It’s Not You: 27 (Wrong) Reasons You’re Single (Amazon) is a series of essays and anecdotes around themes. The themes are the things that you tell yourself, or that people tell you, about why it is you’re still alone.
Mostly I found it… reassuring. The thoughts of “oh I’m inadequate” or “I need to do X, Y and Z first” or “I need to be HAPPY!” are normal, and not necessarily true. I think a lot of these things have maybe a grain of truth in them, but believe them too much and it will drive you mad. The main message was to just be who you are, do what you want, get on with your life. You don’t know what will happen. Sometimes you will be sad, and that is OK. Sometimes you will get dumped, and that sucks but you will survive. Sometimes you will not be able to connect with someone who looks great on paper, and there is no point beating yourself up about it.
I found it to be a pretty quick read, and a nice change from the kind of books that I tend to read a lot of. All in all, if you’re single and don’t always feel 100% happy with that, maybe it’s worth giving it a read for some perspective.
Sometimes I feel like we’re two aliens, from different planets with different languages, trying to communicate via Skype without electricity. Sigh.
I spent a few hours over the break reading the 40 Days of Dating project. Two designers, friends with opposite attitudes to (and problems in) relationships conduct an experiment in dating each other, for 40 days. The visuals are gorgeous, I can see it making a lovely coffee table book. It’s an interesting concept, applying constraints to life (as you do in design) and making art out of it, and is also a commentary on modern dating – the pressures we create for ourselves, the fears we have.
Every day, they fill out a questionnaire which includes the questions “what did you learn about yourself”, “what did you learn about [the other person]”. I love this. The day by day appreciation of growing closer to another human being, and the day by day realisations about one’s choices and behaviour, and how they effect relationships.
As the time goes on, both play out their fears and habits, but it seems like the strong friendship and the nature of the experiment forces them to continue to see the other person as a human. It’s so easy to objectify, dismiss the concerns and humanity of someone who upsets us, but they keep coming back to the friendship they have, the desire to preserve it, and the commitment to the experiment.
On commitment-phobia:
It makes me think of Dave, a former boss of mine I had right after high school. He eventually became an important mentor and a great friend. He has all these phrases he goes by, stuff like “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” and “never put your hands in your pockets, it’s a sign of laziness.” Anyway, one phrase he says that particularly rings a bell in this case is, “never say ‘I can’t.’” When will I stop saying ‘I can’t’ when it comes to relationships?
On Disneyland:
I have mixed feelings about this place. On the one hand, there is something fascinating about Disney World. There is a high level of detail to every aspect of the operation and the experience, from the hand painted signs and the technology behind the projections and holograms, to the large scale coordinated shows that happen like clockwork. Yet, as Prince Charming passed by us waving, and I watched the little children squeal in excitement, I couldn’t help but think there is something twisted about this place. This whole place just plants expectations in children’s minds that make them think they will grow up to meet the perfect person who will make all their dreams come true. While this kind of storybook love is a positive and a seemingly innocent notion, it’s nearly impossible to live up to.
It’s interesting to think about how this kind of true love is a relatively recent concept in human history. Marriage unions used to be treated in a much more practical manner, often as nothing more than a business arrangement between families. It was only in the last few hundred years that we saw this birth of romanticism throughout culture.
On love:
What does it even mean to love someone? It seems almost impossible to universally define such a complex state of mind since we all experience life so uniquely. I guess love is something you just have to experience and define for yourself. On a whole, I’ve experienced it as being committed to someone I am passionately interested in. Someone who helps me discover aspects of myself I didn’t see before and for whom I can do the same. Someone I trust, respect, and share experiences with. Someone I can be my kind of weird with.
I loved it. It’s realistic, but still heartwarming. Sweet without being saccharine. It reminded me of all the reasons why I can’t really be bothered dating right now, of why relationships I’ve had have failed, and yet also somehow also of the reasons why it is worth trying.
My friend and teammate says to me, “do you make a habit of spending your birthdays on planes… after breakups?
It’s only the second time.
It’s really how the dates worked out. With the timezone change, it means my birthday is going to last for 40 hours… I can celebrate on two continents! In two hemispheres.
It is also a way of completely ignoring it, should I decide to go that route. Sadly the dates didn’t work out for me to just skip that day, pretend it never happened, and have a do-over of being 26 (related: I won’t be experiencing April 12th this year, let me know if anything good happens).
Then, another friend and I were talking about “The List”. The list of requirements for your next partner, that you make after a breakup. Specifically it tends to include characteristics about your ex that you think were key to why you broke up, and if that one thing had been different, maybe it would have all worked out and everything would be hunky dory.
Over the course of my dating life I have put on the list: physicists, computer scientists (this one soon got removed, given the circles I move in it’s pretty much signing up for celibacy), men whose mothers don’t have careers, men whose parents are extremely religious, men who are religious themselves, grad students…
As our conversation progresses, I realize that the list is complete bollocks.
It’s trying to distill what failed and what we learned into a couple of characteristic, like if we could just find the intersection of all our desirable characteristics and exclude all the undesirable ones, there would be our perfect match.
Even if this strategy led us to someone, I can’t help but think we’d probably find ourselves in the pool of people they had eliminated.
Anyway, I’m chucking out my list. I’m just going to be Cate. Go places that I like to go, do things that I like to do, and keep adventuring. I’m sure love will follow – possibly with a religious physicist (although it seems unlikely that I would meet one), but maybe just with life and the world. Which sounds a bit soppy for me, but let me off. I will be spending my birthday on a plane, afterall.
I love Penelope Trunk‘s blog. She’s not afraid to write about her life. And sometimes that’s positive, but the most interesting and hilarious and insightful posts are always about a negative – some way in which she screwed up, something she found difficult, relationships – that ended.
The tagline is “advice at the intersection of work and life”. I don’t know about you, but that’s where I need it. How do I balance work and life? How do I deal with people I dislike, or dislike me? How do I lead an interesting life?
I’ve had a great few months professionally, but it all starts a little over 6 months ago. One Thursday morning I cracked and broke up with and evicted my then-boyfriend. All I wrote at the time was that I’d failed.
Here’s the thing, for a couple of months before that I had been living with someone who had checked out emotionally and had just remained physically because, I don’t know. It was easier, and cheaper for him. And I tried to fix it, because that’s what I do. Time is invested. Future is planned. Don’t diverge from the path. Things will get better if X and Y and Z change. Whether they do or don’t, it doesn’t.
Sometimes I would yell or cry that I didn’t even feel like he liked me but mostly I thought I didn’t deserve any better than the criticism that was levelled at me – I worked too much, I didn’t work enough on what was important, I was too career focussed, I was too emotional, I shouldn’t dislike this person, I shouldn’t be upset about that.
The door slams. I go swimming. And the biggest thing I feel? Relief. Breathe out. I’m alone. Mostly I was just numb and exhausted. I watched a lot of TV. Of course I cried, and of course I rationalized that maybe it was that living together was too stressful. We tried to date but that ended after an argument representative of so many others we’d had. One of his friends being inappropriate. Me being unreasonable and overly-emotional (apparently). Done.
Of course this is a vast oversimplification, and it goes without saying that I have my own faults.
It took 2 months to get his crap out of my apartment. I spent my birthday on a plane and all I wanted was to come home to an apartment that was just mine. I didn’t. He wished me happy birthday via Facebook and via text. And I arrived to find his stuff there, in my space, where I desperately didn’t want it to be.
An email showed up with a list of my faults. I was trying to focus on my internship and instead there’s a phone call at 11 at night and I’m in tears. He apologizes, but it doesn’t take the sting out of what was written. Including, when I’d bought him skis for his birthday I had been trying to buy his affection. They were the most beautiful skis, too long for me (the difficulty of getting high end skis if you’re female and not tall is another sad story I’ll tell another time) but I’d demo’d them and loved them and thought I would get to ski them. I didn’t. He comes to collect them and I joke – half serious – that I thought I was getting a refund. He says “I apologized for that” and takes them.
Our belongings were separate but our finances were entwined and that was more work. Eventually I got my own Canadian credit card and had my phone in my name. I was free. The last time I saw him he asked if I wanted to have dinner and I said, “I don’t really see us being friends”. I was done.
It’s telling what friends say post-breakup. This time was a new record in people who hadn’t liked my ex. I came across an article about emotional abuse and realized that there were elements of that, that I’d just come to think I deserved.
I avoided our mutual friends, joking that he’d got them and I’d got the apartment. It was easier than I thought it would be, mostly because of the awesome people who I met in EB.
But also because of my friend who I went to Seattle to see for my birthday, just over a month after we broke up. I was a wreck, completely unconfident and pathetically grateful that he would buy me a coffee (let alone dinner) and find me amusing and worth talking too. He sat me down and finished my resume with me and convinced me to let him put it in to a company that I hadn’t even allowed myself to dream of working for.
And then there was Maggie. Occasionally I would tell her things my ex had said to me and she would look at me and say, “Cate, why did you put up with that?”. Between the two of them, they gave me the pieces and I put myself back together. I was productive. I was effective. I was loving my job. I was optimistic about what was next. I was back in the gym, enjoying it, and starting to get over my injuries and back to normal. Now, I have a workout schedule that I would have struggled with pre-kneecap-dislocation. I am insanely excited about my next adventure. I’m stressed, sure, but pretty happy.
I write this because, it’s time. Because it seems right to share that despite everything I do and everything I’m apparently capable of, I let one person annihilate my self-esteem to way below my usual level of low-level-inadequacy-driving-me-forward.
I found out recently that he’s dating someone new. In fact, the passive aggressive I wrote about ages ago. When I found out I laughed for about 15 minutes. There are a number of reasons as to why I found it so hilarious, but mostly it’s because that group of people – when you don’t think they can get more dysfunctional, they do. I’d been thinking that the best revenge is a life well lived, but after that realized that sometimes people create their own poetic justice, and that’s gravy.
And then, I started thinking about the skis. And whilst I don’t care who my ex is sleeping with, the thought of those beautiful skis out with the guy who annihilated my self esteem, and the woman who made me question my sanity – who thinks she’s all that on the slopes and “teaches” hapless beginners, whilst stemming her turns which she makes entirely with her ass… seems like a tragedy.
Of course, the real tragedy is the time and energy I spent on both these people. The amount I allowed them to affect me. I’m fixating on the skis because they are a physical thing that I let him walk away with, that I didn’t hide them as I wanted to because I was so paranoid about being reasonable. The chipping away at my self-esteem is an intangible thing that I can’t quantify. It’s the thing I’m truly upset about.
Walking through the grocery store I saw trashy magazines depicting the latest gossip about Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise. Since that Oprah show and with the Scientology nonsense it’s always about how Cruise is crazy and controlling. I don’t read these magazines and I have no idea what’s being said, but I do notice that Holmes is less awesome since she got with Cruise. In fact I had a friend, who was really really cool when she was single, but would always be like whoever she was dating. She’s now married and lives in suburbia. I don’t know what happened to all the dreams of living abroad and doing amazing things.
Here’s the thing, I let someone make me less awesome. I didn’t even notice it was happening. And when my friend and I looked at each other the other day and said, “dating sucks. What is the point?” This is what I was thinking: I don’t ever want to let anyone make me less awesome again. And I’m scared to be out there, in case they do.
My uncle died last week. We knew it was coming, and this is the family thing I’ve been referring to of late. It was, as it always seems to be in these situations when someone leaves this world, their family, too soon, cancer.
My family is not a close one, and I did not know this man. Apparently I met him once when I was little, I played with him and called him “Frog” (I asked my dad why, and he said he didn’t know – I had a habit of calling people strange things). I have a gift from when I was 12 or 13, and that is all.
My dad has lost his brother. Three little girls have lost their father. All I have lost is a possibility – as assumption that has been broken. Someone at the peripheral, who when I thought about it I assumed I would meet – as an adult – eventually is gone, and that will never happen.
You always think you have more time. Until you don’t.
With my imminent departure from Ottawa, I have been thinking about endings a lot. The last post meme, had me thinking about that too. I’ve been carrying the situation above with me – close enough to hit me hard, but far enough away to be able to contemplate loss in the abstract.
And what I keep coming back to, is relationships. Not software – although beautiful software is a gift we can give. Relationships. The relationships that we assume we’ll have tomorrow, we need to build today. Someone said at Grace Hopper that you couldn’t put friends and family on hold and build them after you’ve built your career – you have to invest in them as you go along.
And so I’m deliberately carving out more time in my life for the people I love, and those who I want to know better.
And, as you may have guessed from what I wrote above, I’m thinking about time – or lack thereof. My frenzied rushing about is worse than ever, because time seems in short supply. My list of goals, and plans for impact, are more ambitious. My intolerance for things that are fundamentally pointless, lower.
So, if this were my last post I would talk about making the most of the time you have, and taking time to build the relationships you want.
But I don’t know what to say about my uncle. At times like this, my atheism weighs on me like a rock – Christians and other religious people have these things that they say, these concepts they throw out like they will comfort. See you again. Rest in Peace. I’ll pray for you.
As an atheist, all I have, is that I will look at that gift and it will remind me that I must make the most of the time I have, and build the relationships I want tomorrow, today.
I’ve never had much patience for those girls that reinvent themselves in their boyfriend’s image every relationship. You know, when they’re dating a beer-loving football fan they develop a taste for stella and when they’re dating a cricket lover and wine aficionado it’s all about a nice Beaujolais.
Of course if you’re friends with someone like that, how much you have in common depends on who they’re dating – and that’s kinda weird.
But, post-breakup is a time for reinvention. And so I’ve cut my hair dramatically, bought new clothes, and upped my workouts. Because that’s what you do, isn’t it? And I’ve evaluated what new experiences from my ex I want to keep – no to Woody Allen movies, for example, but yes to (vegetarian) sushi. And then I’ve started some new ones – 6am bootcamp, Ally McBeal, the Awesome Foundation, my internship.
The biggest change though, comes from the reassessment of my life I made when I realized I was starting to burn out – I have free time. And during it, I ask myself – What does Cate want to do?
It’s wonderful. I recommend it highly.
And so whilst being a little lost, and a little lonely (my ex was my best friend for the entire time we were together, and we’re not currently speaking – it would be weird if I wasn’t lonely) – I’m happier than I’ve been in some time. I come home from work and it’s not the many things I have to get done – it’s the things I want to. And they are not all happening, but that’s OK. I’m giving myself a break – I deserve it.
Back in March, I had a really terrible week. My paper got rejected and I realized I wasn’t going to be able to finish this semester, and the following day, my boyfriend and I broke up.
It’s not uncommon for a paper to be rejected, however, frustratingly, the comments I got were mostly aspects of it that I had been unhappy with, that I had asked for help with, but, perhaps given the short time frame had not got the feedback I needed to fix. Finishing this semester was always tight, and this was really the final straw – my internship this summer is probably better for my employment prospects than a masters degree, and I was risking going in there burnt out and distracted, which I can’t afford to do.
My boyfriend and I had been together for over a year and a half, in fact, he was one of the first people I’d met when I got to Ottawa. I always found this rather romantic, but I had been aware for a while that this meant my identity here was somewhat tied up in being his girlfriend, and most of the friends I have here are mutual. We had been living together, so this was a further complication. Fortunately, he had somewhere to go so I didn’t have to deal with a post-breakup cohabitation nightmare as well.
I don’t fail often, but here were two – huge – failures in one week. I crashed. I’ve been pushing myself so hard and all of a sudden I didn’t have as many pressing deadlines. I also didn’t have anyone to notice if I stayed in my pajamas all day watching My Family. I was physically ill from – I don’t know – exhaustion? Stress? Misery? I pushed myself so hard, for so long, that when it all came crashing down, I did too.
Credit: flickr / James Jordan
This is normal. But yes, this is when my posting schedule went to hell. It’s been on my mind – failure – so it was hard to write about other things. I didn’t have the perspective that I needed to write clearly, and without blame. Initially, my explanation was that we were married to grad school – and cheating on it, with each other. Because honestly? That’s what I had been feeling like, for months. Then I got angry – at the two 30-somethings who had spent most of last winter in our apartment to the point where one day we looked at each other and asked, “how did we end up parenting two 30-somethings?” – that should have been our honeymoon period. They ruined it.
And, of course, he blamed me too – for working too much, and for taking that job in Shanghai last summer.
I am 24 years old, and I am having trouble balancing my ambition with my personal life. I don’t have children. I don’t want children. Partly because I think all this talk of “having it all” and “balance” is a load of crap. We make choices. We prioritize our careers. If we date someone as focused, we might never get to see them. If we date someone less focused, they don’t understand our choices. If we prioritize our personal life, we risk giving things up, making compromises for something that ultimately may not work out. This cuts both ways, of course, but somehow – call me a cynic, sure – a career seems a more certain and reliable thing than our relationship. I know we’re not supposed to say it and there are women that manage but… I can’t see how having children can not affect your career. And what if they grow up to be traffic wardens? Or politicians? Then what? I hear you love them no matter what but I have a hard time believing that is true of traffic wardens. (Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage(Amazon), by the way, is a fascinating exploration of women and marriage – and the compromises women make for family.)
I know very few grad students in relationships. Graduate school is not conducive to a balanced life, and as a result is often not conducive to relationships, other than those with anti-depressants, alcohol, and electronic devices.
Credit: flickr / squarewithin
So, in all, I’ve been knocked for six. And so, I’ve been doing less, whilst I try and regain my balance. It’s amazing; I’m properly living alone, for the first time in my life, and I have all this space – in my apartment, in my head, in my schedule, to just be. And of course I’ve used some of that in mindless TV watching – My Family, Lipstick Jungle, Brothers and Sisters and Big Bang Theory – but what’s been amazing is that when I’ve had to focus, I’ve created some of my best stuff. The other day, I woke up with the math clear in my head for a fractal. My workshop the other day was really successful, and I’m really proud of the content. I’ve read several books – including Women Don’t Ask (which merits it’s own blog post, and will get one). And I’ve been exercising more, and having the time to actual consider what I’m eating and when – rather than just refueling so I can continue to run about.
My life is changing, and that is really scary because it’s like starting over. But I think this pause is helpful – to take stock, to reevaluate. And I’m not going to change completely, but maybe I am going to do a little less, because when you’re constantly moving, you can’t see the view, and because doing less could mean doing fewer things better.
Last week, I deactivated my Facebook account. Why? There were a number of reasons, and I’d just found myself using it less and less. Since they rolled out the redesign the news feed seemed out of date (it might take days for something to show up), but the live feed was full of repetitive drivel so it wasn’t helpful for keeping up with what my friends were doing.
Perhaps the beginning of the end for me was the constant Farmville updates – which I (stupidly) didn’t disable until I’d got to the point when it felt like I actively disliked half the people I was “friends” with. And I know, you can block Farmville (I eventually did) but there are so many other applications that it didn’t seem to make a difference.
I like ambient awareness, I do, but I was concerned that I’d got to the point that whilst I could get a bunch of people to come to a party, I didn’t have many people with whom I’ll exchange phone calls just because. Is that where we’re going? Where we’ll have a close-but-not-that-close relationship with so many more people, but fewer close relationships? Perhaps it’s just my experience as someone who moved to another continent about 18 months ago knowing no-one. I don’t know.
However an @ message on Twitter has started to feel more intimate than the vast majority of the communication I was receiving on Facebook. The sheer volume of “I’m having a terrible day” / “why does no-one love me?” / “I’m so incredibly busy and important” updates was drowning out the great stuff that does get shared. I prefer Twitter, the lack of requirement to reciprocate, the character limits. Yes some people are still full of angst and over-sharing, but you can just quietly unfollow them. As well as quitting Facebook, I also did some cleaning of my stream on Twitter – some people I find are better in lists, because I want my main stream to be manageable. And that’s OK, everyone does it differently. They can unfollow me too, and that’s up to them.
So far, I have moments where I would normally check Facebook and I pause, but it’s been pretty easy to give it up. Perhaps in a while I’ll reactivate it and just be one of those people who is on Facebook, but never uses it. Or I’ll just leave it, because you can’t commit Facebook suicide anymore.
I’m scheduling this post for Valentines day, when I’m sure the blogosphere (and everywhere else) will be full of romance.
I’m not a big fan of Valentines day, myself. Last year I was in Japan with the Passive Aggressive, wondering if her inability to even go to the corner shop by herself would cause me to lose my mind. I sent my boyfriend a fruit basket. Before that, I was typically single for Valentines day.
This year, paper deadlines, assignment marking and mid-terms mean that it won’t be a romantic evening a deux. My boyfriend and I may not even see each other. I’m okay with that, I think it’s how someone treats you the other 364 days a year that matters. I wish we saw more of each other in general, not just on this one “special” day of the year.
Being an expat, being, in general, a bit of a nomad… makes a relationship different, I think. On the plus side, I’m more attractive because I’m a little bit exotic. On the negative, I don’t have the same support network (so depend on my boyfriend more) and in general I’m not as “fixed” in position.
My first stage of looking for a job (underway at the moment) is through connections. Because I’m international, my connections are too. I know that if I leave, we’re over – my boyfriend can’t/won’t come with right now. But I’ve never stayed anywhere for anyone – this stage in my life is not the time to change that.
This conflict is a dull ache. I’m trying to focus on getting a great job – on opportunities in Ottawa and elsewhere. Then we’ll see where that happens to be.
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It’s Not You: 27 (Wrong) Reasons You’re Single (Amazon) is a series of essays and anecdotes around themes. The themes are the things that you tell yourself, or that people tell you, about why it is you’re still alone.
(Amazon), by the way, is a fascinating exploration of women and marriage – and the compromises women make for family.)
