Kill the jealousy. Save the singles.

The timing of this is on purpose. As of this week, we are entering prime Comparison Season, also known as the holidays. If you are single, and you have access to a cellular telephone, you’re about to be awash in a sea of couple content—with matching pajamas, for extra spice. This year, I’d like us all to challenge ourselves to not let this make us feel like shit. This year, I’m hoping for prevention instead of a cure, if you get me.

A common thread in the single community (a space I’ve dwelled within for 13 years like some sort of folklorish Lady of the Lake), is consuming information that pertains to other people, and and allowing that information to have an impact on us as singles—even though it has nothing to do with us at all. We allow what other people have to reflect back to us what we don’t have. …

Honestly, this is an opportunity.

Alright, I did it. I canceled my Thanksgiving. Next week, instead of heading north on a train to join my beloved friend family in their cozy real house with a basement and an attic and everything, I’ll be home in my one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, the same place I’ve been since fucking March. I won’t be participating in a ridiculous trip to the grocery store that will almost certainly require two carts, no popping in to see the sweet, albeit drunk proprietors of the local wine shop. No cooking together in a newly remodeled kitchen, no group walk through the woods to work up an appetite. None of it will happen, I won’t be doing anything that I want to do, nothing I’ve been looking forward to, instead I’ll just be going down a new, uncharted solo-Thanksgiving road, building the frame of the car as I drive it. …

We never grew out of hating blank space.

Said another, perhaps more accurate way: Posters damaged paint with scotch tape so that gallery walls could carefully nail it. I’m speaking of course about the origins of our home decor tendencies, and in my view, Generation Cover-Your-Walls-In-Tiger Beat grew up to become Gallery Wall Nation. Let’s discuss.

Posters, for those of you who have only lived with the finest of framed artwork, are flimsy pieces of paper ranging in size from 8x10 to roughly the length of a bedsheet that we plastered all over all our bedrooms as teens via the assistance of tape, tacks, or that weird tacky goo we’d steal from school. Gallery walls, by contrast, are meticulously planned, measured, and installed features that now serve as the backgrounds to our professional Zooms. …

Tis the season to sparkle safely.

Look, we’re consumed by complete terror and a sense of impending doom, but we don’t have to dress like it. And while a global pandemic might be keeping us all away from our loved ones and down in our basements counting remaining rolls of toilet paper more than we’d like, that doesn’t mean we can’t completely pretend everything’s fine by wearing a glittering coat to conduct our regular business. …

It’s that thing, where guys you almost dated don’t actually want to speak to you, but still watch every single goddamned one of your Instagram stories.

This is about social media, culture, and the dynamics of people trying to meet their partners. But more than any of those things, it’s about self worth. I’m going to talk about how “window shopping” on social media, and the fact that we allow it to happen, are indicative of a self worth problem perpetuated by modern dating culture. I’m also going to tell you how to wash your life clean of window shoppers for fucking ever.

What is window shopping?

Window shopping is a term I use for those dudes you almost dated but didn’t really but kind of talked to for awhile or maybe got drinks with late one night because he was already out with friends so it was a “group thing” and he didn’t feel threatened or cornered by the idea of an actual date because he doesn’t actually want to date just one woman why would he when online dating is his own personal buffet of sex and attention that he never has to pay for? …

Gifts! That we give ourselves! What a concept!

Last year, I started a thing. A gift guide for single women full of gifts that aren’t sad consolation prizes that assume our lives are inherently shittier than everyone else’s. My gift guide assumed our lives were just as good. (Actually better, that was just me trying to be nice.)

Do a quick search for “gifts for single women.” It’s either incredibly degrading “single and ready to mingle!” ballyhoo, things related to wine, or items with phrases printed on them that really make you sad about the societal opinion of women who simply sleep by themselves—case in point this journal that says “freak out and throw stuff.” I mean honestly can we stop associating singlehood with instability? …

You remember.

First of all, who has coins? I can wave my phone over a cash register like I’m in the cafeteria at Hogwarts and pay for everything from coffee to cat food, coins aren’t really a thing that happens anymore. In fact, they’re a farcical nuisance—and I mean this sincerely. I have a jar full of coins sitting in my home that’s been there for eight years. I have no idea what to do with it and it just keeps going from apartment to apartment with me increasing the weight and cost of my moving fees. …

A country shifts its setting from horrified to happiness, for the first time in a long damn while.

Four years is a long time to be scared. It’s also a long time to be ashamed, aghast, angry, frustrated, and deeply sad. And while we all kind of “knew” all week, we’d been so trained to expect (and receive) the worst that we genuinely needed it said officially, and out loud. Donald Trump lost re-election, we can come out now. And my god, we did.

After the first texts, I went to my window. Say what you will about the internet, it allows good news to travel fast. Thirty seconds later, my neighborhood was going absolutely apeshit—congratulating each other, strangers all, with cheers and honks and banging pots and pans out of windows. I ran to my roof for a bird’s ear view of Brooklyn, not content to simply sob out my own window. I spent 45 minutes standing there, alone, with a bottle of champagne in my hand, listening to the sound of celebration that had no center, and no end. We blanketed a city with communal joy. I’ve never heard or felt anything like it, and I won’t forget it as long as I live. Because I won’t be able to forget the special hell that came before it, either. …