First was Keith, a fellow grad from NYU. He was terrifyingly handsome, the kind of guy who made people walk into lampposts. Beautiful smooth skin, green eyes, dreadlocks, six foot three, hypnotically perfect body. That relationship was tumultuous and spicy, lots of fights and making up and storming out (mostly on his part). I finally broke things off for good, unable to picture a future full of that kind of drama. He went on to become a model, and I got great pleasure out of pointing him out in magazines and telling friends that, no, seriously, I had seen him naked.
My next boyfriend, Jason, was the opposite. We started dating in our late twenties, which is still infantile by New York standards. He was a very nice guy. Things were steady and reliable...and bland. After a year and change, we just ran out of things to talk about and spent lots of time watching TV in a pleasant boredom until he finally euthanized the relationship by moving to Minnesota.
And last, there was Louis. We met at a gallery opening, just as cheesy as it sounds, when I was thirty-two. We enjoyed each other’s company. Moved in together after a year, laughed a lot, felt comfortable enough that he knew that my eating popcorn drizzled with Nutella meant my period was nigh, and I knew that if he ate cabbage, he’d be in the bathroom six hours later. It felt real, and happy. Louis was smart, a psych nurse with a lot of compassion for his patients and great stories from work.
Then he got a tattoo. And another. And a third and fourth. And then, just after he got a Chinese character depicting commitment, he dumped me for his tattoo artist.
Then came the online dating years. Sure, sure, we all know the happy couple who met online, who exchanged fun, flirty emails and then finally met, and voilà! They were in love. Oh, the fun stories of the losers they’d endured before they found each other! Daniel the Hot Firefighter and Calista, who lived on the same Park Slope street I did, had met online, though they divorced after a few years so Calista could devote more time to her yoga. But there were others who’d met online, married, and were still very happy together. I was game. I gave it a shot.
It was a fail. Same for my closest friend, Paige. Like me, Paige was abruptly and completely unable to find a guy. Like me, she was a successful professional—a lawyer—attractive and interesting. Like me, she’d had a slew of nice and not-bad dates, never to hear from the guy again. We both bought a few dating books and followed the rules assiduously. We both wasted our money.
Dating in your thirties becomes a second job. Some of the books remind you to Have fun! If you’re not having fun, what’s the point? The point was to find a mate. There was no fun involved, thank you very much. The fun would come after, when we could wear Birkenstocks and give up Spanx.
Honestly, it was more work than my actual career. I knew what I was doing with photography. This, though... The writing of profiles, the witty exchange of emails, the blocking of perverts. The careful mental list of what to reveal, how to make yourself sound interesting without sounding dysfunctional—should I mention my terror of earthworms? Do I admit that my parents have married each other twice? What about the fact that I binge-watched five seasons of Game of Thrones in one weekend without showering or eating a single vegetable?
Sometimes, the men who seemed nice at first would reveal themselves to be not quite so balanced. After a really fun online exchange with Finn and a perfect first date that involved a tiny Colombian restaurant, much laughter and great chemistry, I got a text that was one giant paragraph without a single capital letter or punctuation mark.
kate you are really great i hate dating dont you we should definitely be exclusive because tonight showed me youre a good person i had a girlfriend who was such a slut she blew my brother in the gas station bathroom btw we were on the way to my grandmothers funeral then they wondered why i was mad seriously people can be such assholes but tonight your eyes told me you have compassion and are fun and wont judge me for things i maybe shouldnt have done
You get the idea. I printed it out for posterity. It was five pages long.
Even when I’d mastered the art of conversing politely yet genuinely and humorously yet seriously while making sure I listened carefully and attentively...well. All those adverbs were exhausting.
And even then, even if I liked a guy and the date went well, nothing came of it. In five years of online dating, I had two second dates. Zero third dates.
Paige and I would cheerfully obsess—Why hadn’t he called again? He said he would! We had a good time! We laughed! Hard! Two times!—and complain—His hair smelled like pot. A noodle got stuck in his beard, and then he got angry when I told him about it. He stormed out of the restaurant because they didn’t have local sheep cheese. We’d laugh and order another round, trying to protect ourselves from too much discouragement or hope.
The single guys we knew, like Daniel, the now-divorced and still-hot firefighter, dated twentysomethings—the False Alarms, Paige and I called them, since nothing serious ever developed after Daniel’s divorce. The False Alarms were all pretty much the same—shockingly beautiful, thigh-gapped, vapid. There was a new one every month or two.
Occasionally, we’d run into Daniel, his cloud of pheromones thick enough to make us choke. Paige called him Thor, God of Thunder, and yeah, he had that kind of effect. Once, Paige and I were sitting in at Porto’s Bar & Restaurant, and Daniel walked in at the very moment the jukebox started playing “Hot Stuff” by Donna Summer. Even the machinery knew.
He was friendly, sure, slinging an arm around my shoulders. “Hey, Kate!” he’d say, his eyes flickering from their usual good cheer. After all, I’d known him as half of a couple, back when he and Calista were newlyweds. I’d seen him sitting on their front steps, waiting for her to come home, unsure of where she was. I knew that he’d been heartbroken, and she had not. Calista moved to Sedona after the divorce, taught meditational movement and spiritual cleanses. I still got a Namaste card for winter solstice each year.
But Daniel and his ilk—the cheerful man-children of Brooklyn—didn’t give women like Paige and me a second glance. Marriage? Tried that, didn’t work. Those guys just kept buying lemon drop martinis for their just-graduated girlfriends, women a decade (or more!) younger than I was, who considered Britney Spears songs classics. They didn’t care about things like fatherhood potential, didn’t care about depth of character. They were simply smitten by the FDNY insignia on Daniel’s T-shirt and the bulging muscles that were showcased by it. (To be fair, I’d once seen Daniel shirtless, and I stopped caring, too.)
The other single men I knew...well, the truth was, I knew only a few. Most of them were ex-cons, as I volunteered at the Re-Enter Center of Brooklyn, a place where parolees could take classes to help them adapt to life on the outside. I taught small business management with a little photography thrown in for fun. And while I was all for forgiveness, chances were quite small that I’d marry a guy with a teardrop tattooed under his eye.
Paige and I would assure each other that being single was great. Our lives were full and fun and we loved our careers. Look at other women! Just because they were in relationships didn’t make their lives meaningful! Paige had two sisters and seven nieces and nephews, and both sisters were wretched and exhausted. One was contemplating a mommy makeover to lift her boobs and shed her fat and get her husband to sleep with her again; the other, Paige was pretty sure, was about to come out of the closet.
My own sister...well, okay, Ainsley was happy, but kind of...how to put this? Naive. Retro in her worship of all things Eric, always putting herself second, despite the fact that she’d had a very impressive job. She took care of Eric in a way he never took care of her; he was the star in the couple, and she had a supporting role. It bugged me.
I was different. Paige, too. We were self-fulfilled. And what about that fabulous trip we’d taken last year to London, huh? We should plan another! Vienna this time?
