In the past few months I have had the opportunity to go on a lot of first dates. I met an artistic Nigerian Pilot. I went out with an Olympic runner from Zimbabwe and had a stellar date with a Hindu gynecologist. I think I have a broad spectrum of friends, but prior to these dates the only Nigerian’s I knew were Princes requesting my bank account thru dire emails. And most of my gynecologist friends have already been scared off by one too many ” Does this look funny to you?-s” at the dinner table.
SO you can see why I love dating. It is a sea of strange shells all waiting to be turned over. A treasure hunt. A wonderful adventure.
I didn’t always feel that way tho. A few months ago if I was talking you would have heard ” If I see one more freakin couple holding hands I am going to lose my everloving mind” You would have heard me longing for someone of my own, someone to kiss MY neck while I cooked dinner, or chase ME in an airport, or rescue ME with a romantic gesture. I was throwing pity party’s alone in my bed, replete with cake and ice cream. Because all I saw, all I could see was the absence of love.
It saddens me to admit I would sit in my kitchen, nodding to the chatter of my children’s dinnertime lore, eyes focused on the empty chair at the head of the table. I was obsessed with what was missing. I took it personally, I read into it. It meant of course, that I was unworthy and unloveable ( or too fat, too sweaty, too weird smelling, too poor, or disheveled, or boring, or annoying, or covered in monster scars, or too hyper to take seriously, or too neurotic, imaginative, paranoid, or stretch marked to love* ) .
People all over the universe were crawling into beds at night with someone that would kiss them goodnight…and I was constructing people sculptures out of pillows to hold me tight.
I wish I could say I had a love epiphany. That I decided I didn’t need a man to complete me and that I could be perfectly happy without living a fairytale love song…..but that didn’t happen, my belief that “Love is the stuff” is far too rooted to abandon simply because its absence is making me miserable. What happened instead was a subtle shift and the emergence of a distant memory.
I remembered this drawing I saw in the sixth grade. It was of concentric circles with a line through it with the caption ” what do you see” Well, I saw a boob, and a target, and an eyeball with a stick through it. When it was revealed to be ” A man riding a bicycle while wearing a sombrero as seen from above ” …. I was forever changed.
The idea that things could look completely different depending upon what angle they are viewed at, has been fascinating to me as both an artist and a human. I have been trying to use the technique on all things that upset me. Mostly reframing the torment of my broken air conditioning into…..the pleasure of a spiritual sweat lodge.
So I set out to look at my loneliness from another perspective as well. Instead of begrudging that I didn’t have anyone to go out to dinner with, I started looking forward to finding someone to go out to dinner with. See what I did there? I took the “absence” from being a sorry life sentence to being an exciting opportunity…. The little shift from hopelessness to glory, was merely a tilting of my head.
Why have I not reveled in the phenomenon of new people! I am completely free. Untethered, and available to explore and choose the people I want in my life and reject the ones that don’t fit right.
Online dating is a wonderful porthole to the people of the world. Curiously there is still a stigma associated with dating websites. People give bad smell faces with the very mention of the term. It’s like I say ” Online dating” but it comes out ” OMG I am so desperate!, Somebody, anybody, quick , love me before I die!” ……when in reality I just want someone to buy me lunch and bask in my awesomeness.
Shocking discovery: Not every one is going to bask in your awesomeness….in fact some people will miss it completely. Case in point, a few weeks ago I ran across a fellow who’s profile described him as a Boxer. In what may be the greatest icebreaker of all time I messaged him “So what kind of boxes do you make?”…. I’m sorry but I still think this was hilarious, made more so by his wit numbing “duh” inducing response of “No honey, boxing as in fist to fist combat”…..
Or the following exchange between me and some guy who writes in his profile..” You should contact me if you happen to have a spaceship”…….umm ok. ( I can’t help what I’m attracted to people )
Me: I have a spaceship and sometimes I dress like an alien
Him: You seem great, but I’m really looking for someone closer to where I live.
Me: But my spaceship is so fast its like I’m already there….hovering over your house.
It made me laugh so hard to write that…what a fantastically creepy way to deflect a rejection.
But the fact is, I really do have a spaceship…or at least a 22% stake in one…. so…his loss
I have drawn the conclusion that being single is a dark suffocating cave of loneliness, or a wonderful shelter of freedom from which to better view the world…depending only at what angle you look at it. Having changed my perspective from staring at the back of the cave, to staring out the front I have been able to find joy in my present circumstance……that I honestly had no idea was there. It has only taken me three harrowing years to go from loathing my single status, to tolerating it nicely. My hope for someone else suffering with their view of loneliness….is that they turn their head around faster then I did.
* Note: No one is ever, ever too stretch marked to love.
