The Lonely Hunter, page 13
She rolled her shoulders expressively.
“Just wondered what it would feel like,” she answered. “Wanted to jump-start things.”
That I understood. From what I’d seen, queer people are often willing to experiment with connection, with forms of intimacy and sex that heterosexual people are not. There is a very well-worn narrative for heterosexual romance: dating, marriage, babies. Until recently, none of those things were simple for LGBTQ+ people, and often they’re still not, even if they’re legal. There are plenty of clear and serious downsides to this. There is also an openness to possibility, creativity, humor, compassion, and risk-taking that comes from walking a difficult path, expressed in both large and small ways.
The heat was beating down on the square, and I was noticing the moistness of my palms more acutely. There was sweat behind my knees and under my hair. It didn’t seem like she felt it. She was edging closer to me. I started to be a little worried she’d ask to kiss me, and I didn’t want to in the heat and smell of bagel and coffee, when I was feeling like an old, wet sponge. I said I had to go to the bathroom, and we walked back down the hill.
When I got home, I took a cool shower. I wanted to see Vanessa again and thought she probably would, too. Even though it had been a date that was both mentally and physically unpleasant to a degree, she was cooler than anyone else I’d met.
I decided that second dates counted toward my weekly minimum. For ours, she asked me to meet her at a wine bar that was mostly empty when I arrived. She lived across the street. I was early and she was late.
“I told my roommates you’re a masochist,” she said, after getting a drink from the bar and sitting across from me in the booth. The bar was on the second story of the building, offering an elevated view of the empty Bushwick sidewalk. Our seats were cracked and repaired with duct tape. I’d been feeling very chill. This comment raised my hackles.
“Why is that?”
“Well, I told them about all your dates,” she answered. I had admitted to Vanessa that I was dating as a sort of experiment—that I wanted to get good at it, for lack of a better word. The more complicated explanation was that I wanted to learn how to accept rejection without turning my back on trying again, but that would only lead to more questions. Vanessa had seemed like the kind of person who would get experimenting. She already had a girlfriend, after all, so she at least understood alternative types of relationships. Hearing her interpretation of what I’d said about my two-dates-a-week commitment concerned me. I didn’t like being called a masochist. It reminded me what a loathsome reputation dating has. Really, anything that requires us to do something uncomfortable has a bad reputation, especially slow things. Even more pleasurable stuff like developing friendships or acquiring a new skill are harder to start because they demand so much time and care. Adrenaline junkies might do something scary or painful, but not enough people want to come out of their shells for smaller, more nuanced joys when the process can be tedious. It was puzzling to me that Vanessa, hand-holder, didn’t intuitively understand that.
Whenever I talked to people about loneliness, they would almost instantly bring up technology. I agreed with most of what people said—yes, it’s isolating to feel like the search for love has been reduced to a videogame. Yeah, social media does make people feel bad about themselves. It’s true, people do look at their phones instead of talking to one another. Something I had noticed that few people talked about was how the convenience of technology made people so unwilling to engage with inconvenience. It was luxurious to be able to swipe on dates from home, form initial impressions without leaving my couch, and delete anyone who bothered me. It was convenient. It was comfortable. Prioritizing convenience and comfort is the death of deep connection.
Convenience is the justification for so many of the apps that shred human interaction, because, let’s face it, interacting with other people is often extremely difficult. It can feel completely justifiable to cut some of the less necessary interactions out of your life.
I could remember debating with friends about who would call a restaurant to order take out. Now there are a half dozen apps that make it unnecessary to talk to anyone to get borscht delivered to your house, except the delivery person, who doesn’t really want to talk to you either. Often, these apps utilize a network of contract workers, so it may not even be a familiar delivery person bringing you midnight snacks every Friday—someone who recognizes you when you open the door.
Some of the streamlining effects of these platforms might seem innocuous. They’re not. Many of them drain money off the businesses, in addition to charging fees to the people ordering through them. Restaurants risk falling off the map if they’re not on Seamless or Postmates. The development of wide-reaching apps that insert middlemen into every human interaction has spread far beyond the service industry. A friend of mine who worked as a therapist started doing freelance sessions with an online app, which paid her substantially less than she would make in a private practice.
“It’s very much the kind of thing that a group of Silicon Valley types must have reverse engineered,” she told me. “Like they thought, ‘Okay, what’s a service that just requires a computer and talking and not much infrastructure? Oh! Therapy!’ And then they built the app.”
Deciding to participate in these structures may seem like a personal choice. I did believe people had agency, to a degree; but I also thought part of why tech middlemen were so insidious was that refusing to participate could make you irrelevant. Without dating apps, who would I have met? It was more common to meet someone from Bumble than in real life at this point, especially at the pace I was going. I could choose not to use them and that would most likely become a choice to stop dating.
On dating apps, the ease of disconnecting dictated all kinds of behaviors. There were a few people whom I went on first dates with where it seemed we liked each other and it might be worthwhile to go out again. Then something would come up and I’d cancel; then they’d cancel next, and that was it. We’d be done. Or I’d be out with someone and a disagreement would arise and I’d think, “I’m disconnecting from this person as soon as I walk out the door.” And I’d be able to literally delete them from my life.
Some of them—like the guy who looked me up and commented on every one of my public Facebook posts before we met, or the guy who insisted I hug him goodbye—deserved the disconnect. I was glad for the sake of my safety that I was able to do so. At other times, it just felt like we were both willing to give up immediately, picturing that endless line of prospects standing right behind the person in front of us. The next person would be more congenial, casual, a better fit, easy-peasy. It seemed like we were conditioned to do this—not just by dating apps, but by all tech that demeans human interactions, turning people into product-delivery systems to be used, rated, then forgotten.
Discomfort, boredom, exhaustion are not the same thing as pain. Trying to eliminate all of those things from our lives has a cost, because along with them go so many wonders.
For Vanessa, I knew what she was saying wasn’t that deep; it was just a joke. I still felt defensive.
“I’m not a masochist,” I replied, after taking a long sip of my drink to collect myself. I thought of Katherine, the woman who relished the dating life. “There are a lot of nice things about meeting new people.”
I took Vanessa’s hand and ran my thumb along her wrist.
We went across the street to her apartment, a built-out loft. I watched her get undressed in front of her vanity, admiring her own reflection in a lacy black bra. Her expression looking at her own body was endearing. I was on the heaviest day of my period and had no intention of taking my pants off, so I kissed her and helped her with the bra instead.
I had promised to meet friends in the city later, but we lay in bed and talked about nothing, the way you do when you’re in bed with someone you’ve been kissing. Finally, I said goodbye, put on my shoes, and headed out of her bedroom. Two of her roommates were sitting at their kitchen table, wearing only aprons, jolted to see me in their home. The woman hid her face. I waved and sped away.
Did you see my roommates naked?! Vanessa texted me, moments later.
Yes, I replied. They seem very shy for people who throw sex parties.
Hahahahah, she wrote.
I wondered what she would tell them about me. An apartment full of sex-positive queers obviously made Vanessa feel supported in her explorations. The way I’d lived with roommates over the years had informed my dating life quite a lot, and influenced how I looked at the inflexible boundaries that seemed to be such a huge part of monogamous sex and love.
Just after college, I lived with a close friend, and we did everything together. We went on road trips, went out dancing, visited each other’s families, and generally acted as each other’s support system as we set up our first home outside of school life.
Then things started to change. She began dropping plans with me to do things with whomever she was seeing instead—always a man, of course. I didn’t get it. Why would hanging out with some guy she barely knew be more important than plans with me?
To her, disregarding my feelings to promote romantic ones with someone else was a totally fine thing to do. When I got mad at her for spontaneously going with a guy she’d been dating for two weeks to a local farm that we had talked about visiting for ages, she told me matter-of-factly, “I was raised to look for the person who I am going to share my life with and that’s my priority.”
Through that friendship I discovered that as people age, deeply close nonsexual relationships are not as acceptable as romantic ones, even when the people in them share a gender and are ostensibly straight. When we were in college and freshly out of it, my roommate was happy to go on road trips and cohost epic parties at our house. The more she got to a place of being ready to settle down, though, the less important our friendship became. Close friendships between two women after they found partners was queer, and not in a positive way.
On the night before my roommate was supposed to come to Easter dinner at my grandparents’ house, we had a blowout fight at a bar in front of a very alarmed bartender. I don’t remember anymore what I said to start it. I’m sure it had something to do with how we’d been spending less time together since she’d met the Italian architect she was dating.
“It’s like you th-think,” she stuttered, as though it was almost too unspeakable to say out loud, “It’s like you think you’re my boyfriend or something!”
Shame silenced me like a jab in the neck, and we walked home separately. We made up the next morning in time for dinner, but the feeling of being somehow wrong or grasping stuck with me until I moved into a queer co-op a year or so later. There, the idea of how relationships should proceed and who could be included in what and what gestures of friendship looked like were much more fluid, more carefully considered, and nothing about my perspective felt aberrant at all.
The importance of same-sex relationships has fluctuated over time, along with how they’re perceived from the outside. In Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, Stephanie Coontz writes about the decline of the acceptable same-sex friendship. Until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nuclear family was not the common family unit. People’s attachments to their other kin took too much precedence. It wasn’t an expectation that marital intimacy would bring “happiness” per se; the emphasis was on economic stability and producing children. As Coontz explains, it was hard to think of personal happiness as the goal of marriage when so many women simply did it to survive.
Under those conditions, very close friendships between women were common. The Enlightenment-influenced view that reigned supreme during the nineteenth century was that love was based on “admiration, respect, and appreciation of someone’s good character,” even in a romantic relationship. People didn’t really discuss sex, so expressions of love with regard to friends and lovers sounded remarkably similar.
That changed when the taboo of speaking openly about sexual intimacy in marriage began to break down. A healthy sex life soon became a priority, and a somewhat sudden obligation for wives, who in the Victorian era were consigned to being angels on a pedestal in their domestic sphere. As the separation between men and women crumbled, those angels were expected to participate very differently in earthly delights.
“Deep marital intimacy had been difficult to achieve in the nineteenth century,” Coontz writes, “in the face of separate spheres for men and women, sexual repressiveness, and the strong cultural, practical, and moral limits on a couple’s autonomy. Now it seemed attainable. And because the progress of industrialization and democratization had weakened the political and economic constraints forcing people to get and stay married, such deep intimacy was now seen as the best hope of stability in marriage.”
Laws that made it more possible for women to survive outside of matrimony made romantic and sexual love the new focus of marriage, putting new pressure on the couple’s bond. To bolster this change, all other loves had to be diminished—or demonized. Coontz writes:
The pressure for couples to put marriage first and foremost in their lives led many women to become more dependent on their relationships with men. Proponents of “modern” sexuality and marriage were deeply suspicious of close ties between women. By the 1920s the heartfelt female friendships that had been such an important part of nineteenth-century female culture were under attack…. By that time intense relationships between women were considered childish infatuations that girls were encouraged to outgrow. At worst, they raised the specter of “abnormal” sexual or emotional development that could make heterosexuality unsatisfactory and marriage unstable.
Some of these same-sex relationships were definitely between two queer people, and I’m certain that many of them were not. The understanding of coded queerness in history has changed, and so has the standard for how close two people can be before it’s considered too close for “just friends.” Soon after friendships between women came to be seen as deviant, close relationships between men became suspect, too. Homosexuality was outlawed in many Western cultures, but two men sleeping in a bed together or showing other physical intimacies didn’t necessarily read as homosexual until the 1920s, according to Coontz. This shift didn’t just affect friendships; it dissolved intimate relationships within extended families, too.
“The new emphasis on heterosexual bonding,” she writes, “also called into question the veneration of mothers and the close sibling ties that had made it hard for nineteenth-century married couples to retreat into their own private world…. This was another way those of the new generation turned their backs on whatever stood in the way of achieving marital intimacy.”
All of this led to the “growing primacy of the couple in people’s range of commitments,” meaning the age of marriage for men and women fell during the first decades of the twentieth century, and marriage rates increased everywhere. Whatever people had once found in all sorts of dynamic, important relationships they were now only allowed to find within marriage. And so they started committing to it sooner and harder.
That doesn’t mean people don’t enjoy this relatively new order. For many, there is a great deal of diversion in making marital love the center of their lives and they’re happy to leave behind friends and other family ties in pursuit of that. But how much of that happiness is attached to an idea of a “tradition” that is only about a hundred years old?
I assumed Vanessa had thought about some of these things: she had told me about her home like it was a meaningful place to her; she had a girlfriend with whom she had an open relationship; she seemed like someone who was trying to expand her life by including as many people as possible in it rather than whittling it down to only one special somebody.
It soon became evident that Vanessa was trying to recruit me into all that, and quickly, though that might have been partially related to having a lot of free time. She contacted me almost every day, asking how I was doing, what I was up to. It was friendly and I liked the attention, but it was irregular compared to everyone else I’d dated that summer. Was it healthy? Was it expected? Was it just different communication styles? I couldn’t tell.
Soon after we met, there was a heat wave. I tolerated it for a few days, then finally broke down and hauled the inefficient old AC on my floor up into the window. It might be okay to roast myself, but the cats had started hiding behind the toilet to keep cool, and that couldn’t be sanitary. I struggled to lift the AC unit and hold it in place, thinking that this one chore would definitely be easier with a partner. When I finally got the unit in place and cranked it up, I fell onto the couch. I was an airless balloon, shriveled and sticking to itself in a balled-up mess. Vanessa and I had plans for a third date that night, but I texted her asking if we could reschedule. She agreed, then tried to nail down a day immediately. Tuesday? Next Monday?
I told her I’d text tomorrow. In the morning I felt ghastly. My throat was sore and I was aching all over. I was getting sick, which seemed rude for the weather. It was much too hot to eat soup, though when I texted Vanessa that I was ill, she offered to bring some. No, thank you, that’s so nice, I replied. It was nice, and I couldn’t imagine trying to entertain or talk to anyone bringing me food. Being alone was all I wanted, to not have to perform or pretend or meet demands or make plans. I needed to rest. It sounds despicable, but if she had ignored me for a bit, I probably would have recovered and messaged her. Instead, she kept checking in and asking when we could see each other. Having not been accountable to anyone for a long time, I was overwhelmed by this level of attentiveness from someone I’d been on two dates with.
