A Single Life

By the time you reach your Jesus year (32) you will be able to classify your friends into 2 groups: those who like Taylor Swift and those who don’t. The in-betweens you can probably shake off. Cheap jokes aside (and I’m tired yo), when you reach a certain age you will actually be able to group your friends into the marrieds (or those who may as well be married) and the singles. There are outliers (there are always fucking outliers thank you very much Malcolm Gladwell) but for the most part this bifurcated segmentation model (using business speak makes me feel better about my $100MBA) holds true for like 90% of your friends.

I was thinking about this segmentation model a couple of weeks ago as I attended Patti LuPone’s recent Broadway review with my friend and fellow single, JP. JP and I were seated at a four-person table with two other gay men who we quickly befriended. Why did we make friends? Because we were two gay men at a Broadway performance entitled: Lady with a Torch. 54 below is basically like a bathhouse for theatre geeks.

After the show, as our foursome trotted out to a nearby bar for drinks, I finally decided to ask if our new friends (Chad and Jesse) were romantic partners or not, a question that had been nagging me since Chad chastised Jesse for singing along during one of Patti’s songs. “We’re not sleeping together,” Chad told me, “We’re just gays of a certain age.”

I knew immediately what he meant; they were thirty or forty something gay men who were single, childless and whose only attachment in life was commitment a low carb diet and gym routine. At forty it was unbecoming to dance the night away at The Ritz with twenty-something twinks, but if not that, then what alternative?

Well in 2014, for the single person, there are thankfully a multitude of alternatives. The very modern single isn’t some sort of sad-suck Katherine Heigl character, spoon-feeding themselves chocolate ice cream, petting a mangy cat, in a frumpy housecoat, and waiting for James Marsden to come along and solve their 27 dresses dilemma.

There’s a resourcefulness combined with a pleasant contentedness amongst most single people I know. Perhaps this overly defensive bluster, “I don’t want to settle for just anyone” is simply code word for: “OMG I’m so fucking alone please see through my pathetic attempts at masking my feelings of loneliness and inferiority by setting me up with ANYONE.”

The truth, like the X Files, is probably somewhere in the middle; single people tend to have an accepting contentedness of their lot in life while if you caught them two margs deep after work on a Wednesday they’d probably admit they would be interested in meeting the right person, caveat, “should that person exist.” This is easier said than done.

As my new friend told me the other day at our office party, “I pay my own rent, I have a good job, I’m not just looking for someone to keep the bed warm.” And in an era where “I can’t get no satisfaction” is both a quaint relic of the 80’s and a time before dildos and on demand sex apps existed, if you’ve been single for the last four years its hard to understand why you would want to let someone tell you what type of throw pillow you could or should buy.

This is 2014 people – what happens in West Elm, stays in West Elm.

My mother often remarks, during our awkward conversations about my dating life, about how hard it is to meet people once you’re no longer in school.

“Is there anyone special in your life?” She asks with earnest.

“Nope.”

“Well… I don’t know where people meet people after college.”

My mother met my father on a beach when they were teenagers. Instead of Tinder, I suspect their romance was like an asexual (cause its my parents) version of Grease (oh wait, John Travolta is by his very nature asexual). And while my mother is empathetic in the nicest, most supportive way possible that a Jewish mother can be when discussing whether or not her son has met another boy, I tend to quibble with her thinking; it’s not hard to meet people, its hard to meet people to date.

I recently went on a couple of dates with who lives a couple of blocks away from me in Chelsea. I think I liked him because he was handsome, successful, kinda awkward and on the muscular side of the street. On our second date he admitted that his diet consisted entirely of organic food; and we’re not talking an “oh I go to Trader Joes every Sunday” type of diet. The only meal he had eaten outside of his home in the last two years was at a Four Seasons Restaurant where they served organic meat. At some point as we sat on a bench in Central Park talking about our families, I had an out of body experience and flash-forwarded to some point in our near future where I imagined a dramatic dénouement to our relationship, “SOMETIMES I JUST FUCKING WANT TO GO TO SHAKESHACK.”

I mean look… I love me some Gwyneth Paltrow, I’m just not sure I would want to live with and or marry some sort of Chelsea version of Goop or “Choop” if you will.

This is, to be totally honest, what concerns me about those of us who are late in life singles (although I do wonder if this concern is more acute in the gay male community where biological clocks are not ticking like Marisa Tomei’s in My Cousin Vinnie); as we grow older and become entrenched in our own single world do we become less open minded in our capacity to develop a meaningful relationship that exists beyond the binary of sex or friendship? Or put another way: are we too afraid or unwilling to accept our status quo (which has probably come to define us), and which we also view as a pretty decent one?

A couple of weeks ago, in Los Angeles for work, I spent a day alone exploring the city. While I was at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) I overheard a couple get into an epic argument over the duration of their cultural interlude. The dude was ready to cut and run (“Swirls, I get it”), while the girl had some unfinished business with Van Gogh. Me? I ducked out when I wanted to and spent the afternoon lying on the beach in Santa Monica and reading the Hunger Games.

Playing a game of would you rather… would I rather spend an afternoon, as I did last Saturday (actually to be honest it lasted 45 minutes), being interviewed by a single gay doctor about my past dating history, feelings on threesomes, open relationships and whether I was a gold star or platinum gay (this was a date, not a medical check up) or would I rather sit on my sofa (!) and finish the second half of Mockingjay? The answer is mockingjay and Team Gale.

Recently, after a couple of dates with a fellow whose intentions I couldn’t quite figure out, I called a friend to ask for her advice. “He’s just not that into you,” was her curt and obvious reply; but I wondered if the last 2000’s cop-out stopped being applicable to single people above 35? My gentleman caller was 39 and for all intensive purposes had been single most of his life – he may not have been into me (I am willing to admit that some people just aren’t that into all this – I mean I’ve been propositioning Aaron Schock for years and no dice) but I’m also pretty sure he may not have been that into anyone. As we discussed fall plans on our walk home from dinner I realized he was back and forth between Europe most weekends between Labor Day and Yanksgiving.

Did he like anyone enough to quell his ability and need to travel for work?

Truthfully his malaise sounded pretty common; if you’re contentedly single and you meet someone randomly off of a mobile app to date, do you really want to interrupt your entire life just so you can wind up six months later arguing about Van Gogh at LACMA, when instead you could be cruising out to Santa Monica at the speed of Singletown, population you?

I know the marrieds will comment about how amazing having a partner is and I don’t doubt it, but what I do know, is that for a single person who is used to be single (And ok with that) dating can feel like you’re forcing a square peg into a round hole (make an anal sex joke, I dare you).

This is not to say that single people are necessarily introverted – what I suspect that my mother has correctly identified is that as you age dating becomes an entirely different activity from making friends. Whereas I’m still making friends (I swear!) – dating how now become an active sport that requires multiple avenues, a/b testing of photos, and multiple account logins.

Friendships, no matter age, are created by natural progression built off of shared and common experiences. I have just started a relatively new job and I’ve been surprised that I’ve actually made some decent friends out of it. The reality is that no matter how old you are – at some point you will wind up drunk at an office party doing a tequila shot with your coworker and thinking to yourself, I fucking love this asshole.

Yet when it comes to actual assholes… the avenues aren’t as natural as they used to be.

At 30, or however old, the chances of you dating the person you drunkenly made out with at 80’s night at a bar is probably pretty low, instead you’re left with sitting across the table from someone you met via the internet in a forced social experience. If friendship is our natural state, dating is a social contract that says I like you enough to create shared experiences that may or may or invoke sticking my appendage into or more of your orifices. Truthfully, unless your biological is ticking, ticking, ticking, sometimes it doesn’t seem like there’s anything wrong living in a natural state of solitude…