But I’m still single, and that seems to confuse people.
Most people are not overwhelmed by this confusion. They say little more than, “huh.” Maybe even a “you’ll find someone one day.” Sometimes they try to figure out why I’m still single. Why no one is lining up at my door, as they say. I let them do their calculations with little interest in their results. I already know the answer. And it keeps me awake at night.
My grandfather cannot grasp my perpetual state of singledom. One day last week, I was scrubbing mouse crap off of a hardwood floor in a room that will soon be my bedroom. I’d spent the whole day sorting, trashing, recycling, re-storing elsewhere years worth of stuff. Then, once everything was off of the floor, my mother and I scrubbed the floor. Mice had, at some point, taken over the room. My brother had left bags of blue paintball pellets in the room. Apparently, paintball pellets are filled with vegetable oil. Also apparently, mice like vegetable oil. So the floor was coated in mouse urine and tiny specks of blue.
I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the floor to a shine when my grandfather walked into the room. “You’re really cleaning house up here!” he said.
“Yep,” I huffed between scrubs. My mom grunted a sound of agreement.
“Well, Barb and I are going out to dinner, and I wanted to see if you wanted to join.” Barb is my 88 year old grandfather’s girlfriend, by the way.
“I’m not sure,” my mom says, while she pauses for a much-needed break. “There’s pasta salad in the fridge, but we can eat that tomorrow.”
“I can’t go,” I said over my shoulder. “I’m going out tonight.”
“Oh? Are you going out with a boyfriend tonight?” my grandfather asked. I rolled my eyes, an urge I usually fight, but since my back was to him it was safe.
“No. I’m going to see some friends play in their band.”
“Well, you should get yourself a boyfriend.” My scrubbing grew more furious.
“Why, Pop-pop? Why do I need a boyfriend?”
“Because you need to be getting married and having kids!” I laughed. Loudly.
“That’s not why she needs to get a boyfriend,” my mother interjected. “It would be nice for her to have a boyfriend so she’s got someone to go to the movies with her. But she’ll get married when she gets married. There’s no rush.”
That was the end of that conversation. Though, it wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last. In the meantime, I’m left with me. Wondering why me is still single.
It’s because I’m afraid. Or possibly weary. Either way, I’ve discovered that I’ve stopped trying. Or rather, never started trying again.
The pattern in my life is a strong one: they leave me for someone else. They date me because it is convenient. They continue to date me while it is convenient. And then, when it is suddenly more convenient to date someone else, they leave me. For her. And “her” is never me.
I am never the one they choose.
This has manifested into a fear that I push the guys I date into dating me when they didn’t want to in the first place. I don’t know if this is true, and it probably isn’t, but I believe that it is true, and that’s enough to paralyze.
My latest ex-boyfriend only solidified this fear. We dated for two years. Every time we broke up, he ended up begging for me to come back. He knew about my fears, and as is his MO, he did the worst thing he could do. He dumped me for someone else and then lied about it.
I’ve, for the most part, left that break up to history. Working through it, I talked to those who were close to me or those who asked me. I’m ready to open up now. I’m ready to explore what happened and how it’s affected me. Writing is, after all, my therapy. Much cheaper than the alternatives, really.
So I’m going to tell what is important, skipping out on minute or revealing details.
First of all, the guy before my last boyfriend was like something out of a movie. A crappy movie. He broke up with his girlfriend, started dating me, refused to end things when I offered to do so (as I sensed he wasn’t fully interested), and then proceeded to get back together with his ex-girlfriend. Without telling me. Me who had a key to his place. Me who thought it would be a good idea one early Friday morning to drop off some stuff I thought he needed to have. Me who will never be able to forget the look on his face when I walked in on them.
So I closed that chapter of my life and opened a new one with Latest Boyfriend. Our relationship started in Italy. How romantic. And what a cliché.
Ahh, well. The important part is this. In May, I moved Latest Boyfriend to New York with a quick stop in Washington D.C. for a job interview. Latest Boyfriend does not have a driver’s license, so I did all the driving. Soon after, Latest Boyfriend got the job in D.C., so I again packed my car with his stuff and moved him.
D.C., by the way, is where Latest Boyfriend’s ex girlfriend lived. The one who tortured him for a year, then dumped him and left him a depressed shell of a human. The one whom he swore he would never be so stupid to date ever again but insisted he must be friends with.
You can see where this is going, I’m sure. A month and a half after I helped him move to the city where his ex-girlfriend lived, he suddenly woke up one morning knowing that “it was over.” Yes. Suddenly.
Suddenly he “couldn’t do this” to me anymore. Suddenly, I was no longer convenient.
He swore there was no one else. He swore.
In September, a month or so later, I received an email explaining to me that now-ex Latest Boyfriend was going to take his ex-girlfriend to a fancy event, but not to worry because it was just coincidence that it was a fancy event and that it was nothing special and meant nothing to him. He emailed that to me on the day of the event. An event I didn’t even know about.
That email made me cut off all communication with him. I did it for reasons that aren’t incredibly important to this story, but aren’t probably what you’re thinking at first. What’s important is that I heard nothing about him until early January.
I was feeling better. I was feeling strong. I was feeling like it was time to let him back into my life. Try a friendship and whatnot. So I consulted a friend over the matter. The matter turned out to be that he had been dating his ex-girlfriend since early September – the fancy event that was supposedly not fancy was in fact a date. The date to win her back, to be more specific. I don’t know how he defines “special,” but I can’t imagine how that isn’t.
Wounds split open. All of them. Not just the ones he’d caused. All of them.
I’d been convenient again. Ms. Convenient for two years. Ms. Convenient who puts her whole heart into every guy who finds her true to her name and lets him take another chunk out of her ability to trust and care every time.
And here I am. Six months after the wounds were torn open again.
I want to say the wounds are healed. I don’t feel broken anymore. I feel strong. I feel independent.
I also feel lonely. But more importantly, scared. I avert my eyes when a guy looks in my direction. And I miss all evidence of any flirtation. It’s as if any guy I’m even mildly interested in suddenly has the plague.
You see, I do not want to yet again be guilty of forcing a guy into dating me. I do not want to construct my own demise again. So I can’t possibly be healed yet. But healing, I think, will not come from me being alone.
So. Why am I still single? Because I cannot control what other people do. And without a concrete “please let me take you out on a date because I like you,” I will doubt that anything is happening. If you were wondering, “please let me take you out on a date because I like you” has happened once in my life. Once. A long time ago. I wouldn’t even know how to prepare for a date, let alone actually go on one.
And so I bury myself in my career, the one thing I can control. The one thing I can pour my heart and soul into and not fear that I will become the left behind. The convenient. The in the meantime.
And so is my conundrum. I’m still broken because I’m afraid of the very thing I need to heal. The very thing I would very much like to have. The very thing I am accidentally and pathologically avoiding instigating. Which means that my strategy to the dating game is one of waiting. Which is a terrible strategy, especially when your grandfather wants to know why you’re 27 years old and not yet married and popping out babies.
