No Hope, No Harm, Just Another False Alarm

I've been single for a long while, but it's not as sad as it sounds. There is certainly a distinction to be made between "single" and "alone." And another to be made between "alone" and "lonely." I'd expound more on the last one, but I know from experience that nothing sounds lonelier than trying to convince another person that you're not actually lonely. It doesn't matter what tone of voice you either attempt or even achieve, it's only ever going to be received as shout-crying.

It's self-evident bordering on condescending to point out the ways in which one might be single and still also fulfillingly, affirmatively, even exhaustively socially active. For evidence I'd just have to cite every single piece of successful popular culture interesting to young people over all of the history of human expression. It's not even a genre, it's just... everything. I'm not complaining about cliche here, striving singledom is just an obvious point of conflict, comedy and dramatic tension, huddling several unattached, attractive people around each other, outfitted with professional makeup, good lighting and an invisible room full of writers to chamber the woo-pitching and bon mots and you've got yourself long-running network series and maybe even a cultural phenomenon. Every generation has its Friends, its Sex and the City, its Big Bang Theory or whatever. They buzz along on the ancient question of "omg which of these pretty people are going to fuck and when?" And then, not coincidentally, literally all of these end when half or more of them decide to no longer be single. Nobody wants to watch happily coupled/married people. And don't say Modern Family at me, I'm convinced people only watched that to try to solve the puzzle posed by the writers: why would any of these people ever choose to be together, let alone stay together? It's a show about how all married people actually hate one another. No one ever said it, but the tension really was waiting to see if this was the week when Claire drowned Phil in the bathtub.

You can doubt this theory if you want, but I just refer you back to Ed O'Neill's previous work in Married... With Children, a (mostly) terrible show but maybe the most nakedly honest acknowledgment of the public's level of tolerance for un-single people. There will be expressed contempt (in this case, blatantly) or it will be a show you've never heard of that was cancelled after four episodes that cost some executive their job.

I've been out there, active, busy, accompanied. Maybe not sitcom-levels of active, but no actual human is. Those are fantasies of carefree living, where existence is just a series of hang sessions in various well-appointed urban spaces. The slog and reversals of trying and finding are too prosaic to be actually entertaining. It's an interesting phenomenon where the living of it is fascinating and compelling (I meet new people, all with unique life stories to share) but watching it on TV (dateless nights watching Youtube food videos or blog writing punctuated by the occasional mildly pleasant but ineffectual meet-up of indeterminate resolution) would break remote controls as people couldn't possibly change the channel fast enough. Overall it's neither enough of a swelling crescendo of anticipation to be engrossing nor enough of a cringing parade of failure to warrant a squirming hate-watch. An iced tea in a Starbucks as two people talk (positively! with grace and clarity and reflectiveness!) about their divorces and then go their separate ways is exactly the rating smash it sounds like. It would be like watching a half hour of someone describing one of their dreams: it's really only interesting to them, at best an imposition to everyone else.

I say this progressing toward the likelihood of breaking my single-ness. It's a process of discovery and caution and awareness and care, but I'm probably not going to write about it here, at least not directly. Nobody wants to hear about some other person's happiness. You write those things down, but then you give them to the other person in the relationship and only them. Other people in the world you nod politely to and make smalltalk about global warming or how this pandemic thing has really got some surprising legs to it. It's the commonality of doom or it's nothing. It's the struggle that binds us. Picking one person to be alone with, that necessarily, in all the ways, draws us apart. But at least it likely also means you're having regular sex while that's happening. Again, though, it's polite to keep that shit to yourself.