It’s a waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop kind of a thing with me lately: I’m feeling really happy to be single and so naturally I’m wondering if there’s something wrong with me.
This is the first time in about fifteen years that I haven’t been obsessed with one boy or another. I feel the way I did when I was about thirteen years old: I talked about boys a lot with my friends, and I knew some who’d actually kissed boys, and I watched movies about, like, proms, and I’d heard all these rumors about boys, like you had to wait for them to call you, (or maybe you didn’t) or that when they were mean to you it meant they really liked you, or that when you went steady with one they had to call you on the phone every night after school just to talk. It didn’t have much practical application for me though; it didn’t have anything to do with my life, which was, if I recall correctly, more about trying to learning all the words to “La Bamba” and adjusting to no longer being a Gifted Child.
And then it became a little more than theory and I embarked on several very intense crushes that lasted me through high school, one of which resulted, I am ashamed to report, in my writing a play about how a boy I liked didn’t like me, and in that play’s being produced at my school in front of actual people. I think the main character actually rips up a picture of the boy she likes. This only happened because it was being performed in a building that didn’t allow open flames, because I think the original script called for it to be burned to a pile of ashes on the floor. I know, right? Kill me now. And then the nineties were really here, and I went to college, and I had several other very intense crushes, and then some other stuff happened, like ten years passed, and then it was the summer of 2004 and I became single again and now it’s April 2005 and I am still single and I don’t have a crush for the first time in a long time and it’s pretty great.
A couple of weeks ago, though, I think I got this weird case of spring fever. I could NOT stop thinking about Boys…I guess since I’m thirty now it should be Men but Men sounds icky and scary to me while Boys sounds cute and fun and as though there may be a Vespa just around the corner with two helmets dangling from it. Anyway, yeah, Boys. I started thinking about them, and wondering what going on a date with one (or more!) might be like. I started casting sidelong glances at Boys on my bus, walking around Green Lake, around work. The lack of specificity was sort of weird and sort of fun, in that I imagined myself as a sort of laser beam, indiscriminately focusing on whoever happened to be handy. I started imagining myself hanging out with a new Boy (or more than one!) and I even planned out some adorable outfits for me to wear, and I thought about dates I’ve always wanted to go on but never have, and then I even went on a couple of dates, and they were equal parts terrifyingly funny and hysterically awful, and then, just like that, the Boys switch flipped off. One day I was pretty much listening to Barry White and making come-hither faces at myself in the mirror twenty-four hours a day, and the next I was getting on the bus and putting my nose right in my book without wondering if that guy over there with the huge headphones and the leather pants might like to join me for a trip to Archie McPhee or if the guy in the beard with the huge economics book would want to jet off to Morocco for the weekend. I stopped emailing everyone I know to ask if it was weird that I was super boy crazy, and I told John and Treasa that the rope ladder we’d planned to install outside the window of my future room in their house to facilitate anonymous hookups would probably not be necessary anymore.
One night a couple of weeks ago I went to burlesque with some folks I know from bellydance. This would have been smack in the middle of my Boys! phase. Between the yam chips, the bonhomous camaraderie, and the naked ladies, a good time was had by all, and I thought I looked kind of pretty in my new ribbon necklace, too. I spent a little time thinking about what it would be like to go on a first date to a burlesque show, and how it would be sort of funny (“Wanna go see TITS with me, dude?”) but also maybe a little weird but still, probably, awesome. And then I said goodbye to everyone and came home late at night to my big bed with my flannel sheets and snuggled in with a movie and thought, out of nowhere, “My bed is a one person bed. My heart is a one person heart.”
And since then I have been thinking a lot about what that means and what’s ,if any, the significance of sleeping in a one person bed and loving with a one person heart. Thus far, weird spring fevers aside (should I get inoculated?) I have to say it’s been really good. I used to have so many fears about what being alone would be like, that I’d be lonely or that I wouldn’t have someone to do fun things with or that I would feel unloved or that I wouldn’t have any support or that I would always be jealous of people who were in good relationships. And yeah, I guess, occasionally I do feel those things, but not as much as I did when I was partnered. Most of the time I feel loved and supported and I go out and do fun things way more than I did this time last year and I spend a lot less time being sad and lonely and jealous than I did this time last year. I haven’t cried in months. Things feel so much easier now, and I never thought I’d say that. I feel full to the brim with Top Secret Plans and cupcakes and new ideas and new friends and old friends and plane tickets and my World Aquarium Tour and parties and brunches and a big stack of books by my bed. It’s hard to imagine, sometimes, anyone else fitting into this life.
And, see, the weird part is, the other-shoe-dropping part of it is, that I feel like I must be hiding something, like a deep desperate need for a partner, when I say that, when I aver that I’m feeling pretty good lately and enjoying myself quite a bit. I feel like I’m buying into that “Single…and LOVING it!!” thing, you know, where people tell you stuff like, “Oh, it’s when you’re TRULY HAPPY that SOMEONE WONDERFUL comes along because YOU JUST ATTRACT IT and then you’re NOT ALONE anymore and it’s JUST GREAT.” I can’t articulate it the way I want to, but you know what I mean, right, like the reason to be happy with your life is so that you can have someone else in it. Maybe it’s true, maybe it makes sense for some people, but to me it feels like, well, how happy can you really BE if happiness, contentment, whatever, is just, like, a strategy? Or is it because a lot of people, maybe just a lot of women, feel like true happiness is in having partnership, and that it’s pretty impossible to be happy without a long term relationship? Am I a woman like that, just for asking the question?
The other weird part is that I am still sort of tired from last summer, all the good things that have happened and all the good things that are going to happen notwithstanding. I could think about Boys! for a couple of weeks but I couldn’t think about Relationship, and I still can’t, because I will fall immediately into a coma and hope to dream of perfect still sunny hours like the ones I had on Sunday after I got home from brunch but before I had to do my Sunday-evening chores, where I sat in a patch of sunlight on my freshly made bed with its awesome flower duvet cover, listening to music and looking through cookbooks and just letting time stretch out. There is no room for Relationship in those hours, there’s no room for issues or discussions or phone calls to ask if there’s anything I can pick up at the store. My one person heart only has space for awesomeness and friendliness and fun and happiness, and I’m sorry to admit it, but when I think of Relationship right now I immediately think of crying and being crazy and out of control and resentment and betrayal. Isn’t that awful?
I don’t see a way to change that, when I don’t have a lot of reason or motivation to pursue a Relationship, hence no way to gather any new information about what one might be like. I have sometimes wondered if I will remain alone out of contentedness and inertia. That feels pretty good right now, even if my brain won’t ever let me totally enjoy anything for very long without overanalyzing it and freaking myself out. And oh, what the hell, maybe I will have that rope ladder installed. Just in case I get tired of being happy.