Opposite Paths To Love

I am in the twilight hour of the pandemic, or rather 'civil twilight', which is the in-between hour of the sun not quite being up. I have suffered through a month of dark winter, and a vaccine is on the horizon, and I am living alone and single. By certain measures, this would count as the hardest season of my life. Were I not inclined to be proactive, I would have sunk into full hermitude and lost my mind a while ago.

Instead I have tied a metaphorical carrot to a proverbial string, making plans with one friend at a time to keep my sanity intact. I reach out to each of them repeatedly, even when they have long forgotten just how desperately I need the simple conversation and physical contact that they give me. Socially, I am living on bread crumbs.

Romantically, too. After a self-imposed breakup, I have tried my hand at the dating apps and have gotten all of nowhere. A week ago I went on a date merely because having dinner with a man was, momentarily, easier than convincing any of my friends to drive forty minutes to see me.

I never wanted to resort to dating in such a way, but the cold hard truth is that, even if sex is not involved, there is always a willing man who would meet for dinner and even pay for it, uncoerced. My own psychological blocks are to blame for my friends' "unwillingness" to spend time with me, but when living as I do now, one tires of always making the ask. 

Yet here I am, single and looking at the relationships around me - or rather a fair distance away from me, but still in sight. A best friend just got married; another is in a two-month-old relationship formed at church; another is proudly single and doesn't try to change that. And then I am in a situation that boggles my mind when I consider it; how did I end up here?

More conventional women than me have luck in love that I both do and do not envy. They find someone willing to spend tons of time with them, but they also seem to sacrifice a bit of themselves. Not through kindness and generosity, but through allowance for the man's personality to take the front seat. 

The pull to do that has crept into each relationship I have had, and I always avoid it. To lose yourself in the arms of a man is a kind of death. I do not believe that the majority of women are dead inside because of this; the same could be applied to many men with domineering partners, to say nothing of same-sex couples.

In attempting to regroup these past few months, I have toyed with the idea of needing to come at the issue from a different angle. To focus keenly on instead becoming all the superlatives that I ever wanted to be. Intelligent, creative, strong, curious, honest. Then from the new version of myself that I would create, someone might come along to take a look at that and accept it. 

This differs from what I am doing now in that I focus more on the dating itself and negotiating in my head about the characteristics of different men and what I am looking for. And here is where I begin to sound like so many others who claim that the path towards the truest self is the same one you have to take to the truest love.

But it feels ridiculous to see this as such a counterculture approach to dating. The name of the game in 2020 seems to be to appeal to the lowest common denominator. That certainly checks out logically, but it has not worked for me. But to instead cut the smallest of slices of the pie and deem that tiny fraction as the proportion of men who are suitable sounds deeply wrong. And yet we are left with no choice if we wish to be authentic.

I make these arguments against myself almost every day. A different Emily wins each time. But hopefully, now that I am about to turn 25, the one with poor math skills will start to win more often.