Only Love (and Books) Can Break Your Heart
Me, looking out over the wide world of dating possibilities. Just kidding. This is me, doing stuff I wouldn’t have been able to do if I was still dating some of the guys I’ve been involved with.
I stumbled into the hopeless wasteland that is dating as a 30-something single mom over four years ago, by choice. I was full of innocent hope and the certainty that by the following year, I’d have a gorgeous, kind, intelligent man sitting next to me by the Christmas tree. The conclusion I keep coming back to since then is that I’d love to have a partner, but I’d rather be alone than with the wrong person. The life I’ve built since the end of my marriage is too beautiful and free to let an un-self-actualized man-child waltz in and ruin. But still,…there is the human desire to be connected, which drives me back to hope over and over again. And necessarily in 2022, that includes online dating.
I recently came across a woman on TikTok who has turned her online dating life into “The Dating Hunger Games,” and it made me feel so much less alone (check out @danaalyss). The online dating sagas I’ve been through have run the gamut from bewilderingly laughable to slightly miserable to mildly hellish, and while I wish others didn’t have to go through that, it’s nice to know I’m not the only one. This woman posts bits of messages, plays the Capitol’s music while she lists the fallen, and has viewers ‘sponsor’ tributes in the comments. I was up in the middle of the night the other night, struggling with a recent bout of insomnia, and as I watched her posts I thought, It must help to do it like that. It must help the whole process feel less pointless. Maybe it makes it a little easier to feel like it isn’t personal each time some emotionally-stunted dude ghosts her, to be able to message him that his time in the Dating Hunger Games has come to an end and that the odds were most definitely NOT in his favor. I thought, I’m not good at talking on camera, but I can write.
Besides, my therapist has been encouraging me to blog about dating for a while now. So as you’re reading what follows, just remember, it’s basically medically recommended. You know, for my health.
Online dating sucks. Let’s not beat around the bush. Everyone I’ve talked to, regardless of gender, agrees on this point. You dream of love like in a Jane Austen novel or Love Actually (sigh, Colin Firth), and instead you get the dude who answers your messages in one-word responses, the guy who asks you in his opening line if you’re “freaky as shit,” and the fellow who expects you to be his indentured servant. Still, online dating is a necessary evil when you’re a busy grown-up and the pool of single people around you is small. At this point (over 4 years after the end of my marriage), I know what I’m looking for and what a red flag looks like. But those things are harder to suss out online, so you have to read between the lines.
In fact, I was thinking the other day as I browsed the aisles of Barnes and Nobles to take advantage of their post-Christmas sale, that dating is a lot like picking out a book to read.
It’s ideal if you have someone recommending a book or a date to you—that means a third party you know has some inside information. However, you also have to be careful of who’s doing the recommending. With book recommendations, you need to know if they like the same genres and types of books as you, if their tastes are as discerning as yours or if they’ll love absolutely anything with a cover and pages that they pick up. With dating recommendations, you ideally want the recommender to have an idea how the recommendee behaves in a dating scenario. I once recommended an acquaintance to a friend, and the acquaintance turned out to be very abusive in romantic situations (this was also before I was so great with the whole red-flag thing). Recently, I had a mutual friend tell me his good buddy that I met online was a truly wonderful guy. The truly wonderful guy subsequently ghosted me before our second date for no apparent reason. Also, you want to know if the recommender is the sort who thinks everyone is a Simply Lovely Person, or if they are they discerning enough to know when someone is a manipulative asshole.
Back to the analogy. Online dating is like picking up a book you just came across in the bookstore without ever having heard of it or its author before. You have no clue what you’ll get.
You come across a book. Maybe the cover (dating profile picture) catches your eye. We all know what you shouldn’t judge a book by. It might be very appealing on the outside and complete trash inside (I’m looking at you, Fifty Shades of Gray). There is something to be said for being attracted to someone, even if you know attraction can grow over time.
You read the summary on the back of the book—their bio.
Let’s say you’ve picked the book up. How much time are you going to invest into getting to know this person—I mean, book? Maybe you read the first page to see if you like the writing style—you message the person. Maybe you take it home.
You start to read. You start to learn the landscape, the characters in their life, hope to get some flashbacks to moments in their past that shaped them as a person. Some books throw you straight into the nitty-gritty action. Some people take forever to get to the plot and stick to meaningless small talk. There are a lot of unreliable narrators.
It all takes time, though, and attention. These days, I’ve found my patience for books and for men is much shorter than it used to be. If a book isn’t holding my attention, capturing my imagination, stirring my emotions, making me think, I’m much more likely to not finish it, where I used to try to press on regardless. My time is too short to waste on books or men that aren’t the right fit. And when you’re not sure if it’s right or not, how far do you get into the story before you put it down and have to start all over again with a new book? That answer is becoming a shorter and shorter span of time.
That’s where the analogy ends, of course, because the book can’t also decide to set YOU down. It can’t ghost you, or tell you that you’re not the right reader for it, or force you to return it to the library unfinished because the more serious its feelings get for you, the more uncomfortable it is with a long-term relationship (classic avoidant attachment style is not a thing for a book). It can’t hold you back from pursuing your dreams, expect you to perform all the household tasks and childcare while it builds its career and ignores you, emotionally abuse you, expect you to be its therapist while you carry its emotional baggage for it (well, maybe this one a little bit—*cough, cough, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemmingway, The Grapes of Wrath, The Jungle—basically my entire eleventh grade English curriculum), make you wonder if it’s seeing other readers behind your back, or hurt your child. A book won’t sense that you’re getting attached and go from ardently pursuing you to running the other direction. It won’t ask for a picture of your ass to show its friends. It won’t leave you guessing as to whether you’re really reading it or “just talking.” A book can’t interrupt or speak over you, run rampant over your boundaries, or kiss you when you don’t want to be kissed. To be fair, it CAN disappoint you, it can make you feel like it didn’t hold up its end of the bargain or deliver what it promised, it can even make you cry. A book CAN break your heart. But a book can’t abandon, betray, or assault you the way a man can.
Annnnd I seem to have written myself into a bit of a corner here. I think I just convinced myself that books are better companions than men, so maybe I’ll just end the blog here and go read. At least for now. In the end, I can’t seem to banish the hope that someday I’ll find someone who wants to read my book as much as I want to read theirs.
**Men have done all of the things I listed above to me and more. Sure, it’s not all men. Sure, some women are jerks too. But there is a disturbingly high percentage of men that are assholes to women. Case in point: What man has to text his friends before every date with someone new to let them know where he’ll be and with whom, in case he gets kidnapped or murdered? As a woman, that’s just one little part of the wreck that is the dating scene for those of us who identify as female.