So, it’s Valentine’s Day. I spent most of my high school years wearing black and being passionately anti-valentine, all the while desperately secretly hoping that the next year I would be one of the ones getting flowers and big hideous teddy bears. In college I wore less black, but I was no less disdainful and fervent and secret. There was one memorable Valentine’s day when I helped the man I was desperately, hopelessly infatuated with, the man I would have dropped everything, including all morals and standards for, plan the perfect Valentine’s day for his girlfriend. Even worse were the weeks afterward when I had to hear her gush about all the wonderful things he had done, all those wonderful things I had come up with and could not take credit for. What can I say, I was pretty bloody stupid, particularly when it came to boys.
I’ve spent my life hearing variations on “just wait, it will happen when…” In the residential summer Governers’ school before my junior year of High School (yeah, I was that kid) I had a conversation about my frustration at being the perpetual singleton and was told to “just wait until your junior year, everything happens in your junior year” Then there was just wait until you are a senior/start college/finish college/ get a job/ blah blah bitty blah.
Here’s the truth — I am 32 years old and I have never kissed anyone. I have never dated. And I am happy about it.
I won’t lie and say I have always been happy about it. Sitting in my best friend’s bedroom in high school while she counted the guys she had made out with (the number wasn’t small) or in the bathroom lounge at church on Sunday morning discussing my friends’ exploits the night before (in code, no less) caused no small jealousy on my part. It hasn’t been easy over the past several years watching my friends get married, and I have on more than one occasion struggled to force smiles at showers and rehearsal dinners and weddings and parties, and I would be lying if I denied coming home from those events and crying alone in my house. Hell, sometimes I didn’t even make it home. A few times I didn’t even make it to the car.
Here’s the thing — we are all taught from preschool on up that we can have anything we want if we just work hard enough. It’s not true, but it is an integral part of the puritans, pilgrims, and pioneers pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality that is so present in our culture. So it is natural to think that you can find love the same way — by working at it, and it’s easy to think that if it doesn’t happen you just aren’t working hard enough, and then if it still doesn’t work, then there must clearly be something wrong with you to make you inherently unloveable, you big hideous freak. It’s worse when you are fat, since you have a whole cultural norm telling you that you are, in fact, a hideous freak, and it’s OMG all your fault and you just need to eat less andexercisemoreandthenyou’dbeperfectandyouhaveSUCHaprettyface!
I would like to celebrate this Valentine’s Day by calling bullshit.
Being thin and/ or conventionally beautiful is no more a guarantee to finding real love than anything else. In fact, I would venture to say it might be a little but of a hindrance, because there are plenty of guys who want to date hot girls just to date hot girls and aren’t at all interested in the girl herself, just her body.
Today I reread Kate’s brilliant post on finding love and dumb luck. I think this is my favorite bit:
Single folks, here’s what I know: you are exactly what someone is looking for, and that someone is exactly what you’re looking for. You just don’t have a damned bit of control over when or where you’ll stumble across each other. That sucks a hundred kinds of ass. But you don’t have to be prettier. You don’t have to be better. You don’t even have to be patient, if you don’t feel like it. You just have to be.
I’m 32. I can’t do one damn thing about whether I ever date, get married, have kids, whatever. I can’t make anyone be attracted to me, and I am not willing to try and change myself into something I am not in an attempt to attain those things, because if I get them but lose myself, what’s the point?
The other day I ran into a friend I had not seen in a while and she asked if I was ever going to get married, and asked if I was dating anyone. I was a little shocked at my reaction, which was pretty much”hunh, I hadn’t really thought about it”. It was in the moment that I realized that all my angst was a thig of the past, and I have reached a place where I am genuinely content where I am and could not care less about “finding someone”. If it happens, it happens, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, and either way my life is good. It’s a pretty damn brilliant place to be.
