Single Lady Admits: It’s Me

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

I fully admit that I wanted to hate Jen Doll’s Village Voice cover story on what it’s like to be a single lady in New York City. I wanted to hate the very premise of someone telling me it’s All My Fault. That sounds a bit too close to my grandmother telling me to stay with the ex I wasn’t in love with, a person she’d never even met. (Every time I talk to her I sense that she sees me as a lost cause, a horrible example of what happens when you get Too Old and no one wants you. But maybe I’m projecting. In my kinder moments, I know that she wants me to be happy, and she’s seen me around enough babies in our family to know that I won’t be truly happy until I become a mom.)

So anyway, back to Jen Doll. I’m a single lady who’s been dating — mostly men, but a few women, including one notable, crying, screaming Valentine’s Day breakup — in New York City since 1996. I moved here when I was 20 and, to my now-nostalgic eyes, practically a virgin. I knew almost nothing about life in a big city, having lived previously in Teaneck, New Jersey, and Berkeley, California. I was so overwhelmed by all the cultural offerings of Manhattan that I managed to spend most of my time at concerts and, later, sex parties and the like, instead of studying, like my fellow NYU Law students.

I wound up leaving school without a graduate degree after three years, having learned very little about the law but lots about Rabbit vibrators. Part of me admires who I was back then, a girl so eager to explore all the city’s offerings that the idea of pausing to assess the state of my dating life never even occurred to me. I was full speed ahead, flush with this whole new world that seemed to be waiting just for me to discover it. I wish I had some deep insight into Life and Dating and Sex that I could spit out here to tell my younger self, but I don’t. What I do agree with Jen Doll about, though, is that knowing what you want is half the battle. Back then, what I wanted was whoever was in front of me on any given night. I could skip from crush to crush with a modicum of heartbreak.

I’ve decided to take most of 2011 off from dating. It feels like skipping out on a job, in some ways. Like, at 35, I should be Trying Harder to find someone, anyone. I keep encountering people who are all over sites like OkCupid, who line up lots of dates and are Out There, while I’m inordinately excited about being able to watch DVDs from my new laptop for the first time in years (the DVD drive on my old one broke ages ago). 2010 was my year of Dating Experimentation and even when it went well, internet dating seemed, for me, like a shadow of what I consider dating to be. There was too much dancing around, too much confusion (I was told that burlesque on a first date wasn’t “PG-13 enough”), too much knowing that it could all collapse at the click of a button when they next logged in.

On the plus side, without the help of the internet, I dated three people who I totally could’ve seen myself settling down with. I did see it, in fact — in my head. Though things fizzled out with each of them, the qualities I look for in a potential partner seem to leap out at me more strongly when I meet someone new thanks to those relationships. I have never been of the “must be rich, tall and hot” school of thought. I don’t care about your Emmy or MacArthur Grant or any kind of public accolades per se, but rather what those things Say About You. I’m drawn to the people who came from seemingly nowhere and made a life for themselves doing something they love. OK, I admit, I have a fondness for the underdog, for the person who built a persona and a career where one didn’t previously exist, where there was no expected path (like law school), perhaps because I relate to that career trajectory the most. My parents did not want me to grow up and be known for editing spanking anthologies, but that’s where I wound up.

I’m not sure I agree with Jen Doll that once you know what you want you can simply “go for it,” if what you ultimately want is to settle down with someone else and have kids. That seems to be the elephant in the room; I know plenty of dads who are totally into their kids and being parents, but didn’t crave that in the same way their partners did. Still, though, I love seeing them hang out with their kids, seeing how vital a connection they share with them. They’re not phoning it in at all. And almost every time I see that, I think, Where can I find one of those?

I tend to think that I don’t have rigid criteria when it comes to dating; I certainly wouldn’t say I have a physical type, or an economic threshold. I’ve dated so many “types” — the stoner, the socialist, the married guy, the drama queen, not to mention umpteen long distance relationships. Yet even though I wouldn’t want to date someone who replicated the relationship problems I shared with any of those people, they all, as individuals, taught me something about myself. As a “type,” I can dismiss them, but as individuals, I still have my moments of what-if nostalgia.

In theory, I think I’m a good girlfriend, but in reality, I know that I have a lot of walls up, intentional or not, that make those who are interested at first not interested in the long-term. I’m coming to terms with the fact that being a hoarder who never lets anyone into her home doesn’t exactly scream “future happy mommy writer.” I know I’ve rushed too fast into thinking a relationship Mattered for superficial reasons: because strangers mistook us for a couple, because we had bicoastal dates, because I thought they were just really cool, because I was flattered, because we had really hot sex. I know that I have to get over my impulse to be so damn grateful anyone would throw a shred of interest my way that I forget about my ultimate end goals.

Mostly, though, I don’t want to be like the girl in that Jill Sobule song, “Bitter.” It’s much, much too easy to fall into the “I can’t believe __ did __” way of thinking, and even if you really can’t believe it, it happened, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Not only that, but in the past few weeks, I’ve been looking for ways to, if not forgive, then to find a way to make peace with people I once cared for so much that I was flattened when they decided they were done with me. It seemed extremely black and white at the time, but I know that sometimes we hurt each other without meaning to. That doesn’t mean it hurts any less, but it does mean that it’s the kind of hurt that truly does pain the giver as well as the receiver, not the sociopathic kind where the emotional impact only goes one way.

Maybe I, too, “don’t actually want to be with someone at all yet,” or maybe I’m just trying to protect my heart from getting shredded, sliced, broken in ways that just might not be fixable. So while I wanted to hate the article, I wound up not only appreciating Jen Doll’s tough love approach, but finding something comforting about it as well. Because if the “solution” boils down to recognizing whether “he’s” into you or not, you’re left with very little power. If it’s you, you can at the very least work on the things about yourself you want to improve, not for anyone else, but for yourself. That’s not as easy a sell, perhaps, as the Why Men Love Bitches approach, but it is honest.

I think my biggest takeaway from the piece is that I don’t want to be the angry girl so worn down by dating fatigue that I give up entirely. That’s why I’m taking until I turn 36 to focus on getting to a place where I can be proud of myself, where I’d, to put it totally immodestly, date me. I don’t want to obsess over the ones who got away, the ones I hurt or who hurt me. I want to live in the present but know that the future holds possibilities that perhaps I can’t even envision right now. And if that’s more than a little utopian of a notion for the Big Apple, please let me live with my delusions. Sometimes they’re all we have.

Rachel Kramer Bussel is a New York-based author, blogger, and event organizer. She’s also edited more than 30 anthologies, including Gotta Have It, Fast Girls, Passion, Bottoms Up, The Mile High Club, and Orgasmic, and edits the Best Sex Writing series. She blogs at Lusty Lady and Cupcakes Take the Cake.