I’m about to get really real here so brace yourselves.
I’m lonely. Maybe it’s just tonight that I am feeling so isolated, nevertheless it feels deeper seated and longer lived. I don’t know why, but I’ve often found feelings of loneliness particularly difficult to own, like they are some sort of failure. I pride myself on my independence and self sufficiency; I go to movies alone, I live alone, I walk into parties alone…and I’m ok with all that. But I won’t deny that it’s oftentimes difficult. New Years is fast approaching and I find myself, yet again, dateless and without dependable plans.
I know it’s not so simple, but I just want to pose this singular, self pitying question to the void – what is WRONG with me that I am dateless on New Years, and coming up on yet another Valentines Day spent on my own watching rom coms and eating popcorn?
Alright, I know it’s not so uncomplicated a situation…but it feels that way in my weaker moments. “It’s not you”, say my girlfriends, “it’s the plethora of retarded and indecisive guys out there”….or the fact that Manhattan houses an unlimited quantity of beautiful women and homosexual men, but few single, attractive and somewhat kind heterosexual men. Most of the time I believe this, but in this lonely late night moment, I feel like I’m the un-desirable actor here.

I’m not one for labels, or rushed commitments, but I do like to sleep beside another warm person’s body, or feel the pressing and reassuring weight of strong arms around my small shoulders. It saddens me how constantly I’ve ached for those things in my life and how simultaneously seldom I have been able to depend upon them with any consistency.

This all sounds rather “woe is me,” and it is to a certain extent, but pointed at the fact that, despite my adamant assertions of indifference towards the opposite sex, I care. And despite my course of study, so steeped in critical gender theory, I feel like a little piece of myself goes missing when I don’t have a date to get excited for or an interesting guy to sit next to in class. I resent the idea that a woman is completed by a man, and yet I subscribe to it on some unconscious level, I must or I wouldn’t be writing this.