“At the still point of the turning world,” T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Neither flesh nor fleshless; / Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.” The poem is about time, but ever since I first read it in college, these words have, like a brain tic, always popped into my head whenever my body relaxes into the peaceful luxury of falling asleep in a lover’s arms. “Except for the point, the still point, / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” Time stops for me in a sleepy embrace. It is the most crystalline distillation of joy I know.
As much as feminist and political theory might want to throttle me for my basic-bitch needs, to tell me that engaging in or even wanting love and a traditional monogamous partnership requires subsuming the self and adhering to a patriarchal power imbalance it’s my god-given duty, as a good feminist, to smash, raw science speaks otherwise. “Social isolation of otherwise healthy, well-functioning individuals eventually results in psychological and physical disintegration, and even death,” sociologists Debra Umberson and Jennifer Karas Montez wrote in 2011, in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Meanwhile marriage, they say, influences “a range of health outcomes, including cardiovascular disease, chronic conditions, mobility limitations, self-rated health, and depressive symptoms.”
Not that researchers are claiming all marriages are good for the body. Or for women, whose bodies fare worse in marriage than men’s, particularly if the marriage is bad. A bad marriage, they remind us—as if I needed reminding—is as detrimental to one’s health as a good marriage is beneficial. You’d actually be better off and less prone to illness alone. The key for reaping the benefits of a healthy relationship are the so-called “emotionally sustaining qualities of relationships”: to feel loved, seen, and heard.
Knowing the effects of isolation, loneliness, and a lack of empathy on my own body, both while in a bad marriage and now not, I agree. I’m not talking about solitude. Solitude and I are good: We get along, we get things done, we walk, we play, we make stuff. In fact, I need my solitude as much as I need company, sometimes more so, and leaving a bad marriage has made me keenly aware of its benefits. But there’s a difference between solitude and loneliness, a difference between the joy of having time alone with oneself to sit and think and the grief of having no one with whom to share your thoughts at the end of the day.
These days, songs like “All By Myself” send me spiraling. The loneliness, I cry to my sister Jen, is killing me.
So I download Tinder. And I start swiping, immediately horrified by the endless stream of human need and folly. If this is what “plenty of other fish in the sea” looks like, I choose land. Many of these metaphoric fish hoist literal fish, freshly caught, or guns or game or wait, is that a woman’s hair he’s tugging? Plus why are they all posing in front of their cars? Is that even his car, or did he go to a parking lot and flash his gang signs in front of the nearest Porsche? And what’s with all the car selfies, bad spelling, group shots with other women, golf photos, and Ew! No! I don’t want to see your hairy butt right now or ever. What does “Not looking for LTR” mean? I google “LTR”: long-term relationship. Oh. Okay. Got it.
Some men list the many nonnegotiable conditions under which you might earn the chance to meet them: no gold diggers, no fat chicks, no bony asses, no drama, must be comfortable wearing stilettos, no heels, be tall, don’t be taller than me, wear a dress now and then FFS (I look up “FFS”: for fuck’s sake), work hard, play hard, be relaxed, must be available to fly off anywhere at any time without a moment’s notice, must have your own life, no games, no kids, be maternal, be sexy, and—my personal favorite, which appears so often I start to wonder who is the patient zero who started this—“If you’re uglier than your pix, you’re buying the drinks.” I swipe left, left, left, left, left, wondering not only if these impossible-to-please men will ever find anyone matching their description of the perfect hard-working but always available, self-sufficient, childless, tall but not too tall, slim but not too slim, gorgeous madonna whore dominant submissive, but also what that poor woman’s life will be like once ensnared.
My hopes that this part of leaving an LTR, FFS, might at least be a little bit fun and adventurous are quickly dashed. Finding love in middle age, I realize, will require just as much legwork, sweat equity, humility, patience, and compromise as finding a new job in middle age. You have to be single-minded, ruthless, open to new ideas, and willing to pick up and search under every moss-covered rock.
But not this rock. Three hours after downloading Tinder, I delete it.
My college-aged son sends me a link to a New York Times article about a relatively new dating app called Hinge. Unlike the others, at least at this particular juncture in the online-dating timeline, its algorithm depends on pairing you with partners with whom you share Facebook friends. That sounds like a more manageable, checks-and-balances, transitive property way to meet other humans, like going to a high school friend’s college party. So I sign up. The first man to pop up on my screen is an artist—we’ll call him Caravaggio, Gio for short—with whom I share thirteen Facebook friends, one of whom I call for a reference after swiping right and matching. She gives me her blessing.
I have never actually been on a blind date before. Or on an app date, as someone tells me they’re now called when I apparently incorrectly tell her I’m about to go on a blind date with Gio. I didn’t really “date” in my early twenties before meeting my husband at twenty-four. I met men in college, or on photo assignments, or through friends. Sometimes these men became boyfriends, and then we’d go out on an actual date, if we had money, or to a cheap Thai joint nearby where we could split a chicken curry. But these courtship rituals of my late teens and early twenties—“hooking up,” as the kids call it these days—took place in the analog era, when I was either at school or off traveling the world, and now that world, in its digital entirety, fits in the palm of my hand. And three cheers for that, or I’d never meet any men who are vaguely in my age range. I just wouldn’t. They’re not at parties, they’re not at work, and what am I going to do, spend $60 on babysitting just to go sit on a barstool with a paperback and hope?
Meaning I’m thrilled, heading into this first app date, not only to have matched with a seemingly handsome, interesting, intelligent man in my age range, but also to have done so relatively painlessly with someone known to my friends. See? This is not so hard, I convince myself. Maybe this will even be fun. What am I looking for from this date and from him? Well…love, of course.
Which is my first rookie mistake.
No one on the apps is looking for love. Or if they are, they won’t cop to it. “I’m just seeing what’s out there” is the phrase I’ll hear most often over the next three years of swiping. As if app dating were visiting a Brookstone on a busy Saturday at the mall. Oh, look! A massage chair! Who knew? (You knew, that’s who. That’s why you wandered into the store.)
I’m shaking from nerves as I take the subway downtown from Inwood to meet Gio for lunch at the Upper West Side restaurant he’s chosen, Peacefood Cafe, which, always looking for signs, I take as a good one. I like peace and food! Who doesn’t like peace and food? Well, warriors, psychopaths, divorce lawyers, anorexics, and dictators, but most of us prefer peace and food, right? Maybe one day Gio or I will tell the story of how we met at the Peacefood Cafe and then found peace and emotional sustenance, together. Yes, okay, I realize it’s premature, immature, and pathologically unrealistic to even imagine such a moment while I’m still hurtling underground through Harlem to meet him for the first time, but I can’t help it. Being a hopeless romantic is a terrible burden. And yet between faith and cynicism, I will always choose faith. Love is my church, my mosque, my synagogue, my temple, and because I was lucky enough to be loved unconditionally by the first and primary man in my life—my father—my spiritual belief system is rooted not in magic or in an all-powerful being but in a tangible feeling I know exists because I
have felt it.
I wonder if I’ll even recognize the man I’m about to meet from his one dating app photo, clearly a joke image—I like that it was a joke image, this already shows he doesn’t take himself too seriously—in which he’s smiling impishly next to a giant breast constructed out of sugar: part of an installation by artist Kara Walker that was built in the former Domino Sugar factory and that, for several months during the spring and summer of 2014, was on the ne plus ultra circuit of trendy art. (“I put a giant ten-foot vagina in the world,” said Walker, “and people respond to giant ten-foot vaginas in the way that they do.”)
I didn’t visit the sugar lady. I didn’t even realize her sugar boobs and ten-foot sugar vagina were out there for public consumption until they were gone, which shows you how trendy I am. I’m also dressed untrendy. Or rather I’m dressed in what might have once been considered trendy in the ’90s, the only era during which my personal aesthetics matched society’s: five-year-old Doc Martens, faded jeans, a peasant blouse, a long, gray wool shawl cardigan with a small hole in the right elbow, and no makeup. I want this stranger to understand that this is me, unadorned, in the clothes and face I normally wear out into the world. That I will always favor comfortable, unadorned, and slightly frayed over sexpot in lipstick and heels. I’m not here for his, your, or anyone else’s porn-influenced viewing enjoyment. I’m here to take up space, to move freely through the world, and to be able to run from zombies quickly, should the need arise.
Our date, from the moment I sit down, goes well. So well that I can feel my heart trying to jump out of my chest as we dive into life’s muck. His failed marriage, my failed marriage, his art, my books, addiction, love, sex, death, suicide, parenting, the nutritional value and cancer-fighting properties of butternut squash: No matter which turn our conversation takes, it opens yet another avenue of shared interests and stories spoken plainly, from the heart. He is, on this first date, the opposite of a man trying to show off. Rather, he seems unafraid to be vulnerable and real; to express confusion, ambiguity, raw emotion, faults, doubt; to listen and respond empathically. At one point, I’m telling him the story of my father’s final hours, and his eyes mist over. I can literally feel the mirror neurons firing between us: something I have never felt being married to a man on the spectrum. I am equally consumed by Gio’s dark, chiseled beauty, by his lofty ambitions, by his shyness and secrets, by the way he sometimes gasps for air between sentences, as if he has to remind himself to breathe.
Recycling, he says. He’s really into recycling and reusing materials, whether it’s mining junkyards for treasure or creating art out of old scraps. A show of his has just opened, he tells me, at a gallery in Chelsea: colorful sculptures made out of metal and blown glass. He shows me a photo of a wall he created out of beer cans. “Cool!” I say. Because “I love you,” at this point, would seem both weird and premature.
Love at first sight: Does that even exist? As I walk away from the new object of my affections, I decide it must. I call my friend Ayelet before descending underground into the subway. “I just met the most amazing man,” I say, heart waves rippling out of my chest with such intensity they feel like a forcefield. Turns out she knows and likes him, too, having met him at Yaddo, an artist colony, one summer. Wow, I think. That Hinge algorithm works! I make a mental note to try to interview its CEO for one of my first Cafe stories.
A week or so later, I invite Gio to a dinner party I’m throwing for Darren Star, who’s just arrived in town to start shooting Younger. Gio shows up with an old friend of his from college. As I’m chatting away with this friend during dessert, Gio sneaks into my kitchen and washes all the dinner dishes by hand. A friend captures, in a photo, the growing electricity between Gio and me at the end of the night, as we play a duet on my kids’ guitars. If thought bubbles were visible, mine would read, “I’m sunk.”
Skip Notes
* A Harold is a structure of improv in which the characters and themes in the first act must recur throughout the rest of the acts as a series of connected scenes. This is really, really hard to do on the fly, without a script. Most Harolds fail in some fundamental way, but still can be quite funny to watch. A good Harold, however? A good Harold is a thing of genius, beauty, and awe.
EIGHTEEN
Bad Judgment
OCTOBER–NOVEMBER 2014
I start my job at Cafe in mid-October, in a small office in the Flatiron Building with large windows and three long shared tables surrounded by Aeron chairs. I’m employee number nine, and these first six months of Babes in Arms–style “Hey, kids, let’s put out a magazine!,” where all of my colleagues are doing everything, including, in my case, shooting the photos, will remain one of my favorite employment experiences to date, despite not being able to make ends meet with my salary. On the days when my son doesn’t have school but I have work, I bring him into the office. I don’t earn enough to pay for childcare. I rely solely on his school’s free aftercare. When he gets sick, I use up my own sick days to take care of him.
My first story out of the gate, “How I Got Rejected From a Job at the Container Store,” originally published during the last week in October 2014 (but now sadly erased from the company’s servers), goes wacko viral. “For years,” I wrote, “we Americans have been fed the convenient lie: study hard, work hard in your chosen field, work hard at your marriage, save money, organize your flour, salt, and sugar into labeled bins and you will be in control of your life and your destiny. But control is an illusion during the best of times.” Within twenty-four hours, the New York Times op-ed section has linked to it on its homepage, recommending it to readers. Forbes asks to reprint it. TV comes calling. Radio, too.
The story—which is not really about not getting a job at The Container Store, but rather about the illusion of control—has struck a chord with American readers, many of whom are just waking up to the fact that they, too, are “just a single job loss, a single medical diagnosis, a single broken marriage removed from a swirling, chaotic, wholly uncontained abyss.” It has also suddenly put the previously unknown Cafe on the map, digital and otherwise, which has, in turn, become a problem for our CEO: The journalists who are now interviewing me have logically started digging into my current income, asking me, point blank, if I’m finally earning a living wage.
“What should I tell them?” I say to my new boss, not wanting to lie but also not wanting to bite the hand that’s not feeding me. $39,000 a year in the New York Metropolitan area is not a living wage for a family of four. In fact, according to MIT’s living wage calculator, the minimum living wage where I live, in a household containing one working parent and three children—and that’s not assuming that parent is also currently paying her eldest’s college tuition, room, and board—is $112,816 per year.
“Tell them yes, you are earning a living wage,” he says, immediately upping my salary from $39,000 a year to, well, not an official New York City living wage for a single mother of three, but to $80,000 a year, which is just under the living wage threshold for someone like me in Chicago. Six months from now, I will learn that my male colleague has, during this same period, been earning $200,000 a year.
My social media timeline and various inboxes have become choked with either the story itself or with queries from strangers about the story. One of those queries comes from Ken Kurson, editor-in-chief of the Jared Kushner–owned New York Observer. Kurson sends me a message through Facebook messenger. “We don’t know each other,” he writes, “but man, I loved your story so much. Please consider pitching The New York Observer.” I explain I’ve signed a six-month contract with Cafe but tell him to feel free to reach out to me in five months or so. In return, he sends me a photo of him interviewing our CEO’s brother, Preet. Which is weird, but whatever. A legitimate editor at a legacy media publication has reached out to me out of the blue to ask me to write for him. I can barely contain my glee. One way or another, I think, I will crawl my way ou
t of this fucking hole.
We’ll get back to Ken. He becomes a key character in my life’s unraveling six months later.
After the Container Store story hits, I spend the weekend managing the influx of interview requests. Monday is taken up with speaking to reporters in various TV and radio stations around the city.
Then, Monday night, I’m doing my usual hour of cold-water dishwashing by hand, feeling nonetheless elated: I wrote something I was proud to have put out there; I got a raise during my first week of work; I’ve finally broken it off with Santi and have another date scheduled with Gio; my kids are adjusting well to our new home, despite the frequent cold showers and wearing hats to bed when the boiler breaks; the roach situation seems to be temporarily under control; the editor of the Observer likes my writing; I have an interview scheduled with Justin McLeod, the CEO of Hinge, and a Younger set visit and interview scheduled with Darren Star; I’ll be getting my first paycheck in six months this Friday; I have a health-insurance approved MRI scheduled at the end of the month; my heart palpitations, for now, are under control.
I want to freeze this moment in time, when my heart, health, kids, work, and emotional well-being finally feel in alignment. When, for the first time in decades, I have the first stirrings of romantic love as well as hope for a less stressful future. When I can start to see the vaguest outline of what a meaningful path forward might look like.
Which, of course, is the exact moment when life says, “Oh, yeah? Watch this.”
A notification pops up on my phone: Judith, my new colleague, has sent me an email. “A response to the piece is also now in Motherlode,” she writes, with a link to the parenting blog* in The New York Times.
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