WAYUT: Voluntary celibacy, American individualism, and the gamification of love
Fuck, marry, kill.
Dear Meg,
Any and all advice on how to stop giving a shit about finding love and putting all focus onto myself?
Sincerely,
New Year Only Me
Dear New Year Only Me,
As a 28-year old, single woman living in a major city, I’m familiar with the dating game. My friends and I spend most get-togethers sprawled on couches in cramped apartments, sipping wine and lamenting about how there are no good men in New York anymore. It’s awesome. My (straight, male) roommate joined one of our evening rap sessions once, and after my friends left he shook his head in disbelief, saying, “You guys really are like if Sex and the City was real.”
Dating—going on dates, not going on dates, thinking about dates, not thinking about dates, securing dates on an app, scoring dates in real life—is work. In fact, it’s often exhausting work. Trying to “find love” today feels like the modern-day interview process: An endless series of conversations with a company you only kind of like, just to get ghosted and sent an email three months later saying they went in a different direction. Right, no yeah, I figured.
When I first moved to New York, I was as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as any other sexually-repressed Midwesterner making it on her own for the first time. I downloaded the Big Three apps, and I was determined to have a “healthy dating life.” What ensued was an educational-yet-disappointing three years featuring a line-up of the most Just-Some-Guy guys this fair city has to offer. And god, these guys really were Just Some Guy.
There were some upsides to my approach. Namely, I got over my anxiety of it all. My sexual identity evolved. Flirting, showing interest, openly wanting someone, these were facets of life I previously thought I could never partake in and wasn’t good enough for—if nothing else, I’m grateful to my younger self for choosing to explore. Yet I left each encounter more frustrated than the last. I was doing all the things everyone told me to do! I was painting the town red, I was girl-bossing, I was maximizing my slay! I was trying, dammit! Yet I was decidedly not finding love.
So I stopped. I enacted a dating moratorium, choosing (though I didn’t know the phrase at the time) to be “voluntarily celibate” while I figured out what the fuck was going on with me, karmically. Certainly, the root of my love-drought lay at the center of some lesson I had yet to learn, or in not loving myself enough, or in some past-life transgression. Whatever the cause may be, I was determined to abstain from capital-D Dating—and all aspects of it—until I found the solution.
Choosing to abstain from sex, dating, romance, whatever, is nothing new. The rise of hook-up culture and the male-loneliness epidemic have left young women and men alike feeling isolated and dejected. (It’s also left young men feeling, like, incel-y, which is another topic for another day.) In the case of women who date and sleep with men, taking a step back from the dating cesspool can usher in an era of self-reflection and emotional maturity. Take my friend and YouTuber Maddie Dragsbaek for example, who spent a year emotionally unavailable to deepen her connection with herself. I fundamentally believe everyone would benefit from spending significant time alone in their adult lives so they learn not to be terrified of their thoughts and feelings.
But it’s a fine line, this line between focusing on yourself and hyper-individualism. Not to be all We live in a society, but we really do live in a society that places too much emphasis on being self-serving, of only looking out for you.
During my dating respite, I found myself frustrated for the exact reasons I had been when I was dating—I couldn’t stop thinking about all the potential love I was definitely, absolutely, without-a-doubt missing out on. I was focusing on myself, sure, but why couldn’t I stop thinking about how fun it would be to have a crush? Am I so utterly inept at love that I somehow fuck up both dating and celibacy? What gives!
This is all to say focusing wholly on yourself so you can stop giving a shit about love is never going to happen, because you are a loving person. Your self, the very being you want to focus on, wants love. You want to be in it and to feel it from others. Somewhere along the way, we got it in our heads that to want love, sex, and romance is morally bad rather than a fundamental part of being human. People, young people especially, have become obsessed with the gamification of love—we could win the game if we just figure out how to control the system.
Choosing to either actively look for love or actively avoid it, hacking dating, and embracing hyper-individualism are all branches sprouting from the same shitty tree. They are the actions we take when we feel like we don’t have control. They are the actions we take when we feel afraid.
I get it. Being guarded is, admittedly, something I struggle with. According to my therapist, I should “consider that I have some walls up, maybe” when it comes to letting people in romantically. Idiot. (Joking. I love you, therapist.)
When I took my break from dating, I didn’t stop wanting love. I was just trying a new tactic to hijack the universe. My perspective on love changed when I started to understand that the part of myself that craves love is just as deserving as every other part of me. She deserves my attention and compassion, too.
Believe me when I say I so deeply understand the fear and shame that comes from wanting to be loved. At a macro-level, it seems that as the obsession with unattainable, individualistic beauty standards rise, so too does the Puritanical disdain for horniness (read: love). Everyone’s obsessed with not owing anyone anything. We’re all deleting and re-downloading Hinge to show us the better, hotter Sims that we’ll maybe get to fuck one day. And yet, here we are, wanting.
We want love because we are human, and we’re here to claw at one another and pant and moan and paint each other’s houses and drink wine on the porch and bring each other soup and pick at the little scab on our foot and hold mittened hands with each other as we watch snow fall in the quiet of the evening, and be so, so ugly. Lean into the gut-wrenching propensity to live, in all your sloppy, grotesque glory.
Falling in love boils down to luck. No matter how many dates you do or don’t go on, no matter how “active” you’re being, it’s an experience you just can’t control. Which sucks. I wish we could. I’d be sooooo good at it.
Being in love is a deeply human experience, and it’s natural to feel the desire for it. You are not wrong or bad for wanting. Allow yourself to exist in a world that isn’t so binary, isn’t so black and white. Try to get comfortable living in the gray and know that I’ll be trying, too.
Talk soon,
Meg
'Falling in love boils down to luck. No matter how many dates you do or don’t go on, no matter how 'active' you’re being, it’s an experience you just can’t control."
Writhing in pain! ty