You just have to be open.
You just have to love yourself.
You just have to stop looking.
You just have to live your life.
You just have to believe that you’re beautiful.
You just have to be the person you want to be with.
You just have to be totally happy on your own.
You just have to know what you want.
You just have to let go of your expectations.
You just have to be confident in yourself.
You just have to smile more.
You just have to talk less.
You just have to be assertive.
You just have to wait.
You just have to put yourself out there, you know?
I have heard all these sentences, several times each, from very well-meaning and lovable people. They have to do with being alone, with being single…specifically, with my being alone and being single, as I have been for, what, three years now?
I try not to talk about it very much, because I am a little ashamed about the whole thing, but I slip up sometimes. If you are a close friend of mine you may have been around for one of these slip-ups, you may have received an email that is four or five screens of a slip-up. I have this idea that it’s wrong to talk about being single, that it’s demeaning to myself and that it makes me come off as desperate. I have this idea that a) no one cares and b) people think I’m weird and c) no one cares. I have this idea that I should be so immersed in my fabulous life—hello, I moved to New Zealand, thanks very much—that I don’t even notice whether I have a partner or not, like: boyfriend? Um, let me check my calendar, okay?
When I let my guard down and talk about it, most people will listen carefully and sweetly and then say, with great earnestness and compassion, one or more of the abovementioned sentences. Sometimes I will nod my head. Sometimes I will go “Mmm hmm.” But mostly what I will say is, “Okay, sure. But HOW?”
See, I’ve been thinking, for the last couple of days, about a post on this topic by the lusciously well-spoken Kate Harding (a crush on whom has recently sprung fully-formed from my head). She writes about dumb luck in meeting her partner: she was at a dinner party and her friend introduced her to a guy and they liked each other and that was that. She wasn’t perfect, and neither was he. She hadn’t passed some sort of test or won some sort of magical prize to find her partner: it just happened, and there was nothing she could do to make it happen sooner, and that was that. Dumb luck.
I left a comment on that entry, saying I had a hard time believing that every single person in the world who is partnered somehow hit upon the right formula of Loving Themselves and Just Letting Go Of Expectations and Putting Themselves Out There, and then boom! Bang! There the person was, because that’s what happens when you do everything right and follow the advice and check the boxes. Because clearly, miserable awful people with bad hair and bad attitudes never hook up, right? They never get into relationships and they never get married. I mean, even I have hooked up when I was in a weird scary broken place, as out of love with myself as is possible to be. Some of y’all may remember that I had a partner for a pretty long time, and trust me I kind of sucked during most of that time. Anyway, in the comment, I said that it was really nice to read something that affirmed that some things, no matter how much we want them, are beyond our control. Some things are just random sometimes.
That, of course, is the frightening part for me, because I want nothing so much as I want control and agency and to accurately predict the future and to believe that I am perfectly, permanently in charge. “Oh, yeah, mmm hmm, okay, I’m supposed to love myself unconditionally, but HOW?” I will bellow, knitting my eyebrows threateningly at my lunch date. It’s not a philosophical, rhetorical question, you understand; I’m asking for the instruction manual (where are you hiding it?) so I can read it and highlight the good parts and then maybe bang out an outline before bed and then create a spreadsheet the next morning and a cost/benefit analysis and also perhaps a soundtrack to go along with the whole project. I want bullet points and Key Performance Indicators. I want an A. I want an A plus.
Or sometimes I want to just forget about the whole thing, to turn away from desire altogether, to shut myself up so completely that the very idea of a partner seems ludicrous, like something I would never do. Wait, I think to myself. So, like, when you have a boyfriend? You have to, like, listen to him talk or whatever? That’s kind of the space I’m in at the moment, actually, as I write this. I have been having some very difficult and painful thoughts and feelings about men lately, and I have been shaking my head and backing away from the thought of wanting anyone. I can’t think about it too much without getting anxious (I am chewing my lip as I type) about everything that would, could go wrong, about getting hurt again, about fucking it up again. I am not completely convinced it’s worth it, and honestly I have a really difficult time imagining myself as a girlfriend, let alone someone actually liking me.
The end result is supposed to be the same though: whether I devote all my energies to Finding Someone ™ or throw my hands prettily in the air and decide to just Be The Best Me I Can Possibly Be ™, the partner is supposed to be the reward, the end result. A Plus! I win! “How did you two get together?” coos the interviewer, as the camera rolls and the mood lighting brings out the walnut tints in my hair. “Oh,” I laugh, rolling my eyes. “It was the most random thing. We were on this scuba trip and I was swimming along and all of a sudden this octopus…right, honey?…all of a sudden snaked out a tentacle and grabbed my arm and it turned out that it had snaked out another tentacle…they have eight, you know, covered with chromatophore cells that allow them to change color, and each sucker on each tentacle moves independently of all the others…anyway, it had snaked out another tentacle and, if you can believe it, grabbed Bjorn here’s arm too! And also I was completely unconcerned with relationships at the time, just enjoying myself and doing my own thing. I was really confident in my own beauty and general fabulousness, you know? So I’d say it was that that brought us together, my true love for myself, right sweetie? Well, that and the cephalopod.”
In my real life, since this hot mess went down and I had to spend a little time being sad and lonely for a while, I have behaved pretty much as I always do. I have flirted a lot and spent a lot of time at home reading books by myself a lot. I have had crushes on all sorts of delightful individuals. I have pursued people I liked, and I have been roundly rejected. I have received a fairly hilarious sexual proposition from a friend, via text, thank you very much, which, though I didn’t accept it, did end up providing me with an excellent cell phone plan. I have been complimented and I have been ignored. I have been to a dinner party at which all the women present discussed their love lives in detail and asked for constructive criticism. I have written in my paper journal about what I would like and not like in a potential partner. I have basically just been me and done exactly what I wanted and usually enjoyed myself, and nothing has changed.
And maybe—probably—nothing will. Maybe not for a while, and maybe not ever. And you know what people never want to hear, the thing that makes them shake their heads and admonish me for thinking negatively? When I say that maybe it just won’t shake out. Maybe my luck—which is so evident in so many areas of my life, starting with all the social and political privilege I have and extending to my housing karma and my ability to rock a bicycle shimmy—will not fetch up at the door of a life partner. Maybe I will just remain alone.
One thing has changed though, now that I think about it: remaining alone for the rest of my life is, at this point in my silly octopus-loving patched-together not-completely-in-control B-plus-A-minus bicycle-shimmying life, far from a worse case scenario. One more thing I feel open to, one more good good thing my luck has brought me.