“He’ll Be Worth What I’ve Been Through” Isn’t A Dating Strategy
Single women don’t have to live in service of someday.
I used to live in hell. Cozy place, great amenities. For me, hell was a decade of “looking,” and if you’re currently single over the age of about 29 or so, you know full well what I mean by looking. From my late 20s to mid-30s, if I was waiting in a line or watching television, I was also swiping through hundreds of (the same) faces each day, searching for my husband. In ten years of looking, I never found him, I never even found one relationship at all. It’s not so much that I didn’t find what I was looking for, because now I’m able to reflect on this time through a lens of logic and see how dating culture was never crafted for my success — just the opposite — but rather it’s that I found so much badness instead.
There’s such comfort to me in the fact that the experience of singlehood is a great unifier. I don’t have to regale this community with “horror stories” in order for you to “get it” like we’re at dinner and I’m having marriage trouble and I need you to remind me of how shitty things are on the other side. All I have to do with you is say the word “dating” and you’ve already poured me a wine and baked me a scone. The horror stories aren’t the exception anymore. They’re the rule, and the “good” stories are often the ones you never hear, because…
