Single, feminine, first declension
In the three years I’ve had facebook, never once did I set my status as “single.” Call me obsessive, but I used to read very deeply into the language and anthropology of facebook: if you don’t list whether you’re “interested in men” or “women,” it either means you’re gay or creative. If you list you’re “married,” “engaged,” or “complicated with” a friend of the same gender, you prefer to keep your relationship status ambiguous. Although sometimes it means you’re in a real relationship, often you have an aversion to considering yourself totally single. Because with loose ends, booty texts, and college, how can one be truly “single?”
At the end of high school, I was married to Linda Zheng. When I was embroiled in drama freshman year, she divorced me and, as revenge, I married Tony Xing for a year. When he and his real girlfriend put up their relationship status, I was left again without a spouse — notice, how I never do the leaving — and after Linda and her then-wife, Thu, separated, we reunited. We broke up a second time because Linda had a boyfriend, only for me to be married to my roommates and Monica, on and off, and finally, this past year, Linda and I reunited for a third time.
We finally, truly broke up in the late fall and I finally, truly put up “single.”
Whereas I was always having good fun by marrying Linda, Tony, and my roommates, during my marriage droughts, I never put up “single.” According to my anthropological reading of facebook, “single” communicated that I was too available and too literal. I haven’t been in a relationship in college, but I relied on all the million little pieces of drama, random encounters, stupid weekends, as validation that my life was more exciting than “single.”
Somehow, I had insecurely equated “single” with unattractive and straight-edged. I know that “single” has a huge spectrum of meanings on facebook and it’s also the emblem word for the promiscuous set. But it’s quite obvious from one browse of my profile, that I’m not using “single” to flaunt my egregious sexuality.
Whatever meaning visitors may now endow my single status with, I realize that it’s important to me. Not that clicking the single box was monumental. I hadn’t decided — wow, I’m going to fling away my past insecurities and just say, loudly and boldly, I’m single. I just did it one day, thoughtlessly. It was only in retrospect that I realized, how funny, I’d never been “single” before. Why? And why am I so adamantly “single?” To complement an April Fool’s Day joke, I switched my status to nothing, but the moment I exposed the joke, I felt a compulsive itch to restore “single.”
I was sitting with Iyad and Saadet at Fattoush on Ben Gurion Street, and we were each describing our own insecurities. I couldn’t admit mine fully aloud because it sounded so stupid, and so I managed:
I’m really scared of getting close with a guy, because I don’t believe in the genuineness of his intentions. Even if he is a good person, I’m not sure if he’s being transparent with me or, in a gentle way, is still playing me. And so, it’s so hard for me to let anyone truly in.
What I articulated then was the saner version of what I’m going to admit now: I have deep problems with not feeling attractive or pretty enough, and I’ve gotten used to assuming that romance happens to everyone else — not me. While this is pathetic, there is a lot of resentment too and I oscillate between feeling very insecure and silly to very indignant and haughty. I tell myself justifications like, “well, it’s not as if I’d date those guys anyway” or “I don’t like this or that aspect about him.” When truly, it’s much simpler: I’m twenty, I’m not looking for a husband, so why can’t I just go with my feelings?
When Dan Suo prodded me online, I realized that the deeper part of myself where I’ve kept my emotions wrapped is still too vulnerable. I, myself, don’t even know how to touch or handle it. I’m happy that I’ve fallen out of love with love and out of lust with lust (and the college hook-up attitude, altogether). But sometimes, cheesily, my anxiety reminds me of Lena’s in New York 2007:
I’m incredibly scared of loss. And I know I shouldn’t feel like I lose something by sleeping with someone, but I do. I decided to stop having sex because I was sick of giving away all these pieces of myself and subsequently worrying about unintentional attachment, ill-advised yearning.
Last month, she wrote a response to that post:
I feel sad that I was so utterly broken that I was incapable of experiencing any sort of emotion toward men […] I was miserly with trust, and once I had mentally checked out of the dating game, no one had any chance of penetrating my emotional armor or anything else for that matter. And yet, as closed off as I was, I was undeniably happy that summer and happy to go back to school and happy to be alone. I was finally free of seemingly endless heartbreaks and disappointments, because I had ceased to hope. And in a strange, satisfying way, I was incredibly at peace for the first time in a long time.
I haven’t experienced bad relationship karma to the degree that Lena has, and so I don’t think my own “mental checkout from the dating game” is as heavy or resolute. I feel simply freed from myself. While my insecurities will recur, they’re not accompanied with the deadening thud of hope, that I have to be better and change. Ironically, I’ve found strange faith in faithlessness.
I’m faithless about the endurance of feelings, infatuation, need, but also, pain, awkwardness, embarassment, regret. The second list is longer.
