This Week's Drama: Aging

I'm finally happy and I can't stop complaining

I just turned thirty-two and I feel like I know nothing.

Honestly, I couldn’t even tell you what skincare products to use (although I’ve recently been cleansing then using charlotte tilbury toner + tacha water cream twice a day and I do feel like it’s making a difference in my complexion).

I went to a twenty-something’s birthday party recently and was reminded how at that age, I felt like I knew eeeeverything. At twenty-five, with a unicorn constellation tattoo that accidentally looked like a penis on my ankle, I would tell YOU how to make decisions. I would tell you to break up with your partner, I would choose a therapist for you, I would fight with your libertarian aunt on facebook and I was sooooo serious about how serious everything was.

me on my 25th birthday

I was just like this one girl at the twenty-something birthday party who made an announcement that “THE BIRTHDAY GIRL IS COMING OUT TO THE PATIO IN A SEC AND WE’RE ALL GONNA SING HAPPY BIRTHDAY BUT LIKE WE ARE GONNA BE SUPER LOW KEY ABOUT IT BUT SERIOUSLY EVERYONE BE READY TO SING HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”

I don’t regret anything from my twenties BESIDES that tattoo that I’ve since gotten covered up, but now that I’m thirty-two with chronic neck pain and a distinctly grumpy response to the weather getting nicer, I do find myself envying my friends who are more settled down. I envy the certainty of owning a home, being legally bound to another person, or having whatever a 401k is. In fact, I’ve envied certainty my whole life. I remember being jealous as a kid that my mom was already married and didn’t have to wait and wonder whether a man would ever choose her. When she’d offer advice or comfort or any kind of perspective, I would think - ‘EASY FOR YOU TO SAY THAT THE ALIEN FROM SIGNS ISN’T UNDER MY BED! YOU’RE MARRIED! MUST BE NICE!’ I truly felt that if I was married, I wouldn’t even care if the alien from Signs was under my bed - I would LAUGH in the alien’s face and hoist my left ring finger at they/them like ‘HAVEN’T YOU HEARD, ALIEN? I HAVE A HUSBAND!!!!!!’

Now, I’m thirty-two and I’m not married and I live alone in a rented apartment with my cats and I am “seeing someone”. I did the unthinkable and met a man on the apps and truly nothing has made me feel older than “seeing someone” in my thirties. In my twenties, I would traipse across boroughs with my hello kitty backpack full of cigarettes and clean underwear to spend the night at any given boyfriend’s apartment. Now? I hunch and limp under the weight of my makeup bag and medications bag and laptop bag. I sweat through my jacket on the subway platform, and show up to my new man’s apartment with streaked mascara, hacking up a lung from my allergies, totally depleted of energy before our night even begins.

And this is what I’m supposed to keep doing. For at least a year, until it’s socially acceptable to talk about moving in together, and then another year or more before it’s socially acceptable to start fighting about an engagement, and basically by the time we get married, our registry is gonna include a honeyfund for a downpayment on a condo in a fifty-plus Floridian community. I’m exhausted even thinking about it! And in the meantime we’re supposed to figure out what to watch together vs. what we’re allowed to watch separately and whether The Regime even looks good and what to order for dinner?!?!

Sometimes, I wish I met the man I’m seeing in a plastic pod. I wish I learned about his family and friends while sipping a mocktail from a matte gold goblet, sheathed in a gender-color-coded fuzzy blanket. If we’d met in Netflix’s botched human experiment Love is Blind, then we could get engaged within weeks and married in a few weeks more and figure out all our relationship conflicts AFTER we’re legally bound together.

me if i was on Love is Blind p.s. why is there a random golf club

I tried to explain the concept of Love is Blind to my Dad recently and, needless to say, he was SHOCKED that anyone would participate in such a chaotic game just to “find love”. But again, easy for him to judge - he’s MARRIED and barely had to even date before he met my Mom! He doesn’t understand what it’s like to try to keep your heart open after being love bombed and then rejected by not one but TWO fully adult men who are almost a decade older than you but can’t seem to effectively communicate a single feeling beyond “I’m hungry”. He didn’t have to spend years swiping through people’s “dream dinner guest” and “best travel stories” while watching his friends be treated like celebrities on their wedding weekends and hating himself for feeling jealous and sad when he should just be happy for them and then spending the whole post-wedding bagel brunch hyper-fixated on how his life is VOID of something and how nothing will be OK until that void is filled.

This is what I presume the participants of Love is Blind are seeking - an overnight solution to the life-void-problem. They may be successful flight attendants or fitness entrepreneurs, but they don’t have a spouse or wedding photos to post on a yearly basis and they want to quickly get that out of the way, even if their new husband has built an entire personality around wearing Hawaiian shirts or if their new wife will only have sex with them after a vasectomy.

If I did meet my guy this way, and if my wedding vows systematically included a YES or NO answer to staying with him, I suppose I’d be more certain about the future, in technical terms, but then… uncertainty is kinda hot and fun. There is so much excitement in knowing there’s more to find out about this person who has captured my attention. I still get butterflies when he texts me and nervous if he doesn’t. After lugging my bags across the city, I get to see him at the door with a glass of water waiting for me, and after he lugs his stuff over to my place, I get to receive the “here!” text and when I let go of the idea that something is missing, I find myself giddy and smiling, before I even get to the door.