I don’t feel I can publish here without mentioning that a crisis is happening in Gaza right now. Please considering donating to some of the organisations I’ve linked below or, particularly if you are in the West, contacting your government representatives to press them to get Israel to end the blockade and allow humanitarian aid to reach people who desperately need it.
Medical Aid for Palestinians (this has previously been cyber attacked so please check on their twitter whether the website is still safe to use)
Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Organisation
Refuser Solidarity Network
Google drive for letter templates and more
I didn’t think about A.E1 much after our not-date. We had gone out for bubble tea near his workplace, out of my way but not unusually so. At that time, my friend was living next to JW3 on the Finchley Road so I was there frequently. I knew all the different train lines I could take there instinctively, no Tube map required. I was the one who orchestrated it, taking him up on an offer he had made previously but hadn’t mentioned in a while. A.E and I did not, still do not, text each other often. Perhaps we’re both not the type to text for the sake of texting. We both have our own lives, that intersect regularly enough but are by no means intertwined.
In any case, it was not a date, though throughout I was scrutinising the conversation to see if it was one in secret, like coming upon a gemstone whilst turning over the sediment of a river. Did I force it down a platonic path? I refused to let him pay for my drink, lest he get the wrong message. He said it would compensate for me having to come so far and I pushed aside his justification, pushed aside his hand so that I could tap my card against the reader. No, I said, I wanted to stop by at the art gallery across the road. A not quite lie, since I did end up there afterwards, if only to sort out my thoughts.
The conclusion that I came to is that as much as I enjoyed his company, try as I might, I was not attracted to this man romantically or sexually. It disappointed some part of me. I found pleasure in his countenance, which possesses a gentle, woodland creature-like sensitivity that puts me at ease. He enjoys reading plays, exists in the same sphere as me politically, loves studying torah enough to go to yeshivah for it. All the boxes I unconsciously drew up were ticked. I still was not attracted to him. This not-date was the last in a slew of failed first dates from the first half of 2023. I tried different ages, backgrounds, genders. The common denominator: I was disinterested in all of them.
I have now come to terms with it. I am a romantic who isn’t going to be falling in love any time soon.
I really like love. Romcoms are my guilty pleasure. I’ve probably spent days worth of time reading romantic fanfiction. I read Pride and Prejudice every year. Two of my favourite podcasts, Love Letters and Modern Love, are about people of all ages finding love, staying in it, falling out of it. The playlist I’m most proud of putting together is a collection of love songs. In the description I quote Romeo speaking to Juliet during the balcony scene:
With love’s light wings did I oerperch these walls,
For stony limits cannot hold love out,
And what love can do, that dares love attempt.
Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me.
As a child and teen, I kept wrapped up inside of me a fervent wish. To be married and remain in love forever. A wish that was hardly expressed out loud for how much embarrassed me in its femininity. I was in dire need of care and understanding and thought that marriage would provide me all the nourishment I required. I had little interest in loving; I wanted to be loved.
I held onto this want for a long time. It was a story I told myself about who I am. I carried the script of it folded up in my ribcage so I could refer to it in any interaction, so that I would never be caught unawares, I wouldn’t forget a single line.
Slowly, I came to understand that this story may not have the expected ending. In The Cost of Living Deborah Levy swims away from the boat that is her marriage. “I knew that if I swam back to it, I would drown,” she says. Instead of the act of falling in love, Levy painstainkingly details the process of exiting it, of deconstructing the family home she poured herself into, of making a new life. This rebuilding spills over to the next book in the trilogy Real Estate in which she hunts for a sense of home as her youngest daughter flies the nest.
Reading Levy for the first time was like encountering the writer I would be in thirty years time. I was comforted by her voice and slightly obsessed. As it stands I own eleven of her books. We have a strange and lopsided kinship. I am challenged by her and she doesn’t know I exist.
Levy likes love too but she rarely ends her novels with the characters galloping into the sunset. In Swimming Home the father, who feels neglected by his world-travelling reporter wife, has an affair. In The Man Who Saw Everything the protagonist loses the love of the mother of his son and the man he becomes involved with on a visit to East Germany. Levy is not shy about the unequal nature of heterosexual relations. She tells of her male best friend who refers to each of the women he’s been married to as his “wife”, not by name; the simplified vernacular of mothers waiting to pick up their children at school; a husband who travels from England to France just to find shoes that will allow him to monitor his wife’s footsteps throughout their house. This would keep me in check when I would fall into the habit of convincing myself I was attracted to men I had no interest in. I reminded myself that I as a woman have something to lose by courting their attention.
Not infrequently, I run into articles claiming single women without children are the happiest subgroup of the population. Usually the explanation for this is that we invest in rich support groups that men don’t or women with children do not have time for. I don’t know if I’m happier than my peers who are married, but I know for a fact that the effort I’ve put into building community for myself makes dating seem near redundant these days. Somewhere along the way I learnt to satisfy my social needs on my own and just like that, the version of marriage that I was so attached to as a child lost its shimmer.
I attended two weddings this year, both were of friends who are around my age. I thought it would make me feel jealous but instead I was overwhelmingly glad that I was not in their position. I am simply not ready for marriage, maybe not even for dating. In order to be ready I’d have to know that it’s what I want, and I’m not so sure anymore. This leaves a gaping hole in my ambitions. In fact, it seems I have none left. Marriage used to be my one and only life goal (or at least it gave me an easy answer to the question of what was on my bucket list). Aside from that, I just wanted to be happy like everyone does. What does happiness look like for me? What does fulfilment look like for women outside of matriomony and child rearing? The patriarchy makes it seem hedonistic, selfish and a threat to the propagation of the human race. How dare a woman understand her identity outside of or worse yet in defiance of what she is to others.
None of us owe the world such compliance.
In truth, I did not think of A.E again until I saw him like a text message sent to a group chat we’re both members of. Just over a week ago week ago I enquired after his safety. He was in Jerusalem at the time of the attacks on Israel. It occurred to me that I must not care for him much at all if I needed that red heart as a reminder of his existence at a time like this. But there lay in the back of my mind a persistent whisper. Maybe? ‘Maybe’ because romantic love is one of life’s great joys and it would be a shame not to experience at least once. ‘Maybe’ because I might just be the type who needs more time to form a romantic attachment. ‘Maybe’ because the fantasy of falling in love it’s entertaining enough on its own without any follow through.
Maybe one day I’ll find a reason to want to be in love outside the gender expectations, cultural norms and religious obligations that have been baked into me since I was a child. I could be waiting on The One who changes everything. Or maybe romantic love will never come for me. If so, my goal is to be the coolest spinster auntie at the family dinner, who scandalises parents and children alike with my devil-may-care attitude about being single. They’ll bemoan my stubbornness and I’ll say, “I’m doing just fine. There’s plenty of other kinds of love going round.”
rusty xx
For the sake of privacy, I will not be using his actual name. Obviously.
2 coïncidences : 1) AE are my initials. 2) I'm also confused about dating and reading deborah levy this year. I'm glad i stumbled upon your writing. thank you for this (i loved it)