Much of my time is spent writing about love. Thinking about love. Being in love. But a single perspective is never enough to understand an experience. So for the past few weeks I have been surveying and interviewing the people around me, those I know well and those I don’t, in the hopes of gleaning an understanding which can inform us all. This week: we look at the singles.
All quotes and descriptions are factual and real, because what’s the point of something like this, otherwise? Names are the only things changed to protect anonymity and seek authenticity.
The heart is a lonely hunter. Shoutout Carson McCullers, but I haven’t read that book and Wikipedia says that it doesn’t have much to do with anything here. I mean the phrase literally — we are all searching desperately for love and companionship, it seems, but none of us seem to have enough of it to give out. What to do about this great lacking?
When I ask a stranger if they’re single, most understand this as a pick-up line of sorts, like I’m trying to see if there’s a target available for me to shoot my shot at. Some smile, some give me a once-over, others flinch and retreat into themselves a little. “What do you think?” a smiling Colombian woman half my height responded, still bobbing to the beat of the DJ reigning over us at the outdoor festival. “Do you want me to be?” After the interview I DMed her out of curiosity and she left me on read.
That’s certainly one problem of dating in modern New York: the chase is too fun. Few seem to want to commit to any one option, they don’t want to be the one saying yes or no. “I’m kind of in something right now, but it’s casual,” Mary May told me. She had green eyes and wore a green dress and she gave me a cigarette from a green carton of Newports, but it wasn’t a Newport, I soon tasted. When I asked her why she kept new cigs in old cartons — seems like a lot of work — she said, “There’s just something about a familiar thing I like to hold onto.” When I asked if that’s why she was sticking around in her situationship despite, she gave me a smile, but not an answer.
The situationship: impetus of many a villain origin story these days. It seems to me that one is involved in such an arrangement typically because of lopsided attachment: one wants more, the other wants less. Why stick around? These days many of us are touch-starved and largely unsatisfied with the breadth or depth of our social circles. Some intimacy is better than nothing… until. “I finally cut him off when I found out he was still hooking up with his ex,” Rosa confided. Rosa has just finished a MFA in the spring and spoke to me on the phone on the way back from a weekend spent in the Hamptons. Despite never being in a committed relationship, she felt quite experienced about love. “It only took a damn year for me to figure out. He was really good at being so terrible!”
“Oh, I love a good situationship,” Val told me, from the other end of the issue. We had been eyeing each other across the dancefloor under the Public and, I confess, this time I asked the interview questions as a sort of pick-up line. It didn’t work: at first Val said she had a boyfriend, then after a few questions she admitted it was really a situationship. Her partner in debauchery was happily (?) married. Her last not-boyfriend had been an illegal immigrant and couldn’t commit because he was afraid of getting unceremoniously deported, which did end up happening, but only after she’d moved on to Mr. Taken. “They’re just so much fun. And so easy. We don’t have to bother meeting each others’ parents or best friends. We don’t even have to be emotionally connected. That’s what I’ve got my own friends for. All we have to do is be in love, forbidden love, which is the best kind!”
On the topic of The Forbidden: how do singles get their needs met? When asked over email, Cameron complained about his “physical yearning” for touch. The concept of dehumanization came up a lot here, from everyone, and the common denominator seems to be: men. “I want to touch and be touched, but when I let just any man in, they tend to treat me like a breathing fleshlight,” M. said at Rintintin. “No thanks.” Cameron likes men too, and it doesn’t seem much better on his side of things. “Good luck trying to make any sort of connection on Grindr. You’ll get blocked most likely. Or just straight up told to send hole pics.” Over half of the people I’ve interviewed, though, have been single for much longer than they’ve been celibate. Few of them seemed happy about that.
I thought, at first, there was a simple solution for this problem: why not invest more in our friends? What’s wrong with a cheeky cuddle or kiss with someone you already know and trust? “I can’t do that, because as soon as I get any sort of extra attention from a man, I’m like, OK, this is my husband now,” D. told me at the roof of Le Bain. We laughed, but she was dead serious. “I can only kiss friends that I know have no sexual attraction towards me,” another D. added, at the pool party. “Otherwise it gets weird very fast.” She didn’t have much of an answer about what weird means, beyond a nebulous “feelings”. But what is there to do without feelings? Can they be avoided? “I don’t know,” she answered, “but I know that I’m trying to save some of those feelings for a boyfriend.”
There’s layers upon layers to unpack about this particular phenomenon. Men are unequivocally against this with their male friends, regardless of whether or not they’re gay. Seems you’re either playing with homophobia or opening a door for messy meaningless sex. Only one woman I asked about kissing their girlfriends was worried about this, but she admitted this was due to some sexual trauma sustained from a butch bully in middle school. On the topic of intergender friendly relations, almost everyone seemed to say they’d rather abstain in the name of seeking their One.
The One: urban legend or scarce nugget of gold? The One, AKA The Soulmate, The Soul Tie, The Imprint, The Twin Flame. “I’m not actively looking for mine now, but I think they will find me somehow,” R. said in their Google form survey answer. R. is an artist that never goes outside. R. doesn’t know how The One will find them, and R. has only ever felt platonic love for friends. But R. has faith and a big heart and a passion for red lipstick.
If I may be permitted to speak personally on this matter, I have to say, I’ve been convinced that every single person I ever dated was my One. Of course, every single time I have been wrong. Once I likened this to the confidence of a professional darts player. You have to be absolutely convinced you’re going to hit the bullseye every single time, or you’re definitely going to miss. Deep down you know it’s impossible to be right every time. But the conviction has to be there. Then you can accept reality if it appears — mostly, you’ll be pleasantly surprised with how fantastic you can make it, if you work hard enough.
My therapist thinks otherwise. When I asked her take on it, she gave a surprised blink, then an amused grin. (I always surprise her, I’m sure that’s why I’m her favorite client and I’m perfectly normal for thinking this is true and something I should be proud of.) “Have I ever been in love? Or am I actively in love right now? Actually, don’t answer that, it doesn’t really matter, does it? I think falling in love is like climbing Mt. Everest. There’s really only the first time. You can go back up and down as much as you like, but it’s never the same, you never really forget that first time.” As usual, I hope she’s wrong and I fear that she’s right.
Some of us out here don’t even believe in the idea of ~The One~. “I’ve never been in love, but I fall in lust every single day,” Phil told me outside of Wiggle Room. I’ve known P. for years now: while it’s true, I’ve never seen him be in love, and he does have hungry wandering eyes, I catch him some moments looking off wistfully to someone I can’t see, maybe someone in his past. Over drinks at Cafe Mogador, G. told me about her recent breakup with her partner of six years. “We both thought we’d be together forever, and I guess I still think that, sometimes.” Even so, G. was the one to break up the relationship. “I just felt… trapped, you know? Like I couldn’t live with myself if I stopped looking now. There’s more for me out there, I can feel it.”
What if there is? So we all seem to wonder. Yet at the same time: What if I can’t do any better, and I end up having to settle? From my standpoint as a clinician, it seems like a future-oriented fog of anxiety has settled over all of us, and we sabotage our todays with worries about an unhappy tomorrow. But none of us know how things will work out in the end. Even when we make marriage vows, the best we can do is hope.
One thing’s for certain: we are all lonely. We all think dating in New York is a lamentable, radioactive experience that even God couldn’t have seen coming in antiquity. We all mourn the organic and spontaneous connection, we are all open to the idea of flirting with someone whose paths we just happen to cross… but we all tend to listen to music on the train or in the grocery store, and we all fail to attend big occasions with unfamiliar faces as much as we should. We’re all thinking of some new activity we could be exploring, but none of us have taken that big first step just yet. For now, we’re all just looking, and waiting, and… hating it!
After all this, if you’re anything like me, you may be asking: why? Why are all of these interesting people still single? Most told me: “It’s not my choice. I just haven’t found someone I want to invest in yet.” There were of course other answers: “focused on myself right now”, “actively trying to be single for a while for once”, “I am passive when it comes to love”. Few were brave enough to admit that their current search for love is largely masking a desire for validation. “I just love to see that ‘99+’ over my Tinder likes. I’m probably not even going to match with any of them,” L. told me, leaning back over her chair at Cafe Select, grinning broadly. As she does so, I catch a group of guys across the terrace staring hungry at her neck, like a pack of circling vultures.
That night, L. was wearing a brown silk dress only a shade away from the color of her skin. As I trawl the trenches I notice that singles tend to have a uniform: they emphasize their identity, sticking to feminine or masculine silhouettes as applicable. They aren’t afraid to show a little more skin than one would expect. There are lots of bared midriffs this season. We’re all aware of a man’s tells: the dangly earrings, gold-plated rings and chains, really baggy jeans back in style. Being ran through at least means you’re willing to go on the run, right? But do our aesthetic mating calls do more harm than good? “I definitely would say I dress like I want a man,” Christie told me outside of Tompkins Square Park. “But you know what? It never works. I get more attention when I dress like I’m Amish.” If you’re interested, when I stopped her, she was wearing a tank top, booty shorts, and milk-white cowgirl boots. Very chic, very inviting, in my opinion.
By now you may also be saying to yourself: OK, I understand, lots of people can relate to the frustrating loneliness I feel. Maybe there are even more people willing to date me than I thought. So where are they? How do I meet these eligible candidates? I asked my interviewees about this, and surprisingly, no one seems to have a clear answer. (I blame the death of the third space.) Lots of men at the club said they’d be reluctant to seriously date someone they found at the club. Phil said he’s always open to mingle at bars. G. said yoga classes and gyms are great places to find women — then, after a moment and a chuckle, she walked it back. “That’s actually such a bad idea. Don’t write that down.” Ubiquitously we are all frustrated with dating apps. “I’ve never known anybody that’s gotten anything serious or meaningful from an app,” D. answered, with quite a bit of forceful energy. “Not ever. Not one person.”
I’m on a bit of a mission to make this mess easier for all. It doesn’t have to be this way, we make it this way, every single one of us. So I asked all of my interviewees what kind of advice they’d give to their target audience. Funny enough, most people gave the same largely useless platitude: “Go with the flow!” A few muscular men (predictably?) said women should try to be “more feminine” to attract them better. Some women told me men should put more effort into planning dates and being romantic; others wished men would cut to the chase with their intentions and stop fooling around with dates which waste everyone’s time. Long story short, everyone’s advice contradicts someone else’s’.
I admit I saw this result coming. The answer is that there is no one answer, just as there is no common definition of love or what a relationship looks like.
So, what to do? I say: do you! Keep going outside, keep talking to attractive strangers, keep going on dates, keep taking chances. If you’ve been paying attention, I met almost everyone in this article at a different place or a different medium. You have to try new things, new places, new experiences! Leave your phone in your pocket. Surprise yourself. Compliment someone that draws your eye. Tell your crush you want to get to know them better. Show more skin. Hold eye contact. Ask a question to the person next to you. Go in for the kiss!
It’s infinitely better to have tried and missed than to regret every trying at all. You never know how it’ll go, who you’ll meet, where the future will take you. Give it a try, and if it doesn’t work, maybe consider coming to the Hot Literati event coming up in NYC…!
Streets are saying there’s going to be a fire DJ…
Next week, I approach this topic from the perspective of people in couples. If you or someone you know is in a relationship and would like to consent to answering some of my questions on the manner, please email me and we will be in touch. Reach me at “scvasya AT gmail DOT com”.
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