you said "baby, no attachment"
why dating should be more like AA
I hate writing about dating. And yet… here I am, about to write about dating. Not because I have anything particularly fruitful to share, but because it seems inescapable—this daunting vacuum of possibility that never quite seems to take shape for me. Usually by my own undoing. Sometimes by my lack of interest in the first place. But by virtue of being a partnerless 35 year old, relationships loom frighteningly large all the time, everywhere. When you’re my age and a woman with all the working affixations, yet are still empty-wombed and ringless—or live alone and have no real prospects—well… it’s all anyone else fucking talks about. Like, you have no idea. I cannot so much as breathe the name of a man without raised eyebrows, a million opinions, and immediate disappointment (or worse, mocking disbelief) if I say he’s just a friend or a coworker or a family member.
The thing is, I know everyone means well. This is not a call out or even a criticism. We are programmed to think in pairs. The world is quite literally built for partners. This is something I express ad nauseam to anyone who will listen, and I still don’t know that it ever quite clicks, but my brain operates in an entirely different mode than coupled folk my age. I won’t ballyhoo about the split rent of it all again, because I’ve done that before. Yes, it’s more expensive to be single than in a relationship. But it’s not just the finances. I also lack in other areas, like even the extra hands needed to get household things done. I can balance on stools and hold multiple tools at once and move a whole couch all on my own because that’s how I’ve always done it. And yeah, sometimes it’s really tiring, bearing every load.
And sometimes it’s not. I also have the freedom to decide how I spend my days. I can live lackadaisically, and sometimes that’s all I want. And my imagination—it’s bountiful beyond belief. I can think of things for hours at a time without interruption. I can talk my way through most sticking points before ever uttering a word, because I’ve already played it through a million times. My mind is vast and labyrinthine and unknowable to all but me. And I am fiercely protective of it.
But I don’t think I should be. Because existing like that—well, I think it’s the whole root of the problem, and what I want to write about today. The fatal generational flaw we share when it comes to creating and sustaining relationships, especially of the romantic variety: a terrible, unrelenting selfishness.
Clearly I am guilty. I talk and write and think so often of myself that I wonder sometimes if I’m all that exists. Or at least I used to. While I still spend a lot of time alone in this big stupid head of mine, I do have one thing in my back pocket that has made me look at the spectrum of relationship-making very differently these last few years: my sobriety.
It’s not the physical lack of booze that gave me the clarity I reference here (although that certainly helps)—it’s that through sobriety I found community. And, by extension, the power of relying on and conversing with others through and about my most harrowing inner turmoil. And through that I learned perhaps my most important life lesson to date: that other people can help us understand ourselves way better than we ever can on our own.
Maybe that sounds kind of “duh”, but I don’t think it’s something practiced all that often anymore. We are all about ourselves these days. Internalizing. Self-diagnosing. Fixated on conditions and categorizations and anything that might place us into tidy groups where selfishness is not only permissible but encouraged. And sometimes these are good things! Sometimes you find community through identification. But I also think it can imprison and even undo us. When all we do is look inside, the world around us loses shape. Other people become concepts instead of company.
It’s part of why I also brush up against the concept of mindfulness, at least as it’s been sold to us this last decade or so. It comes with good intention, yet I have found it is often just coded self-obsession with an air of commercialization. It’s important to love ourselves, yes. To find inner peace and mental clarity, sure. But so often, mindfulness comes at the expense of the relationship forming we actually need—the external kind. I know that when I exist solely in my mind, I’m creating a reality instead of living in one. I am able to convince myself of anything if my subconscious wanders far enough down any alley. What can feel like a thunder-clap revelation is often just my synapses tiring and parking on the most available conclusion.
I’d argue that because of things like this, we know less about ourselves now than ever before, despite illusions of the contrary. This grows more evident to me by the day. Any time I wade into the dating pool, I’m frankly stunned to see just how little people know what the fuck they even want. And then you start thinking, maybe I don’t either, even though I thought I did? Where does my assuredness end and their confusion begin? Once initiated, you aren’t really dating—you’re just trying to figure out the answer to that question.
My last few efforts to date, or at least explore the possibility of dating, were a wash. With individuals where interest was so earnestly expressed early on that I let go of my natural suspicions and decided to reciprocate. Maybe they really meant it, who knows! But unfortunately, my initial suspicions proved correct in every instance. With almost comical timing, every time I returned affection, it was snatched away as easily as it was given. Like… lol?? I thought… you wanted to date me??? You were on the apps!!! Saying you were looking for something long-term!!! I guess not???? Ok dude!!!!!
I suppose that once the serotonin boost of my disinterest was muted by reciprocation, I was no longer of value. And “value” is a key word here, since it applies to what I’m trying to get at—that because we are treated like commodities by our institutions, we have come to treat relationships the same. What do other people offer to us in a commercial sense? How can we mold them for our own purposes and impulses? I’ve learned, through these experiences and ensuing conversations with friends, that my strengthening sense of self has diminishing returns in the modern dating economy. Unavailability is far more alluring to today’s single men because it allows them to flap around and flounder just a little bit longer. The second you start taking the shape of a finish line and not an ellipsis… well, then they can’t stall anymore. They can’t keep questing for validation because you might not provide it as quickly and efficiently as they need in that moment. You might actually need something from them too, and we can’t be having that now, can we?
It’s depressing and dehumanizing, but I refuse to let it get the best of me. I’d rather be alone forever than discard the parts of me that I know will bring actual value to a relationship. with a partner who’s willing to listen and respond and grow up instead of confusing communication with confrontation. Maybe I’m wrong, but I really feel like this push towards inward thinking, intensified by the pandemic and toxic therapy talk, has moved dudes’ needles so far away from real human connection that they’re in the fucking ocean, drowning without even knowing it.
I’m sick of throwing buoys. And yet… I kind of have to if I ever want to make a spark again. I try to explain this to my long-partnered friends a lot. Those of them who love me most tell me constantly that I deserve better, that the right person won’t make me question myself, that real love is easy. And while I love the encouragement, I don’t think people realize how isolating that line of thought is, and how impractical given the state of things.
Like first of all, does it apply to any of your relationships? Please, tell me honestly. Did your marriages and long-term partnerships follow a perfectly easy, check-box trajectory? I’m sure some of yours did! But it’s simply incongruent with reality to think that every course plays out the same. I have friends who hate-fucked everyone in their friend group to make their crush jealous, and now they’ve been married for a decade. I have friends who broke up for years then got back together—and have stayed together ever since. I have friends who met in high school and have loved each other every day since, and I also have friends who had the squeaky-clean everything until it all fell apart spectacularly. You just never know. Every story is different, the coming together and the coming apart.
But it’s especially different now, given all I’ve just shared. Because men are not ok! Connecting the dots as the dots jolt all over the place—through new therapy techniques and exercise routines and dietary supplements or whatever other fad Instagram reels are feeding us this month—is an ever-humbling game. And that’s before we get into all the unrealistic physical expectations set by porn and social media filters and dating app manipulation.
The other truth is that we’ve forced so much our dating logic into mathematical boxes decided by algorithms that we don’t have any idea how to give or receive advice anymore. And it’s not just the dating apps breaking our brains. My social media accounts know I’m single and so my feed is a constant barrage of content-making women yelling the same phrases at me over and over. “If he wanted to, he would” is of particular contempt for me. I hear it constantly on that app, but what does it even mean? If he really wanted you, you wouldn’t have to question it, is the intent. But to my mind, it just reduces men to the same thing women hate being reduced to: people who need to have it all figured out immediately or else they’re ejectable. If we don’t want to be thought of that way, it doesn’t help us to think of them that way either. Sometimes things take time and consideration—sometimes they genuinely want to get to know you before they leap in with promises they know they can’t keep. This logic also forces women into a powerless position, letting men always call the shots. He gets to dictate everything? Fuck that. You have the agency to steer the boat too. You’re not weak or wasting your time by putting effort in early. But if you keep staring at your phone and repeating their plagiarized phrases, you’ll start believing it.
Most of what we’re fed today isn’t dating advice as much as learning manuals for how to glorify abandonment issues. Creators found the juice: play into your lack of worth and the currency of hopelessness and they’ll never run out of content to capitalize on. You aren’t of value to counterfeit match-matchers if you find a match/ And there’s that word again. Value. That’s what it keeps coming back to. What you give, not who you are under the skin you stretch over social media profiles.
So what’s the solution to all of this and how to I connect it back to my earlier point? I guess what I’m really getting at is… I wish there was AA for single people. I’m not even shitting you, I think it’s genuinely a model that could help us all. I don’t know how it would work in actuality, so I guess this is all very theoretical, but I really can’t stress enough how much I learned about myself through saying words aloud and having others receive them. And I mean really receive them.
There’s no mindless phone scrolling in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. When you speak, you are the only one. A whole room of people listen to you, look at you, see you. They don’t interrupt, and when it’s their turn to speak they don’t give you advice. Instead, they relate your story—your pain or happiness, whichever you’ve shared that day—to their own. It’s a mapping of experience to create comfort in the things we share. And oh boy do we all share a lot. I’ve heard people lay the deepest things bare in those rooms, many of them things I thought only I had ever felt. And I’ve shared things there that I’ve never told even my closest friends or family members. Real, raw, deep truths about myself and things I’ve done that I couldn’t comprehend until the words were out of my mouth.
There was freedom in the anonymity, sure, but I don’t think that’s really why I felt so comfortable opening up in AA. I think it’s because I had the full attention of the people in front of me. They looked into my eyes and heard me, for real and without compromise. Selflessness is baked into the ethos of that program and you’d be surprised just how easily people can practice it once it’s expected of them. And you’d be extra surprised just how easily people heal in the safe hands, soft company, and gentle love of a group of total strangers.
But that experience also came at a cost. Because I don’t think anyone outside of those rooms has ever really heard me since. Strangers can love you and listen to you with ferocity, so why can’t your friends? Your family? Your potential suitors?
It’s no fault of their own. It’s just not something we’re really taught how to do. We are commodity first, remember? There is also this modern idea of transactional exchange and how we don’t owe people our time, how it is ok and even necessary to prioritize our schedules and comfort first. So I realize that what I’m about to say is controversial, especially on the internet in this moment. But I think we should prioritize other people first. I think we should reach out every day if a person means enough to us. Not because we have to on an owed system, but because we want to. Because it comes naturally to consider what we provide to the people who we love, who love us, and who we could love even if it’s not quite there yet. I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem that hard?
And I can hear the chorus of “what ifs” about that already. I know there are medical and psychological conditions, attention disorders, and other things that prevent this. I know not talking to someone every day is not a sign of lack of care. I am never, ever mad at a friend who doesn’t reach out to me every day or even every week or month. I don’t expect it at all and I don’t even do it myself. We are not actually in a place where these things need to happen or speak to anything all that concrete. But I suppose what I’m trying to say is that it sucks how we’ve come to frame these things. Not us, as individuals, but again, this disparate collective that would be better off actually connected. We go and create these faulty channels of communication where we have to wonder how even our best friends might feel about us, because we have no idea how to just… be there in any truer sense. In a utopia of my making, we would have learned all along that our time is not something to shield and dole out and give like a gift, but something inherently participatory. Sending a text is not hauling bricks over a mountain. But we’ve made it feel that way.
And this all comes back to dating because that is where this break in the link is most apparent. We can smooth things over more easily with the bonds that already exist, but the ones to create… how do we do it when we’re off in our separate realities? And how do we convince people that we’re worth it? I know I’ve probably said disparaging and gender essentialist things here, and that I’m speaking from a heteronormative worldview, and that’s all worthy of criticism. I don’t have everything figured out. If I did, I wouldn’t constantly bring all of this stuff up without a finer point to put on it. But I’m just trying to reason with all there is to sift through when it comes to finding love. And because I’ve witnessed the power of community and connection in sober spaces, I wish I could bottle and gift that experience for everyone who feels on the outside of their own life. I don’t even go to AA anymore, but I hold all of that stuff so close to my chest because it’s the realest shit I’ve ever felt, in communion with other souls that found certainty in their enmeshing. I look for it in all of my relationships and try to provide it wherever I can. All of me on a platter. Is it so much to want a platter in return, not as gift but as a willing offering?
Who knows! Maybe it is. We’ll probably never get there all the way, but I’ll keep nudging toward it. I will keep holding the men I want to love accountable because if I give you that attention it means I think you deserve it. I will keep asking my friends to consider the reality for those of us still single and looking, to focus less on idealization and ask us, genuinely ask us, what we want. Because what I want actually involves a little friction! I do not like to come by things too easily, nor do I like existing in safety mode. I like my relationships to be a little bit raw and unruly, a little bit freaky, with some tension and spitfire and things to work through, because I’d die of boredom otherwise. I don’t want someone who adores me plainly and loudly and affectionately. That makes me want to gag, to be honest. I like someone I get to figure out and spat with and love all the same because that’s romance to me, never getting to the end of a person.
But I do want to be loved. I will keep looking for it. And just in general I plan to keep on keeping on, because sooner or later someone might affix themselves to me, and see the way I think as something fun and valuable. Not in a currency way but in a way that makes us both better, together and apart, because that’s all I really want for anyone in the end. To be better, however we define that for ourselves.