I find myself in a true moment of singleness now and I didn’t fully feel it until the other night when I was hosting a party for all of my beautifully coupled friends. What do I mean by that- a moment of singleness- I’ve been attempting to maintain somewhat of a roster with men and I’ve learned the hard way that I really do just like having one coffee order, one go-to ice cream flavor, one trusty cocktail order. I challenged myself to stay open and say yes and I can truly say that in the past few months, I have been on the worst dates of my life. The most memorable was the guy who talked about his passion for The Bachelor for two hours and then tried to kiss me despite every obvious signal that I did not want to be kissed or touched by this person. I screamed like someone was throwing acid on me. How I had the stamina to keep dating after that one is beyond me. 

My friends have given up on learning names and will soon adopt a numbering system. The number isn’t that large but I was given the assignment to date, have some fun, and boy did I. I am now exhausted, my doe-eyed sparkle is dull and my will to please needs to be buried in a bowl of rice for a while if there’s any shot of me turning all of that back on again. 

Hosting a party alone was not devastating. It actually revived my dream of feeding a table full of friends I call family - under a purple sky. If I was to vision-board out my dream home, there would be an extraordinarily long table in prime sunset view and I don’t care about the rest. But part of that scene also might involve a significant other begging me to sit down and eat something and stop passively bullying everyone into validating my cooking.

There’s nothing wrong with my singleness, it’s become this friend that tells me to slow down and not rush out of desperation or wanting something or someone who isn’t ready for me. I wasn’t the sad girl at my own party, nothing was missing. I truly just needed someone to walk the dog around the block while I set the table. But there may have been a brief, unnoticed moment when I accidentally turned to a ghost, quickly realizing it was just a ghost of someone I made up in my Hollywood-influenced lady-brain. Everyone was full and happy, that’s all you can really ask for when hosting a dinner party. And for someone to help with the dishes when your feet might come right off with your shoes.  

Dating in New York in your thirties is musical chairs and just in case the music stops, you hope there’s an open chair for your well-sculpted butt, preferably next to someone with a nice smile, sense of humor and a good head of hair. If this were some sort of support group, this is the part where I’d say, “Hello, my name is Marina and I am not a casual dater.” I don’t play it cool or juggle multiple love interests gracefully. When you get married in your early twenties and then get divorced just before your metabolism starts slowing down forever, the idea of a healthy relationship gets skewed because the happy medium between keeping a sweatshirt and sending out a Christmas card together is a very large grey and when misinterpreted, someone is bound to call you crazy.

I personally don’t think I’m crazy, but in some versions of stories, I have to be- because that’s how the story goes, one person has to be right and the other one has to be some level of unhinged. If I wrote a list of all the cringey things I’ve ever misread that men have done, well, that could be its own book. If I revisit ghosts behind closed doors, there’s plenty that I misread and when I retrace each story, it’s hard not to wonder how could I have known. I’m my own rom-com movie character, yelling at myself through a screen, “DON’T GO OUT WITH HIM! HE HAS COMMITMENT ISSUES AND ANNOYING DIETARY RESTRICTIONS YOU CAN’T FIX!” I would relive every dent on my heart just to see and learn the parts that didn’t make the editor’s cut, the parts my blinders filtered out. 

Behind door number 1: A model that greek statues could have been sculpted from and a demeanor I called golden-retriever syndrome. He rarely booked a modeling gig and refused to let me pay for anything so our dates were home cooked meals and walks. Lots and lots of walks. Ten months worth to be exact. This wonderful human spent hours listening to me agonize over a job I hated and couldn’t tell me about his own demons because their names were too scary to be said aloud. He disappeared (completely ghosted) after those ten months and I was certain he would be my project and I his cheerleader forever. 

Behind door number 2: We met just before the pandemic and our panic got the best of us. We were quickly making plans to share custody of the puppy I’d someday get and we took turns walking between Brooklyn and Manhattan to see each other. At the peak of Covid, there were no Ubers or taxis, so what seemed like a lot of effort was actually just the result of having nothing but time. It all fizzled as intensely as it started, punctuated by a big question mark that was eventually answered by inaction. But when the whole world is blanketed in uncertainty, you get a pass for bowing out of a relationship, especially one that takes 45 minutes each way to walk to.

Behind door number three: He was the most fun I’ve ever had. He could convince me to do anything. Playing hooky from work to go ice skating, followed by hours of day drinking? Sure! Early-stage relationships on ice- presented by Bumble. He even took the dog out in a blizzard when I was four drinks in and couldn’t figure out how to tie my own shoes. He cooked me extravagant meals and made my world a little extra shiny; nevermind that he hopped a plane to Cabo on my birthday. I was allowed to meet friends and appear in the background of Zoom calls instead of army-crawling across the kitchen floor to make coffee on the slow mornings.  I wasn’t a secret, I met the friends and everything, and to me, that was just the sweetest thing. But he wasn’t interested in someone who was interested. He did his best with a well intentioned heart and was not ready to carry all that I came with because he couldn’t yet carry his own baggage. We do the best we can with all we have to give. 

And behind door number four: This one was harder for me to understand- maybe because it was all too familiar and I can’t help but slap myself for retaking tests I thought I passed. We met years ago at a wedding on the other side of the country. I was the wedding planner that day and was assured there were no decent single men in attendence. The universe is a tricky bitch and let us meet again in New York years later. He quickly had a toothbrush at my apartment. (Keeping a toothbrush in your apartment is probably good for one more date for every dollar spent on said toothbrush.) It was his idea to use the fire pits on my rooftop to make s’mores so I couldn’t help but feel a teeny tiny bit melancholy roasting double the marshmallows for just little ol’ me at last weekend’s party. 

Men, teach me something I don’t know about dating. I’m still new to this and it’s wrong of me to be the person who writes a shitty draft in my brain about someone just because our storylines don’t match up nicely. There will come a time when my bar isn’t so low and I don’t go weak in the knees just because a man commits to making a plan, any plan, or does what some might call literally the bare minimum. 

It’s that bare minimum that I often misread and get carried away with. No one warns you that when you get a puppy as a single woman, there are men who will woo you just to be around a puppy.

If you’ve made it this far through this post and are now cringing on my behalf, the point of me sharing all of this isn’t just to spill tea or anonymously light anyone on fire who may read this. I have three single friends- just three. And every single one of us can trade war stories about dating in this wild city of hot-date musical chairs. Our stories have different cringe factors but end with the same lesson in grace, patience and the fact that not everyone is for you and that’s a blessing. Boredom and loneliness are terrible frenemies of ours but investing in someone who isn’t ready for you is like planning your own surprise party- you know what happens in the end and it’s all very anticlimactic but the buildup sure was fun. 

I never understood the saying “good grief.” What a paradox. It means: an exclamation of irritation, frustration, or surprise. In the context of these brief almost-romances, frustration is totally valid but the surprise element lessens the more you snap at your ego with resilient little rubber bands. And there is such a thing as good grief -  it’s the name of the feeling we feel for these short lived attachments. 

So for every misread action I magnified x10, every toothbrush I proudly kept in my apartment, every well intentioned copout, I can keep playing the largest, most painstaking game of musical chairs. You just need one chair to land on and what a relief it is to see it waiting for you when the room goes quiet.