Meditations On Sucking At Relationships, Dating, And Not-Dating, Too, As It Happens

I have a date tonight is a thing I didn’t say much last calendar year, though at the time of this writing — a Thursday, one of the last of 2017— it happens to be true. Or it’s true for the time being (3:26 p.m. being the time being), which doesn’t necessarily mean it will be true later (later being tonight). I have a five-hour window during which some blessed derailment could occur: an apartment emergency or a sudden deadline or perhaps a seasonal stomach flu which, as it happens, never really go out of season.

I used to be more comfortable making dates and then making stories as to why I could no longer make the dates, but now I try to avoid it. I made very few excuses in 2017, and even fewer commitments — which, it should be obvious, was key to my making fewer excuses. It turns out I didn’t need as many once I realized it was okay, perhaps even healthy, to experience a period of time in which my romantic/sexual desires do not inform my every thought and action. So much of my adult life has been colored by a relationship or shaded by the absence of one; always falling in love or growing into it, then falling or crashing out of it, and then a period of mourning, followed by a period of rebirth, Spiritual Spring, femininity more potent than at any time in human history, all dead things jerking back to…