On Arrangements in Blue and Embracing Spinsterhood
I deactivated all of my dating app profiles this week. I did this because I feel an increasing disinterest in communicating with strangers for the eventual purpose of finding someone to share my life with, and my continued insistence on trying feels unfair to myself as well as to the people I interact with. I've only been on a single date from any of these apps in the past five years, and while it was a wonderful date with someone I enjoyed talking to, someone who wanted to keep talking and watching movies together and sending me packages of handmade crafts, I eventually cut things off because I just didn't feel like I had the energy for it. I told myself that was a sign that we weren't compatible and it would have been worse to force it, and there was truth in that, but more significantly, I think I don't know how to fit romance into my life. I want it very much, but I can't make it feel possible. I can't make it feel healthy or sustainable.
The thing is that I only feel capable of romance with friends. I need to live in the relationship long enough to feel safe, certain that it has staying power, that I'm valued for more than the short term benefits I can provide someone. I have too often devoted myself to people who only want the short term benefits, the easy, surface things, the uncomplicated things that bring pleasure and nothing else. There's nothing wrong with that if both people are on the same wavelength, but it's not a wavelength I can exist on for long. I always feel devalued eventually, less than, and there's nothing wrong with that either. It's inconvenient to move so slowly and require so much platonic buildup before I develop romantic or sexual feelings, but it is what it is. And what it is is a way of being that doesn't lend itself to dating apps. I don't want to be romanced by someone who doesn't know me and hasn't earned the right to speak to me intimately. I don't want to try to feel things more quickly than I feel them. I want stability and security and comfort, paired with passion, yes, but unfolding slowly and sweetly over time so that I know it's real.
Because I've been considering all of these things, I'm attempting to return to reading Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone by Amy Key, a book I picked up months ago and abandoned after reading a very small amount of it. I hoped it might resonate more this time around, as I'm untangling my feelings on romance and as I've just passed the five-year anniversary of my last breakup, but unfortunately it still isn't. It's terribly repetitive and exhausting, self-indulgent in a way I normally appreciate in memoirs but hate in this one, obsessed with men despite the premise of exploring singlehood and doggedly determined not to meaningfully interrogate any of the issues it raises. Some of this might be a case of mismatched expectations, me wanting it to be something it never set out to be. The way it's marketed is as a bold manual for navigating life alone, Amy Key exploring her feelings about chronic singleness and reveling in the pleasures a solo life can provide, and it's very much not any of that. Any moments of pleasure she manages to find in her life without romance are fleeting at best, quickly glossed over in favor of retreading the same territory again and again.
She is bitter about being single. She seems to believe that her achievements and experiences have no real value unless she's partnered, that she deserves no love or care if it doesn't come from a romantic partner. She resents her partnered friends and begrudges them any expressions of happiness that come from it, as well as any expressions of heartbreak when their relationships don't last. Her thinking seems to be that at least they had relationships to grieve, whereas she's been single for half her life. Everything she does or feels is lacking because there is no one by her side to affirm its meaning for her, meaning that can only come from romantic love. It is so tedious to read, even as their are glimmers of relatability in it.
Perhaps some of my feelings about it stem from my fear that my writing is the same. I'm aware of my tendency to focus on the same themes, unable to leave them alone until I feel like I've written my way to some sort of closure or, failing that, simply mined all the depths there are to mine of a given subject. I hope it doesn't eventually turn to bitterness and a level of self-obsession that brings with it no room for growth or new realizations, but would I know if it did? I'm not sure and I worry about it.
I don't worry about becoming embittered by singlehood, though, because what I know about myself is that I love my own company. I love solitude. Most of my hobbies are solitary hobbies, reading and writing and listening to podcasts and watching things, and sleeping in a bed alone is so, so nice, so much room to spread out and toss and turn, and few things make my whole body loosen with relief like coming home to my quiet, empty house after a period of socializing. It's expensive to live alone and it's hard when emotionally difficult things are happening, like the time when my cat was sick and though I could call and text loved ones about it, there was no one physically here with me and that lack of support was deeply felt. Sometimes I get lonely and I want someone to lean against, to pet my hair and kiss my face and reassure me, to experience mundane things with and to have mundane conversations with. I want the body alongside mine, the intermingled clothing, the trading off of domestic tasks. But I think those things have become idealized in my brain in a way that isn't reflective of reality, and regardless, I know myself to be selfish at my core. I don't want to take someone else's preferences and schedule into consideration and I want to keep my routines the way I like them and I want to decorate my space in a way that pleases me.
This is where I've felt the most kinship with Amy Key while reading Arrangements in Blue, during her recountings of the process of making a space her own. Collecting things over years, arranging them just so in her apartment, inviting friends to spend time with her for dinner parties and overnight visits and finding joy in their positive reactions to the environment she has cultivated. I related deeply when she described her worry over and dislike for the things roommates brought with them, when they didn't fit her aesthetic and she had to figure out how to be okay with shared living. I would like the book so much more if it devoted more time to this than to the endless ruminations on how little worth she has and how little things matter without another person to be coupled with. Or even if both things had equal time, because of course it's not all positivity and light, and we live in a society and that society tells us we're incomplete without marriage and babies and a lucrative career. It's natural that we would be affected by that to some degree, especially as women.
I have been single for five years, and during that time I have had flirtations, have convinced myself I was in love and then experienced the real thing, have been heartsore and heartbroken and heart confused. I have thought that I would uproot my whole life for someone, have wished someone would uproot their life for me, have gone on the one aforementioned date, have tried and failed to form lasting connections with various people from various dating apps. And throughout all of this, what has been constant is my deepening relationship with myself, my evolving understanding of myself. What has been constant is friendship, the steadfast love of people who know me and see me and accept me for who I am. What has been constant are words, my own and other people's. What has been constant is the slow and steady work of making a life and making myself a person who can make a life. These are the things that matter to me, things I can trust. This is what I have built my foundation on, and it's a good foundation, a solid one. It's one that will last.
Maybe someday, eventually, one of my carefully grown and lovingly tended friendships will bloom into romance, and maybe then I'll feel like it's something I can expand my life to accommodate. But I'll be fine if it doesn't. Today I took a long shower, put on a green dress I love despite its simplicity and some green hoop earrings, spent time out in the fresh air, fed myself food I had made, and sat down to write this newsletter, and what I can tell you with absolute certainty is that none of this is diminished because I did it by myself, for myself. Tomorrow I'll watch a movie with a couple of friends over Facetime, and it will be wonderful because we care for each other and enjoy each other's company, and it isn't diminished because it's friendly care and not romantic care.
I'm not diminished because I've been single for five years and might be single for five more. Or ten more. Or fifteen. My life is not diminished because it's mine alone. Romance is wonderful, and so is spinsterhood, and so is any other way of being in between. Living and loving don't have to be bound by convention. It will happen if it's right, and if it isn't, there's so much else that is. More even than I know about now, which is as exciting to me as the vague possibility of future romantic love.