On the Impossibility of Dating Men

by Emma Long

I saw men as these starry, cosmic things. A vortex: an apex of desire, pleasure, and longing. They shifted in and out of my life like the changing of the tides. I felt them with a great, swelling, and tender emptiness. They remained, somehow, no matter the circumstances, entirely unattainable to me. 

I’d inevitably end up dating the same variety of men. They all were rather indistinguishable in their personal style, suffered from similar neuroses, and all played the same sorts of tricks on me. They couldn’t fall asleep without white noise, went to Western-themed dive bars where they drank $18 whiskey sours, and loved that I liked Agnes Varda. They had traditional mothers who taught pilates or hot yoga and abstractly difficult relationships with their economically successful fathers. And they always had traditional names bordering on Biblical: ones that sounded far too formal to call out during sex. They were, of course, the types to announce a new relationship with a picture of a retro photo booth strip. 

They were consistently emotionally unavailable and were chronically on Letterboxd. I vacillated between being in love with them and being disgusted by them. We always drank together, and I always made them choose the bar. I spiraled out in bed on languid afternoons, thinking of how good they could make me feel, then smoothly moved on to the next when things didn’t work out. They were tender in a way that made me buzz. They fucked. They got around, you know. 

My therapist told me, as I choked up on the couch across from her, that if I desired not to feel so left behind in dating, I should just pick someone and commit to 8 dates with them. She told me that in New York, nobody could commit after the first date, and in Miami, they did but cheated on you the whole time afterward. I wondered who she knew in Miami who had been cheated on. 

I told her about the Trader Joe's checkout girl who said she had a particular skill for making men fall in love with her. I was approaching twenty-five with a lifetime of failing to convince anyone to become my boyfriend for even a few months, let alone fall in love with me. So naturally, women like her made me nervous: women who seemed to have men figured out. I feared they would somehow find me out; that I really didn’t have men figured out, that I was a statistical anomaly, that I was actually quite repellant to men rather than alluring, as they seemed to be. I was sure if they did find out, they would be filled with a great, welling sense of pity for me. And I didn’t want to feel so separate from them.

I was always trying to find someone to inspire me sexually. Unfortunately, most dates were: Hinge and disappointing. The few men who asked me out in real life often turned out to be insufferably dull, undeniably uncool, or sneakily creepy (often a combination of several). I lost whole evenings to dates with unremarkable men, sucking down tropical cocktails and flat gin & tonics, skewering maraschino cherries and waterlogged lime wedges that swam at the watery bottoms of my glass. They grabbed at my legs and ran their hands over my back, asking me back to theirs, their desperation for sex steaming the air between us. I thought of other things, made myself laugh, and ignored when they made comments I disagreed with. There was invariably something wrong with them: a malignant ego, a vaguely obscured drinking problem, incestual tendencies, et cetera. 

We played skee ball at some sticky bar in Williamsburg. He was from Alaska, which was a relief. As an Idahoan, I was tired of trying to explain the concept of the American West to people from the East Coast. He had a dangly earring and worked as a line cook at an immensely popular pizza restaurant. He reluctantly paid for my souring Guinness and seemed to have no major career prospects: both red flags that I joyfully chose to look past (although who was I to judge as someone who also had no major career prospects?). We made polite conversation, tried to eat pizza in the most attractive way possible, bid our farewells, and aimed to arrange another date. It was as well as a date could go these days: a respectable, cute, and gay-looking man to share a vague connection with! The next day he messaged me that I reminded him so much of his step-sister that he felt “uncomfortable to say the least,” at the idea of being anything more than platonic. I was practically her replica, apparently. He asked to see me again. 

Like any modern woman, I considered myself bisexual. And, like most bisexual women, I really only dated men and existed as a bisexual in a more cerebral and philosophical sense. I fantasized about women and erratically dated them, but in the end, when faced with a girl actually interested in me, I felt an innate pull back into the patriarchal grip of male approval. It was rather pathetic and deeply unmodern of me. And being a modern woman was a high aspiration of mine: to be casual, cool, and uninterested in male validation. I wanted to be all those things, obviously. But, likely because I’d spent my whole life chasing the idea of a man loving me, I had developed a stubborn defiance to the idea of giving up on that; of removing myself from the male sphere and enveloping myself in the comfort of women. 

In the depths of winter, I went on a date with a man almost ten years older than me, perhaps because I expected it to be something exciting. It was uncharted territory: the thirties, the millennials (the real ones, not the cuspy half-formed versions I knew in their late twenties). I felt I’d be faced with a true man: a fully formed adult. But, staring into the eyes of this aging millennial at some cheugy cocktail bar, I felt a

disappointing, stale sense of sameness. His hairline, I discovered jarringly upon the coy removal of a baseball cap, receded severely. And, as I watched him wax and wane entirely un-poetically about marijuana, I could feel an unsettling sense of age radiating from his skin: a pronounced sunkenness to his skull, a radiating pattern of fine lines pooling under his eyes. 

So, the frontier of thirty-something men was not as alluring as I once imagined it to be. He was desperate for sex, like they all were, grazing my chest in his unsolicited grasps for my necklace, running his hands across my lower back whenever he felt I’d said something funny, grabbing at my thighs at the mention of clothing taste, and labeling whatever obscure interest I had as “hot.” Every fifteen minutes or so, he attempted to bring up his apartment. I politely declined his invites every time. In the end, I kissed him goodnight anyway, his lips cold and soggy against mine. It was unpleasant and a pronounced display of my weak spirit: my inability to say no. He was the same as all the men a decade younger than him I’d dated, only more weathered by time. 

I cried to my therapist about the most recent one, who I had really cared for as a friend, but just saw me as some girl he was fucking. I missed laughing with him; he had grown distant as they habitually do; I had become a shell of a woman to him, et cetera. I had been incessantly complaining about his behavior to my coworkers, as they always seemed to be in wonderful relationships, and continually asked me about the abysmal state of my love life (never phrased as such, of course). They were quite confounded by me, I think. Everyone was always trying to give me advice on how to better attract a partner. I found it confusing—depressing, really. 

These men tended to disappear with the change of the seasons, their attention drifting away with a warm spring breeze. They took me to Éric Rohmer films, and I never kissed them first. We often mutually chose never to text each other again. I made abstract paintings about them that nobody really got and wrote poetry about my unmet desire that was too embarrassing to share. I lost myself in their interests, secretly lingering on the Wikipedia pages of their favorite authors months after the last time we had spoken. They sent me songs instead of just telling me what they were thinking, as if they expected me to dissect abstract lyrics and take them as truth. I couldn’t understand them, or more principally, why I struggled so much to make any of them like me in a meaningful way. 

I desperately wished for one who didn’t feel so slippery, so fragile. I had devoted my thoughts for entire years to some of these men, wondering always, always, what they were thinking.

Their spirit hovered above me, like some cosmic chandelier. Everything was shadowed by them. And then, they’d slip away,all eel-like and entirely apathetic. I ragefully deleted dating apps, redownloaded them, and returned to those I knew I should renounce. I despised the idea of dating someone just to date them and pointedly avoided spending time with the types of people who were habitually in relationships. 

Men remained impossible to me. But their failures fueled a creative spark of inspiration: they were my symbolic muses of the unrequited. They continued to drift in and out of my life in a cyclical, naturalistic sort of way. I understood them as products of modernity: reflections of the illusion of choice brought by form of dating app. They didn’t understand me, much like no one understood my paintings. 

I longed for the right one, cursed the infernal technological machine, and harbored a mystical sense of anxiety about it all. I lingered in my dissatisfaction with them, escaped to the realm of fantasy, and at times, fought the urge to hit my head against a wall. I painted and wept and wrote and argued with them in the bathroom mirror. I escaped abroad and prayed fruitlessly to the moon. I figured myself a poet from the disappointment they gifted me. They were abstract creatures, these men: visages of false care, illusory symbols of what I could not get. Desiring them was an entirely insatiable endeavor.