Why I Haven’t Been on a Date Since Trump Was Elected
On election night 2016, I was texting a boy. He was a man, technically. Biologically and chronologically. But it feels imprecise to apply the word to the totality of our few interactions. “Boy” suits him better. This time, he and I were trading exclamations of despair.
In spite of his boy-ness, I would have met up with him later, on the way home from the bar as the polls closed, if he’d acquiesced. Instead, I wandered back on the subway with people who looked like they had each been informed of a loved one’s passing.
The next day, commuters moved like their limbs had been filled with sand. No one smiled at each other, but no one complained, either, as they shuffled in and out of the train cars.
In the evening, I heard from the boy again, who was describing his feelings—not about me, about the thing that had happened to him, to everyone. He seemed to want simply to see his own thoughts written out on the screen of his phone. It felt physically exhausting to type out responses. So I asked him, outright: “What do you want?” He sent back a litany of apologies; I replied to his paragraph with a single, apathetic phrase, “Don’t worry about it.” After a moment, I watched him type, with more satisfaction as the little chat bubble sputtered a few times, until it didn’t.
The cynicism the night had unleashed left me feeling almost high. I relished the foreign, sawed-off quality of that directive, “Don’t worry about it,” one that I would never have meant sincerely if I’d sent it during the time before. Now, I felt a seeping, pleasurable nothing. It brought on a hysterical relief to decide that everything was bad, nothing mattered—I wanted sweeping, nihilistic proclamations. I let the political result bleed into my disposition like the TV screens at the bar that had curdled ominously from blue to red. I had, in effect, lost interest, in everything.
In the year since, I’ve imagined sitting on a folding chair in a semicircle of like-minded confessors, stating the effect that our national nightmare has had on their romantic lives. Perhaps, for some, it had resulted in the opposite affliction; they can’t stop going out and meeting people and trying to connect. There’s a woman who’s had hundreds of partners, say, or maybe some people went out to courthouses the next day and got married, or went home and conceived children. But I haven’t been on a date since Donald Trump became president of the United States.
Other parts of my life expanded in the time after. I read more; I wrote more. I joined organizing groups and went to JFK on a Saturday afternoon to scream with a crowd of strangers in front of Terminal 4. I learned about the word “solidarity” in its most pragmatic terms.
It was the smaller aspects of doing and being that I couldn’t bear, the rituals that make up pretending everything is fine. It was why I was comforted by that subway ride in which no one muttered outrage nor pleasantries—I couldn’t stand slipping into pretense, which encompasses so much of the time spent in a woman’s day if you really tally it up. I was the assistant to a man then, a figurehead-type; I got in trouble because of “my attitude,” because I remained unsmiling when I brought him his juices or his printer cartridges. “He likes feeling like everyone is happy here,” I was told by a female superior. I cried in her glass-walled office.
Disdain for rituals, pleasantries, and pretending is mutually exclusive to dating. You can’t just be yourself, not really. Even if you try to be a larger percentage of yourself than someone less like you but perhaps more palatable, in the beginning, you can’t be scary. And I wanted to be scary. I had a brief thing with another man a few months later, something physical that I thought could turn into something akin to dating. But I couldn’t get past the regular hurdles of introductory conversation, in which one typically attempts to compromise, regulates volume. Instead, I made demands. I shrieked them.
It was easy after that to slip into hibernation, hiatus, boycott, sabbatical—words that terrified my mother when I used them to describe what I was “going through.” She started sending me greeting cards in the mail, of the “Thinking of you!” kind that borders, discreetly, on “Get well,” but for mental health.
The election bifurcated time into the before and the after. Only because I’m lucky enough not to have been targeted by the new administration in more sinister and permanent ways was the line drawn most clearly in my love life. There have been threats made to my reproductive enfranchisement, my health care, my environmental future, but none of my family members have been deported, for example, or kept in an airport TSA holding room.
But these degradations of the new state made me even more love-averse. It made sense to me that romance should have lost its sheen the same way America did. They were both made up of institutions in the before that, however flawed, held some idealized meaning, and which in the now had been hollowed out, revealed to be something boorish, exploitative. Love—marriage, monogamy, relationships—and the Electoral College are not so different, if you think about them this way: They used to be, simply, just the way things were; now each one was understood to be something of a sham, the long con.
In college, after my first real heartbreak, I became obsessed with social psychology studies, the ones that seemed to disprove true love. One was a 1950s experiment in which researchers observed relationship formation patterns among students at MIT. More than factors of common background, shared interest, even physical similarity, it was geographic proximity that overwhelmingly determined whether the kids in the experiment got together.
In my favorite test, two groups of men walked across different bridges, one suspended high in the air. The men up there reported more physical attraction to a woman they encountered than the men down below did, because of the misattribution of arousal, a tendency in people to associate physiological responses to fear or anxiety to sexual stimulation. It explained brilliantly, to a college student, why you might put on a horror movie when you’re hoping to make out with someone.
I acutely remember how electrifying it felt to release myself from romantic love, awakening instead to its subliminal messaging. How healing it was to understand that what had hurt me wasn’t even real, and that the future I had felt so thoroughly depended on being loved by someone actually was mine to do with as I pleased. It was the first time I felt emboldened by loneliness, rather than made abject.
Almost ten years later, my first Valentine’s Day post-Trump, post-love, was spent with a friend at the beach. She’s the type of person who buys self-help books, the academic kind, with charts and lists to fill out and plan your career. And she’s a teacher, so she photocopied the pages of the book she was working on and brought them with her for me to work on, too. It was a clear day, and I was distracted by the ocean. But sitting next to her, digging a hole in the sand with my toes while she intently, earnestly scribbled, felt like its own kind of mindfulness.
Obviously, that’s the contradiction in the Emily Dickinson, “Angel in the House”–style shtick I’ve crafted for myself since I decided that love and America are both big lies: that I have, of course, been loving, been loved the whole time, maybe even more than before, just not in the way I was thinking about. There’s a Sharon Olds poem that compares figuring this out to stepping off of “the roof of love”; once you realize, having left love behind, that you were actually standing on it, it’s too late—you’re plummeting.
I’ve started to feel like that as the months have worn on, as the world sometimes feels like it’s getting worse. That swearing off love is freeing, yes, but also like free-falling: You’re not sure what will catch you, if anything. And part of that is good, in that old love song kind of way, because it’s new, and with newness comes the possibility for something better in the unknown. But what is known, with as much certitude as anything can be, is that you’ll need to be caught, at some point, by someone who loves you, and you will need to catch others who you love. And as it turns out, I am remembering that I want to catch, and I want to be caught.
Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day for the first two weeks of February, until Valentine’s Day.
