God Dammit, I’m Dating Again

At some point over the course of becoming engaged to and, eventually, marrying my now-husband, it occurred to me that my dating days were over. And what a colossal relief. Dating – or, pretending to like somebody while trying to decide whether or not you actually do, and all the while knowing that they’re doing the same – is deeply unpleasant. Now that I’m firmly in the “desperate for parent friends” phase of having a child, I’ve found myself experiencing a host of familiar sensations – anxiety, hope, unease, excitement, insecurity. I’m changing my outfit three times before going out. At night, when the baby’s in bed and I can finally relax, I’m trying to decide how mortified I should be over everything I said to the moms at the play gym. Turns out, the search for new parent friends is literally just dating. Thanks, I hate it.

Few experiences are more isolating than becoming a parent, and yet some 70% of women my age have children. We literally walk past each other constantly, in grocery stores, on sidewalks, at the park. We nod to each other timidly as we hurry our strollers past each other, while wondering how a person goes about finding other people with babies. We are surrounded by potential friends, yet we feel completely alone.

Much like my dating days, when I go out for the day there’s always a tiny part of me wondering is this the day I finally meet someone? Is this the day a casual conversation at the playground will lead to something more? Could a chance encounter in the post office line lead to exchanging phone numbers and meeting for coffee? It’s on my mind when I get dressed for the day. When I haul my child off to the park or the play gym or the neighborhood’s most family-friendly brewery, I take care to avoid any appearance pitfalls that may give somebody the wrong impression, or perhaps an accurate impression I don’t want them to have. After all, it takes a lot to start chatting with a complete stranger. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we’re immediately sizing up those around us, trying to decide which people might be the most interesting, or that we might have the most in common with, or whose lives are closest to the lives we ourselves wish we were living. I’d hate for a potential to friend to get scared off because I unknowingly dressed like I might invite them to go foraging for berries in the mountains at 5am. Most moms are just hoping to drink their morning coffee while it’s still hot, and a walking Patagonia mannequin might freak those moms out.

No, my hope is to appear like a reasonably-put-together mom who’s open to new friends but isn’t desperate for them. That my house is clean. That I’m fun and spontaneous and can go with the flow. These are all lies, but aren’t we all just lying to ourselves? And if we lie to ourselves consistently enough, and for a long enough time, doesn’t it eventually become the truth? A little bit of makeup to give the appearance that my mornings aren’t absolute chaos, but not so much that it looks like I dressed up for the occasion. A neat ponytail because I’m relaxed and I just happened to notice this place on my way past and thought I’d stop in! But my hair is never done done, lest anyone start to wonder how I have the time to do my hair. Just how much Bluey is she letting her kid watch? Clothes roomy enough and stretchy enough to subconsciously suggest I might be able to wrangle their kids along with my own were our relationship to advance to that level, but not so overtly athletic that I might invite anyone to go for a run. Not fashionable enough to make another mom feel bad about herself. Not modest enough to suggest I plan to homeschool.

It’s impossible to know if the person who says hi to me by the slide is just being polite, or if they’re interested in more. Do they already have plenty of friends, their social abundance making it easy to strike up a conversation because there’s nothing they want? Will it be a perfectly nice conversation, maybe a few laughs, even the revelation of a shared interest or two, and then we part ways, never to see each other again? If I suggest we meet sometime for a beer, perhaps give them my number, will they laugh about it later to their real friends? “And she thought,” said in hysterics that very evening, “she really thought I wanted to see her again! Can you imagine?” “Just because you said hi at the slide?” a friend gasps. “How humiliating!”

And if I do manage to arrange that play date at a brewery, toddler and Cheerios in tow, I’m likely to be up all night rehashing everything I said. Call it a deep appreciation for the stories that reveal our underlying humanity, or call it nervous oversharing after one to two beers, but some potential new friends may think it’s strange of me to tell them about my late grandfather’s contested will, or to mention that, back in my bartending days, I woke up on a rooftop balcony that was not mine upon occasion.

But to this I will say that I don’t want a superficial interaction. We have enough of those. We already interact superficially by living alongside each other and never saying anything more than “glad the weather cleared up.” We already interact superficially by going to our Zoom meetings as the versions of ourselves we want other people to think we are, rather than the versions we truly are. And by giving so little of our true selves, we don’t give anyone else anything to possibly connect to – like trying to climb a glass wall. No, if I’m lucky enough to find the kind of people who want a real friendship, who don’t just want to put on clean clothes and sit politely alongside each other, I damn well want you to tell me about your sister who’s addicted to pills, about your aunt who paid $4,000 for a designer dog and feeds him exclusively shrimp and corn cobs. In fact, if you have that aunt and you don’t tell me about her, how dare you. And you better believe I’ll tell you, probably within the week, about the pimp who owes me eight hundred dollars, and all about my going out tooth. Because those things make us individuals and not just a part of the environment, an object in your physical space, a tree or bush or bird. And for god’s sake, the next time you’re asked to say something interesting about yourself, stop saying that you hate cilantro. Tell them the prettiest place you’ve ever peed your pants.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see, before too long, something like Tinder but for friends. And really, I bet it already exists. I can certainly see the appeal. The sheer number of people in the world makes us feel, somehow, entirely alone. And it does get discouraging, sharing what seems like a meaningful interaction with somebody just to never see or hear from them again. It’s appealing to have intentions out of the way from the beginning, to be connected only with others looking for the same thing. But again we face the perils of immediate and superficial dismissal – the swiping left because of what we see in a few photos and a tweet-length bio. Think about the closest friends of your life – are there any whose best selves would not be captured by a Tinder profile? Are there any you would never have spoken to if you weren’t, for one reason or another, placed in each other’s paths by circumstance? I’ve had plenty. This person runs marathons? Next. This person loves going to Vegas? No thanks. This person likes to spend her weekends getting “carried away” in her craft room? Absolutely not. By immediately dismissing those people in the way that an online-dating-esque platform would encourage, I could be missing out on some of the great friendships of my life. What a shame that would be, and all because I was – what? – looking for somebody just like me? Looking for somebody I wish I could be?

And I’m starting to think – at the end of the day, isn’t dating just decision fatigue? Just like looking into an overstuffed closet and despairing in our overwhelm, is our scarcity actually caused by our excess? Would we be better off if our human closet contained just the few dozen people in our village? Humans simply can’t be trusted with so many options. With five single men in the village we decide which one we like the best. With fifty single men in the village, we realize there must be more somewhere else.

I’m choosing now to believe that when they say “it takes a village to raise a child” they mean “it takes the handful of people you’ve settled near, your friends by way of chance and repetition and the importance of working together so everyone survives the winter” to raise a child. And in that way, I despair this abundance of social possibility. Humans weren’t meant to shop for people like this.