Brittany Crosse, How to Get Back into the Dating Scene as an Emotionally Jaded and Socially Awkward 27-Year-Old | L*STS

   

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How to Get Back into the Dating Scene as an Emotionally Jaded and Socially Awkward 27-Year-Old

Brittany Crosse

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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents

 Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Other

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1. Download Duet and Hinge. Create a profile for the former. Start to create a profile for the latter but give up halfway through. You’re not that desperate, besides, you’re busy enough as is. You’ve been skeptical about dating apps in the past, but then again, look at the men you’ve met the old-fashioned way. Even if the next one turns out to be a serial killer, at least he’ll just murder you instead of send you into a weeks-long deep depression. That shit was worse than death.   
2. Speaking of old-fashioned, don’t listen to your father whenever he tells you to not have sex with the next man, that if he really loves you, he’ll marry you. Your father will never say it outright, but he believes that everything that happened with **** happened because you slept with him. Not because he’s in a perpetual state of arrested development (hey, that’s the name of the show!) and changes his mind almost as fast as he comes. Your mother believes this as well. 
3. Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t fall for the same bullshit (I really, really like you, you’re important to me, I’m going to ask you to be my girlfriend) you fell for in the past. You’re not a naive 26-year-old anymore.  
4. Don’t expect things to work out right away, or even at all. Life doesn’t always happen the way it does in books and movies. You know this better than most. 
5. Remember that even if things don’t work out, there’s a 50% chance you won’t die alone because you promised your best friend that you’d move in together if you were both still single at 40. Only 13 and a half more years to go. Tick tock, bitch. 
6. Swipe left on guys with four-letter names AT ALL COSTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fuck 13, 4’s the new unlucky number.   
7. Keep going to therapy and puppy yoga (which is itself a form of therapy), taking your medication (not that it helped much when you were depressed), doing schoolwork, writing your novel. Consider volunteering at an animal shelter. Keep yourself as busy as possible, but also don’t forget to indulge in self-care.
8. Convince yourself that you will not let the next man you meet walk all over you and/or want you exclusively for your body. 
9. Realize that this is the same thing you said after ****, and look at what happened with **** not even a year later.
10. Realize that perhaps you are simply cursed.
11. Realize that it is more possible you are simply too kind, too forgiving, too weak.   
12. Realize that you are approaching 13 steps.  
13. Realize that perhaps you should stop at 13, because it’s not unlucky. You are.

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This is basically me reflecting on the mistakes I made in my previous two "relationships" (in quotes because they could hardly even be called that) and how to not repeat them in the future. Without getting too personal, my previous two "relationships" were very one-sided in that they were all takey and no givey. My piece is essentially a how-to guide on how to break the cycle of being used by men. This was deeply therapeutic for me to write, as not only was I able to poke fun at one of my previous partners, I was able to poke fun at myself as well. The names of my previous partners have been censored partly for privacy, but mainly because they don't deserve mentioning.  

Brittany Crosse was raised in the Chicago suburbs and currently lives near Miami, where she attends Florida International University's Creative Writing MFA program. Her work has been featured in The Bond Street Review, Maudlin House, and more. She is working hard or hardly working on a novel, depending on the day.