How to Even…Date

By CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue

There’s a lyric by Leonard Cohen (pictured at left) that we can’t afford to quote due to copyright law, but it was really profound and yet also dark. Let’s say one of his exes called Lenny up to tell him she’d married someone ‘who was just like him.’ (What do you do with information like that?) Being married, she said, was just like being single but lonelier. You have to be strong to survive, she said. Then she asked if he was interested in some time share condos in Cape Breton, but that’s another story.

In any case, that’s what dating is all about, really: that whole emotional mindstab we just described, but also with the possibility of bodily harm, if you’re femme.

So why do it? Because people are fickle af. After we’ve been single for a while, or sometimes when we’re still in a relationship, we start looking at that other-side-of-the-fence grass’s booty and salivating. We think, ‘Hey, maybe this time will be better.’ Of course, it won’t be. But it’s something we have to try because, otherwise, we would all, um, well, we sort of lost our train of thought there, but we’re sure it wasn’t important, anyway.

Dating is tough.

There are whole industries built around helping people find dates, and most of them have bigger budgets and more experience than we do. The bottom line is that…