The longest romantic relationship I’ve had thus far in life has been with my eighth-grade boyfriend. To be fair, we dated for a year! I may never have entered his home, but we sure did exchange those long, gushy “I love you to the moon and back” texts. Since then, though, nothing. I hadn’t thought about this as something others noticed about me until recently. I was sitting around my friend’s kitchen table with her and her boyfriend and she raised this fact about me: “Did you know {author} has never had a boyfriend?” to which her boyfriend followed up with, “Why do you think that is?” I gave a ramble of a response, speaking in platitudes, saying something about how “the stars had never really aligned” etc. On one hand, I felt embarrassed. On the other, a little flattered? Like this fact somehow made me cool or “different.” Embarrassed, though, because it exposed a gap in my experience as a person. At this stage, it feels as though one should have had at least one serious thing. I felt awkwardly juvenile, like a kid at the adults’ table.
In moments like that, not having a boyfriend makes me feel like less of a person. A lot of times, though, it inflates me with a sense of independence. The whole “don’t let a guy define you” has a pretty strong foothold in my mind. Like look at me, happy, no boyfriend, totally in tune with my own soul. The reality is, though, lots of people have “defined” me. For example, my mom is definitely responsible for my love of theater and music, my dad my interest in sports and running. I am literally a biological amalgamation of the two of them. My best friend’s conversational mannerisms have infiltrated my speech to the point where our texts are nearly indistinguishable (I think a game of “who wrote that text?” between the two of us would be very difficult). I am much more an aggregation of others than I am some totally independent being insulated from influence.
When a boy becomes the source of inspiration for a habit or interest, this seems to sap it of its innocence and credibility. The interest feels corrupted and insincere. I know I’m not alone in this. I’ve noticed that women seem to feel a sense of embarrassment when they admit something is the result of a boy’s influence. Like, my friend, for example, guiltily attributing her newfound interest in photography to her boyfriend (ish), an avid nature photographer.
I also think a partial explanation for my singlehood is the fact that I have never met a boy who could occupy the status of “boyfriend” without his “boyfriend-ness,” so to speak, being grossly apparent. Like hey guys meet my BOYFRIEND, his only relevance is the role he plays as BOYFRIEND in my life. I think if the person were “right” it wouldn’t feel that way. But I also think part of dating someone is buying into, or at least accepting the cringe factor of a romantic relationship. But, it’s like, what do you mean they’re going to be my PeRsOn. You mean they can’t always just be some flighty, seductive, elusive figure that I watch from afar, forever preserving their mystique because of the sheer fact that we NEVER SPEAK. Yes, {author}, dating someone means speaking to them on a regular basis. Maybe I like the little equilibrium that emerges from these one-sided relationships. We never speak, you never become a problem for me. Sure, we never get to date and do all the things that dating people do, but I have friends to hang out with, books to read, standardized tests to study for, etc. (there I go with the independence shtick). There is no reason why a boyfriend’s presence should prevent me from doing all these things. But okay, what? We text each other goodnight and you call me pretty as we eat ice cream on a city bench? That actually does sound like a sweet prospect—I’m not heartless! But see how juvenile my conception of a romantic relationship is? Eating ice cream on a park bench? C’mon, life isn’t a rom-com.
Sometimes I have moments where I remember how distinctly modern my existence is. I think about my grandmother who already had two children at my age. I probably would’ve already been married off 100 years ago. Marrying for love is a relatively new concept. Nice to know I’m in fairly uncharted terrain.
The “situationship” (which for me took the form of an on-again, off-again, sometimes romantic, mostly sexual relationship) is a key feature of Gen-Z dating culture. I found myself in one of these throughout most of high school and I think it shaped a lot of my ideas about what it meant to have a boy in one’s life in a more than platonic capacity. With no label of boyfriend or girlfriend, we could do lots of the activities of those in a committed relationship, like hold hands, and cuddle, without officially being “boyfriend and girlfriend.” There was no expectation to do “date-nights” or text each other in the morning. It was more cringe-proof than an official, labeled romantic relationship. But, this also came with the constant fear of him kissing me goodbye at any moment with little explanation.1 I came to see the cat-and-mouse, push-and-pull dynamic, which in truth caused immense emotional turmoil, as synonymous with intrigue. To be unstable was to be fiery and sexy. Stable, boring. Now, with more regulated hormones (16–17-year-old me was something else) and some years of existence under my belt, I can recognize the insanity of this view. Yet, at the same time, I have not experienced anything that has proved it wrong.
The key to solving these problems, I imagine, is finding someone that I actually like. But finding someone you actually like is difficult in today’s dating scene. I see three options: work, mutual friends, or the apps (and maybe the possibility of a bar, which I rarely go to these days). Work is tricky because there are real stakes if it doesn’t work out. A mutual friend seems okay, but unlikely. I always hear people say “Oh, you’ll meet someone through a friend!” and then have a lot of trouble seeing how that would actually pan out in my own life. And then, the third option—the apps. Mixed feelings about the apps. My immediate reaction is disgust. I think it’s reasonable to not want to meet the love of your life via an algorithm. But if I met someone on the apps I actually just liked, my opposition to them, in theory, wouldn’t matter much. I mean, really, finding someone on the apps doesn’t seem any less random than hitting it off with someone at a bar, even if unsexy and less romantic. Also, there seems to be a strong presence of normal, happy, interesting people on the apps, which gives me hope. So, I’m happy to give the Hinge dates a try for the time being (shoutout to Cambridge Boy if you’re reading this).
The straight answer to my friend’s boyfriend’s question is that not having a boyfriend hasn’t made me unhappy enough to try really hard to get one. But also, in taking too much pride in my independence, maybe I’ve denied myself something special—the tenderness and warmth that comes with truly caring for and, yes, feeling dependent on someone romantically. I remember an English teacher from high school saying something about this. That she loved Jane Eyre as a text because it seemed to suggest that to fall in love was not to compromise one’s dignity as a woman. There is nothing inherently anti-feminist about romance. And in fact, we rob ourselves of something in the name of “defying expectations.” So boys, I look forward to meeting you and hope that you will prove me wrong.
Footnotes
He did. ↩