I don’t want a boyfriend but a husband would be nice

It came to my attention that I should be scouting for a mate before I knew what any of those words even meant.

I began to twist the stems from my apple to the tune of the alphabet at a very young age. Whichever letter you say as the stem snaps off is the first initial of your future husband, I learned. My stem would inevitably snap at Q or some other inconvenient letter, and I’d sit in a huff about the rarity of such a rune. Now I am older and I know this is nothing but an old wives’ tale, but I still find myself looking for a Quentin or a Quincy. Not making it past the first date with a Quinn hurt more than it should have.

So however antithetical to my undisguised misandry, in the interest of honesty I confess: I am a hopeless romantic. I like being loved, and being in love, and I like loving people who are in love with me. Which is to say I find myself enjoying the most human of faculties possible.

Love is what makes the world go ‘round. Or so they say. It’s the subject of nearly every song ever written, and the center of the greatest stories ever told. It’s as sweet as it is sour and is a valid excuse for almost any unreasonable action. True love is intoxicating. Heartbreak is devastating. If love takes form in manic fervor, so be it.

Somewhere in between silly games that I still find myself playing, and first developd crushes beginning shortly thereafter, I’ve developed a compulsive desire to live out long held fantasies. These days, I might imagine myself spending an afternoon at the Prado on a Sunday -- probably wearing a bitchin’ leather jacket, or maybe something really cool and European -- and, unfailingly, stumbling into a Chalamet lookalike that is immediately taken with me, and I with him. Settings and storylines vary but the ending is always the same.

For most of my life, I’ve been under the impression that a romantic partner is just the thing I need to complete me, and to make this thing called my heart whole again (if it ever was in the first place). Needless to say, this thinking easily becomes fatal.

I’ve held court with female friends, acquaintances, and coexistent bathroom attendants, turning over wounds of love to no avail. Any debate, psychoanalysis, or otherwise futile dissection to get to the bottom of what exactly went wrong with whoever inevitably resigns itself to perpetual circularity. It doesn’t take long before self worth becomes dependent on external validation, and attention is currency hard won and much too appreciated.

Countless hours of introspection have ensued. What is this obsessive compulsion I’ve developed? Does it have to do with my relationship with my father? My relationship with my mother? Does it have to do with patriarchy, the way I’ve been socialized as a woman? Or am I over-analyzing my feelings again? None of them have ever quite gotten me anywhere.

I could believe this is a problem singularly my own, except that I’ve been on the listening end of just as many conversations with other random women in club bathrooms as well. And however many times we talk about it, the issues still seem to repeat themselves.

Suffice to say, any sage advice that one must love themselves before they can love another grows boring and tired, whether I’m telling someone or being told. My eyes should be stuck in the back of my head from rolling them.

Loving yourself is courageous. Being who you are takes guts. But I think it’s easier than we give it credit for. Figuring out who you are means that you have to spend time getting to know yourself. A lot of us haven’t given ourselves the grace to do that.

After a decade of bouncing between fleeting crushes, entanglements maxing out at date number three, and relationships that could’ve been but never were, I’ve realized that I often mistake the idea of being in love for the real thing. More often than not, after spending any actual real time with someone I’ve thought I was in love with, I’ve realized I don’t even like them. It was the excitement that someone liked me that I was infatuated with.

If I think of my husband, and if life plays out on the course that it's meant to and I do have a husband floating around somewhere, then there are certain traits that I know my husband has. He’s someone with a great sense of humor. He’s a creative, curious, well-read and cultured, energetic, goal-oriented, and ambitious person like me. Then, am I just describing myself?

Self-help syndicates proffer that to idealize someone is to project oneself onto an unsuspectig stranger. It so happens that the further I am from someone, the more I like them. Any boyfriend I’ve ever wished for has never existed. He was really just me all along. It’s about time I’ve taken that for what it is.

I think I want to take dating for what it is. Which is: not the end of the world, or the beginning of one either.

Dating, unless serious, is entirely unserious. If taken unseriously enough, it can be incredibly fun. To avoid falling over myself unless it is someone that I really genuinely fall for, is to invite more enjoyment into my life.

I asked a friend on a recent girls trip, would we really be having this much fun if we had boyfriends? We might enjoy dinner dates or texts in the morning, but what of random make out sessions with strangers, or the far more fruitful time spent with the people in your life that love you unconditionally instead.

What a shame it is to be a young woman who has so much love to give, who has a profound affection for her family, friends, or common strangers, and to not channel some of that and to appreciate all of that as a love more pure, more strong, and more righteous than any average looking white man with sub-par hygiene ever will.

I truly do believe there is a lid for even the most crooked of pots. Until then, I'll be content to let the steam rise.

FROM THE HOT LITERATI UNIVERSE

• FILM CLUB ♡ If you’re in New York, join us for the next irl film club. We’re releasing tickets to our paid Substack subscribers tonight. We’ll be watching The Truman Show and meeting next Tuesday, December 10th.

• BOOK CLUB ♡ Thank you to all who participated in Frankenstein. Still working on uploading the audios. Delightful conversations. Will take a couple of weeks off and then announce the next book.