2006-04-06
Lucky Single!
I am so tired of being the only person at a table who is single. I went to lunch with my department today and I am it.
It
IT.
I had nothing to say to them. I didn�t even have the fighting spirit to make some cute analogy about my dog. I just kept my mouth shut because had I said anything, I would have heard the voices at the table do the up and down roller-coaster thing that women�s voices do when they are being fake to one another and I would have endured, �You�re lucky! My husband hates to go shopping with me!� �You are so lucky! You get to walk away from screaming children!� �You�re so lucky!�
I�m lucky because I might be able to sell my car and buy a Jeep Wrangler, guilt-free in the next few months.
I�m lucky because I have my looks and my education.
Being single is not lucky. Being single is fact.
It�s just fact that nobody likes me that way and it�s fact that I have yet to meet someone who is excited to meet me.
It's not that I am gung-ho to meet someone because as my best friend remarked, "Even if I did meet someone, he would turn out to be a son-of-a-bitch."
And that's historically been true for me.
I meet guys all the time.
I meet cute guys all the time.
Guys who have good jobs and who are educated and single and interesting and there is ALWAYS something that is no good about them.
I am let down every fucking time I meet someone. There's no spark, there's no instant Karma, there's no nothing but me feeling like sometime in the week ahead, I will be making fun of the most recent guy I met, either on the Internet, to my best friend, or in the worst cases, to roomfuls of strangers when I need a good story to tell.
Things have gotten to the point where I actually don't want to meet someone. I don�t want the disappointment, the clenching of my gut telling me that "This isn't it." I don't want to make plans and think to myself, "Maybe I'll meet someone great tonight!" I don�t want to think it because it's not true. I'll meet someone; sure, I always meet people.
I was recently lamenting being old and fat and again with the best friend who said, "Neither of those are true because you are never lacking for interested men."
But I am lacking for an interest in those men.
So much so that when someone says to me, "You never know where you'll meet [the proverbial] him!" "Tonight might be the night!" "It could be anyone!� when someone says any of those things to me, I am going to say something about how offensive those things are to me.
I'm sick of meeting people.
I'm sick of meeting people and dating them and knowing that they are not the right people for me and knowing that I will have to slog through another season without having that one person to call when the day is really awful.
Or worse, I'm sick of meeting people and thinking, "That will work for now but not for the long run."
It's another season where I won't be turning to someone and saying, "What was that thing you did last year that cracked me up so much? Don't you remember that?"
It's another season where I have to decide for myself if it is too cold to wear that skirt or if those shorts fit better this year.
It's another season of being alone and I do not the fuck understand why that bothers me so much but it does.
It bothers me so much that I quit.
Someone can meet me but I�m not meeting anyone anymore.
Someone can meet me and he can be sincere and available and all of the things that I would want him to be and he is going to have to be okay with the fact that it might not be so easy.
That whole college thing is throwing me off a lot. I am thrilled that I am not nineteen and hooked up with someone I would theoretically be hooked up with for the next 70 years. Had I settled back then... well, words fail me, they really do.
But here I am and I realized that anyone who meets me now will not have the memory of me being that young and there's something bittersweet to me about that. I look at my college friend now and think, "Wow. Balding? Suit and tie?" What I still see is this kid, you know? This kid in army surplus plants and a football jersey and his blond hair is kind of a flat-top and even in the pictures I see of him now, I see each of them and I see the adult but only barely because the photos hit a buzzer in my memory of him when he was smoking and drinking 40ozers and was every bit the Wisconsin farm boy turned football player that you can imagine and that buzzer?
It makes me miss my own naivety.
It reminds me that the guy who meets me now will never ever have his memory of me as a chubby-thighed Catholic school graduate wearing cut-offs, smoking and watching the Phi Psi guys get back to campus.
And yeah, there's something about that idea that is horribly sad to me.
So for a minute, I don't want to hear that I could meet someone anytime and that this could be my lucky night.
I want to be left to think that I won't meet someone because in light of the recent reunion of sorts, it would make me kind of sad to meet someone now and to know that he will never, ever see me the way a ten-years stranger on the Internet could see me because he knew me a lifetime ago.
arizonasarah at 3:13 p.m.