Article 1, Article 2, Article 3

Hello and welcome to my new bi-monthly column ‘Quarter Life Single’ where you are going to get to accompany me, a gorgeous and brilliant queer woman who is single for the first time at the age of 25 after a long-term relationship ended. Join me on my adventures in navigating the adult dating world. That doesn’t sound like a big deal until I tell you that the last time I was single was when I was in the 11th grade and demonetisation had not happened yet. Yes, it has been almost 8 years since that fateful day. And yes, we are all officially that old.

Okay, first things first: am I desperately looking for a relationship? Honestly, (and genuinely) no. The truth is that I am open to a relationship and it is fun to try out different ways that people go about dating today. But to be very honest, I am not sure if any of these ways are for me. When I imagine the kind of love that I want, I often imagine it happening organically. Maybe we will meet at a bookstore (I did have a very flirty conversation with a very hot bookseller recently) or stumble across each other on vacation. And then I wonder if that is too passive an approach — the ‘going through life normally and when love happens, it happens’ way of thinking about companionship goes against my idea of doing things in life with purposefulness. I am not sure what the right answer is, but for now I find myself wondering: how do I send out a purposeful message into the universe that my heart is open to love?

I am not someone who posts a lot on social media, so nobody can slide into my DMs or reply to my story to flirt  (or as I understand, people now also think of responding with an emoji to someone’s story as a ‘thing’ which is like…come on!) So I have made dating app profiles and met up with people — but the way that they seem to be navigating dating seems extremely different from the way I do. Most people around my age do not seem to have gotten the memos about healthy communication practices and the maxims of love. And I REFUSE to be another person’s queer Katrina Kaif from ZNMD —  I really, REALLY do not want to be the manic pixie sapphic dream girl who makes you realise that love is the most important thing. I mean, they teach this to us in school assemblies in the second grade! And while I know that neither our parents nor any other adult around us embodies these ideas outside of that assembly, I am all out of emotional labour spoons and I refuse to try to get more for the purpose of your education. Please go to therapy, and please unlearn things independently?

As someone who has re-entered the singledom a few months ago, I now wonder if many adult dating rituals are not rituals at all, but ways to disguise the fact that neither of you is engaging with yourself. The ‘which one of us will call first’ game clearly stems from feeling insecure about coming across as wanting to talk more because you enjoy someone’s company (it is a GOOD thing to like people! It is a good thing to take initiative!!!) and the ‘answering questions in an ironic manner on dating apps’ is straight out of the ‘I need to pretend that I am too cool for this place because if it does not work out for me I do not want people to know that I wanted it to’ playbook. And don’t even get me started on the ‘we won’t flirt even though I asked you out on a date because we can’t appear to be actually interested in each other’, can it really get more nonsensical than that?

I have a question to ask: if we do not risk rejection, how do we open ourselves enough to accept love? Why are confusing signals still a thing on dating apps that have clear space allocated to describe what you are looking for? The one foot in and one foot out thing seems immature to me at this point to be honest — I mean, we are Sapphic People. We INVENTED the eye contact and yearning stage — but to reach that stage, we have to talk and sound interested. As for me, maybe I need to put out a three-line ad for a pen pal who will exchange books with me as we slowly start writing each other coded love letters in the margins until one of us finds the courage to speak up and take initiative right before dying at the age of 81 — not out of the fear of queerphobia, but out of the fear of coming across as the one who wants it more. It will be exactly like meeting on a dating app, except in this case I will also get to read.