the forest naked to get in touch with pachamamma or pretending to be celebrities in order to sneak into fancy events together. basically, he can go with the flow. he’s like a total weirdo, but without the dark weirdo wounds from being bullied in middle school for being weird. or, at least, his emotional wounds are all completely healed because he’s enlightened as fuck. which is convenient for me, because he will be very zen but also sensitive to my full feminine emotional range and attune with or tune out as necessary. obviously, we will be having cosmically bonded sex capable of taking up whole weekends from which we will emerge radiant, moist, brand new human beings ready for the work week, during which time he will be steadily chipping away at saving the world. i can’t wait to swipe right on this. 

[twodatesaweek]

compare contrast

my entire self vacates my head and burrows into my heart when i sense chemistry, i’m a luxurious feathered thing nesting as far away from my suspicious, unrelenting brain as possible. let me lean in a little closer, let me whisk you around town. let’s have another drink, let me take you to a party. only when things are completely still do i peer up, warily. one eye opens, then the other.

just let me hang around in my heart for a little while longer, let my brain take a load off, i guess is what i’m thinking. picking a thing apart just seems so...unromantic, but how stupid is that? or, if not stupid, just not particularly me. anyway, i’ve had a date a week this past month, but i forced myself (or, okay, a good friend and a good therapist pushed me out o the nest) to alight into my mind for date four. (”help, head. help heart.”) 

he’s a beautiful guy with a sense of humor and a sweetness that sneaks up on you. i like that he’s easy to read but still surprises me with our interactions. it’s easy to talk to him about how i’m feeling, it’s easy to tell him when he’s annoying me or whatever is on my mind. he’s got an ego and a mean judgmental streak, but i find he mostly exercises it when he feels nervous or uncomfortable. i like that he blushes a lot, i like how he waits a long time to kiss me. i think i may contribute to his general nervousness with a steady upper-hand--he’s looking for full-time work after graduate school, new to the city after living in the bay area for four or five years. i’ve spent most of my twenties in new york, i work in prestige media and can appear to know everyone around town. 

i avoided writing about those dates, wanting them to remain in the plush nest of my heart, but my mind is clear these days, and my new project is challenging myself to be myself around anyone at all times. part of that is the cold analysis i tend to put everyone i know through, so here i am again in a place i can be honest and not gauge another person’s attention or judgements. 

i took him to review a new spot in west village with me, he’s a record obsessive and this spot advertises a gimmick of letting patrons choose from a curated list of vinyl songs along w an izakaya menu and low abv sake cocktails. he was terribly rude from the moment we stepped in, though i tried to accommodate it and steer him away from his pessimistic edge, still here he was repeating a line he uses frequently to describe new yorkers (”rich, with no taste” ) complaining that the songlist didn’t allow anyone to choose any song off any record, telling me that the place wasn’t the kind of place he’d willingly go to, that cocktail culture was ‘on the other side of the tracks’ for him. it was all hurtful and made me retreat inward into a state where i wondered what he must think of me, whether i needed to clarify that it wasn’t a place i’d normally wind up at either, if he thought i was cool. instead, i told him he was being a bad date and that his behavior was making me feel like he was casting criticisms on me, as well. he responded with immediate regret, apologized and told me he really appreciated me taking him, that it wasn’t something he’d get to experience normally. it’s not about the place, i said, it’s about the company. 

‘just be cool’ i snapped as he walked off to the bathroom, only slightly entertained at the vastness that that sentence contained, and mostly annoyed and concerned that i’d have to negotiate his negativity all evening at a place i was mostly at for work. 

but he came back and he was sweet and even a little thrilled when they threw him a bone and played a song of an album they hadn’t listed. the food wasn’t great, the atmosphere was too contrived for us, the drinks were good. “you said i talk too much when i get nervous,” he said to me, referencing a previous date. “no one has ever said that to me, before.” 

we left and tore around chinatown, stopping at one of my regular spots to pee and drink beers. we talked about joni mitchell, our relative interests in music, what djing means to a person from detroit. we played arcade games on mott street, i leaned into kiss him after a confusing giant game of space invaders. we went for a night cap at a bar in fort greene where his friends were playing records. i liked them, i drank too much and relaxed into my seat, raved about uigher food and vodka in brighton beach. he came and sat w me and i swooned into him from the way he smelled. 

our last date, we were in bed chatting about astrological signs. we’d ridden his motorcycle to his place and i was freezing under the down duvet. ‘aries -- we have beautiful faces and like a good head scratch,’ he said, egging me into one. “you could use your nails more,” he said, flipping his back to me and asking for a back scratch. i declined, teasing him about unfair labor and trying to warm my still-cold feet on his legs. ‘you’re an aquarius...air signs feed fire signs,’ he said, dodging my feet. ‘well what do air signs get?” i asked. “what do you mean?” he asked. ‘if fire signs feed on air, what’s left for air?” i asked, still attempting to find some stretch of skin to place my feet on. “you get to stay warm,” he said, relenting to my cold feet, but snatching my hand and guiding it to scratch his back. 

--

i was pensive and content friday morning, if terribly hungover, listening to mitski on the c train. recently, i chopped my hair off in a bob and dyed it purple. a much-too-late breakup haircut. but as soon as i had my new look i felt new again, invisible to my past self, stronger. a man to my left popped his head over the platform and i was too dreamy to recognize at first, that it was A. 

“hey,” he said in a kind of performative shyness. “hey,” i said, feigning masking my awkwardness and reluctance w a kind of professional cheer. we boarded the train, i asked him what he was doing in this part of town, hoping desperately for the relief of knowing he was seeing someone else who lived around here. ‘oh i had to rent a car and go upstate for...the dui stuff.’ he’d gotten a ticket driving his motorcycle upstate after a few drinks. idiot, i thought to myself over and over again, as he told me about having to convince a social worker that he wasn’t an alcoholic. ‘i was just thinking about you,’ he said, ‘i was just thinking about you an hour ago.’ i recoiled, i fell into the rabbithole of my anger and resentment against him, against every idiot guy who has taken advantage of my kindness and accommodation. fuck you, i thought, fuck you for this violation, fuck you for trying to turn me into something else. how could i ever have dated this fucking dope, i thought, how could i have actually stood to spend more than one night much less three months entangled in his bullshit? 

in three short train stops he tried every emotional appeal, trying to impress me, trying to guilt me, trying to make me miss him, trying to make me feel anything. he leaned down slightly before fulton station so his face was closer to mine. ‘hey, can we hang out?’ the doors opened and i skipped out as quickly as possible. ‘yeah, sure!’ i said over my shoulder.

and all day i was inundated with guilt mongering texts and emails from him, about what had changed, how horrible i’d made him feel that morning, he demanded an explanation of why, i suppose, i’m not his girlfriend anymore, why i don’t owe him a fucking thing. i wrote to him ‘please respect my boundaries, i don’t owe you any emotional work’ only to make things worse. this afternoon, a long manipulative email about his depression, about how he still thought we might have a future, about him him him him him. 

[twodatesaweek]

dating ennui + race

perhaps you’ve noticed, dear reader, that we haven’t updated in a while. that’s because dating sucks. ok, maybe a more thoughtful answer is: dating ennui. 

it’s that wall every single woman hits once in a while - when the whole process of meeting strangers with dicks feels increasingly as welcome as a root canal. unlike job hunting or obtaining healthcare, only loneliness and social expectations will motivate you to go through a task often as daunting, time intensive, and rife with rejection as seeking employment and as routinely annoying as a pap smear. and unlike the fear of dying homeless, sometimes those forces are just not enough to overcome dating ennui, which can consist of: nausea when viewing that sea of faces online and all the information they give or don’t give you (which all start to sound like bullshit), choice paralysis, fear of rejection/disappointment/rape/STDs, etc. the online dating game is also designed for projections. the best profiles aren’t necessarily attached to the best people, just the people who are best at branding themselves. a face i may reject online may be one i’d warm up to if he approached me at a party in a gentlemanly way. 

which is why i deleted tinder last weekend, because i just didn’t like how the app was forcing me to think about humans. hours later, someone contacted me via instagram who had found me through tinder. though i usually ignore those who try to skirt the matching system like this, i started talking to him because i loved his feed and his website. he was great at branding, since he ran a company that did exactly that. the waves of dating ennui had finally washed me up on the shores of surrender, where i decided to say fuck it to the lists and marriage goals and set the intention to just have fun.

we meet in front of the whitney on a friday afternoon. i’m only 5 minutes late and he texts me a photo of the sunset reflected off the museum’s glass walls  so that i wouldn’t miss it. such a different approach from the minimalist and i like it. i spot him a few feet away and my first disappointment registers - not attracted. but no matter, i’m a professional and you can have even more fun with people you’re not attracted to, so i soldier on. we drink beer. he talks. he talks a lot. a theme that starts to emerge in his talk is that of craving attention. his stepfather and mother came to the city to visit him for the first time in ages to attend an award ceremony for his work, but they never make it to the award ceremony. we go to the high line and he says that he’s usually friends with all the artists who show work there, though he didn’t know the ones whose stuff was up there that day. nevertheless, we actually have fun because neither of us has walked to the end of the high line and it is unusually empty of tourists that breezy autumn evening. flanked by neon lit plants, the walkway curved into an eerie area of half empty skyscrapers and half-built gargantuan constructions - one composed of hexagons like a dark beehive and another with arches curving overhead like a giant’s ribcage. behind glass, a large coach ad plays on loop to no one. next to it are color coded objects arranged in precise rows. i assume they are coach bags, though from afar, they look like deformed colorful, dead animals displayed according to their state of decay. my date squeezes about five instagram stories out of this strangely beautiful landscape while i stand around in silent wonder and think about blade runner 2049. 

i feel very comfortable with this man, maybe because he’s also asian american (filipino). he’s the first asian i’ve gone on a date with in many years, and i am surprised and also not surprised by the complete absence of social anxiety. is it because i’m not attracted to him? is it because he’s asian that i’m not attracted? in addition to whatever it is, there’s also a complete lack of trying to measure up in some way, to prove that i’m attractive or hip or whatever enough - basically, that i’m white american enough. he feels like he could be my brother in a way that i could never feel with a white dude. i challenge and tease him with abandon. i feel safer and somehow know he won’t be aggressively trying to fuck me. i feel confident - as in, i know where you come from and how you feel inside when your parents speak to you in accented english; i know you. do white girls feel like this with white dudes? is there an automatic foundation of confidence because they’ve grown up seeing these guys as their brothers, cousins, fathers, friends, so that parity and shared experience are assumed? to me, there’s always a little more distance between me and white guys that i’ve become numb to, because i assume that i just have to accommodate to it no matter what. white guys can feel either too interested in a creepy, fetish-y kinda way, where you imagine them imagining tying you up in a basement and then making paintings about it, even though you’re maybe 20 years younger, but they feel entitled anyway. or, you feel like they’re never going to be interested in you because they’re part of that idealized group that you’ve been excluded from in the past when you were more asian, pre-pubescent, and wearing sweat suits your grandparents shipped from china, including a neon pink one with a mr. potato head holding up a phone mouthing the words “hello, will you be my friend?” no. no one was going to be your friend in that suit. and no matter how long you’ve mingled with elites at ivy league schools or townie art scenes, you never forget where you came from (near the bottom of the socioeconomic pile, across an ocean). the experience of your sixth grade science teacher asking you in front of the class if you understood his english, even though you were fluent and had done nothing to attract his attention except by looking different, competes with the experiences of fucking white dudes and having white best friends. the latter mostly wins out, but there’s something about the former that leaves an imprint on you that you’re not even aware of until you hang out with other people of your color in a racial awakening that you didn’t even want to have, but which is now inevitable in this woke world. 

so anyway, about that date with my asian brother: we had ice cream after the high line and then he drove me home and kissed me on the cheek. i still had zero attraction to him because, ew, that brother thing! no genetic material exchanged + fun + carbs =  first date success! 

[twodatesaweek]

wide-eyed and bushwick-tailed

my blogmate came and picked me up a few weekends ago, when i was in a funk so that we could go on our second round of ‘out to drinks to talk to men.’ i used to hang out with a group of women in their late-twenties when i was still feral and twenty-two in D.C. and we would go to the fancy white college-educated bars on U-Street like Marvin’s (name after Gay) or Church Key and do a lap every few hours, trying to spot handsome and available men. i never really felt like i was actually participating in the experience, just there for the odd and sort-of-desperate ride, like someone’s little sister in from a different country. once, i went with them to ‘casino night’ at someone’s membership-only club and of course i got very drunk and natalie, who had a decent face and a nice body, spun me around the dance floor manically saying ‘WE ARE THE TWO HOTTEST LADIES IN WASHINGTON’ sometimes it made me feel very sad. 

my blogmate and i wavered a bit on whether we should give up and just go to a movie, but none of the movies at nighthawk looked particularly good and we seemed to both be getting nervous. i’d been visiting a mead bar in bushwick, for work, and i’d made a mental note, talking to the owners, that they seemed like guys that my blogmate might like -- easily handsome ivy-league-educated weirdos who knew a lot about foraging and tonics and were able somehow able to turn their artistic impulses into a (somewhat stable) career and anyway i liked talking to them.

so we put on nice dresses (she, a very cute form-fitting navy blue shift w a trail of white buttons up one side) and me, a blue bag dress with spaghetti straps. we both put on bright lipsticks and hopped into a cab, first to a cape-cod style clamshack, then to the mead bar, then for a night cap at a beautiful cocktail bar that i don’t get to go to as often as i like. 

i didn’t like it. i mean, i liked being with my blogmate and i like savoring what was probably the last hot saturday night of the year out drinking beers on a patio then winding around the industrial streets of bushwick, but i didn’t like having to invert a private experience that i normally cherish and experience somewhat spontaneously infrequently (bar hopping in a far away neighborhood with a good friend, deep in conversations about whatever our minds go to) into a public one, scraping my surroundings for the right atmosphere, the right people, the right vibe. 

i found myself jittery and not able to talk about anything but the thing we were there for: love, men, relationships. i love bars more than any other kind of institution in new york -- i love the surprises that inevitably arise out of a bunch of strangers drinking together for unrelated or related reasons i love the sheer heart that goes into opening something that you can be sure will be puked in if not shat in corner to corner. but that night it was like i saw the setpieces broken down into their parts, i could not suspend disbelief.

so i was glad that my blogmate seemed genuinely interested in the man i hoped she might be charmed by, and it was a kind of win for me (we should always know what kind of partners our wingwomen would like or not like) but what i wanted to know was what the indian food vendor who’d set up a little stall in the bar hoped to do for indian food (change its reputation, of course) and how long he’d been away from his other restaurant, which had just closed the week before. i’m a professional observer, so i can always find a way to make myself comfortable in a situation that i don’t feel fully immersed in, by taking one step out. 

i want the act of finding a partner to feel more like the act of coming back to myself -- easy, serendipitous, sureness descending on you immediately -- so obvious -- rather than bending yourself to fit into someone else’s routines or your own routines. maybe i have craved a partner so terribly recently, because the last year has left me at a loss for myself.

i said i’ve spent the last week at home crying a lot, but this morning, remarkably, i felt better. less consumed by a swirling negative loop that belies the deep disappointments and heartbreak i’ve felt the last year have contained for me. in chinese, when things are painful, but you don’t want to let on, you say you ‘bite it.’ sometimes you bite it, because you can’t let down others around you. sometimes, it’s because you can’t even admit to yourself how much it wore on you. but being around my family, being around a constant hum of support and questioning and nagging and food and interruptions finally broke me, no time to make up a story, no time to avoid the bad feelings, the ones that actually hurt. i read on the couch for a few hours this morning and it felt like i’d suddenly descended on myself again, like i finally remembered. none of the stuff i feel i should be doing, or maybe just enough of it until it’s actually who i am again. 

[twodatesaweek]

oh i don’t even fucking know anymore

i didn’t go on a date, but i did ask ‘little rob’ (as opposed to ‘big rob’) why he hadn’t asked me to dance yet at julie’s wedding, which was so incredibly southern that i could have been delighted at how transporting everything was -- the southern accents, the grits bar, the vineyard vines cumberbunds on all the tuxes, the groom attempting to convince me over the rehearsal dinner that that statues should be left alone (’it’s just history!’ he said). but i got kind of sad, as always, when i’m around everyone and everyone has their partners and i feel like i’ve just mucked around for the past ten years dating whatever comes along and not making good decisions and leading a VERY INTERESTING but otherwise unstable kind of life. 

i known that sounds angsty and maybe a little myopic, but it is certainly what i start to think after a few drinks sometimes. jennifer’s husband, kevin, gave me some advice:

* you might not feel sparks on a first date but if you think someone is a Good Guy, just keep going for it and attraction may start

* don’t rely on online dating -- go to parties! go to all the parties! use everyone else’s networks

i think that last point is actually good advice that i should try out -- just accept invitations to go to any sort of group thing and meet people. i think i have a fear of this because i know, for one, that my rational self and my emotional self have a hard time meeting each other mostly. one theory i’ve thought of: that i’m generally more convinced by rational arguments than by emotional ones. so i don’t tend to my emotional self all too often so when i become sensitive or have strong feelings, i tend to act on them, rather than waiting it out. my gut must be correct, i think, if it is screaming so loudly.

that impulsiveness has mostly rewarded me with interesting experiences, with a certain courageousness that i even sometimes surprise myself by displaying. but in terms of dating its not always been so great -- i feel some kind of chemistry with a person and i let my rational self tune out, sometimes i find myself being unable to find the right trapdoor to get myself out of emotional turmoil.

A emailed me, and i just went to pieces. he said he’s back in therapy, still miserable over what happened between us, and that he wants to meet and talk and give me my things back, and its like my heart dropped ten stories. what do i think will happen? do i think he’ll apologize for all of the chaos and hurt he caused me? even if he does do i think it will give me closure? do i think he’ll show up as the guy i always wanted him to be and confess that exhibit A - M of him being Not Good Enough For Me were flukes? do i think he’ll be back on anti-depressants and suddenly a mature thoughtful member of society? 

‘okay let me put it this way: do you want to see him?’ lauren asked me.

‘yes’ i said.

‘do you think it would make you feel bad?’ she asked.

‘yes’ i said.

i mean what the actual fuck is wrong with me. my mind keeps feeling the floor for the latch that will get me out of this negative loop. i want to see him because i’m depressed and angry, still, that he committed to me, but then didn’t actually mean it. i’m angry and humiliated that i so eagerly gave in and was myself and embarrassed myself and made myself something i’m not because a person treated me badly and i wanted to prove that i was good enough. and i just want the opportunity to take it all back somehow. 

i’m crying a lot these days now that I’m home in Atlanta. being with my family does that...i don’t have anyone to pretend to have it together all the time. (here’s to feeling sensitive, blogmate!) i know i need to make a big change when i get back to new york, career-wise and emotionally. when i’m feeling vulnerable and sad like this, it’s hard to curry up the energy to even think about a change. it’s hard to find the part inside of me that believes that things can get better, that feels good when i make the right choice for myself, esp when those choices are hard. actually, feeling so heartbroken makes me feel like i deserve less, makes me want to be a bad horse that goes back to old fields, makes me destructive and generally bad. 

anne always asks me: ‘do you believe you deserve better?’ i get nervous, i stutter everytime i try to answer.

i don’t want to be that woman, i don’t respect her. i need to walk the straight and narrow for now, i need to cry because i’m sad, i need to think of a solution, even if it’s not permanent. i will quit my job, i will find something new, i will write my book, i won’t see A, i will stick up for myself, i will believe things can get better, because i know they can. i have seen them go from the very worst to much better.

little rob told me ‘duly noted’ when i asked him to ask me to dance. but first, he had to watch the clemson game. i laughed and went outside and smoked cigarettes with kevin, gabriel, and lauren. i blacked out later that night, while my dad had been called over to take a look at another partygoer who’d fallen on the steps and head their head. my mother told me i told him he was the best father in the world and you can’t find men like him anymore. she also said that i cried about not ever getting married. she laughed a lot at me in the morning.