I put my best self on. I primp and starve and plank. I laugh but not too much. I’m smart and savy, independent and aloof. And still, the movies lie, they don’t fall for you the way they say so. The pursuit is short lived. The attention span brief. My appetite is merely wet whilst theirs seems satisfied or perhaps refined to a taste that is impossible to pin down but definitely not: me.
I heard someone say once that tinder has ruined men. Perhaps. It might soften the blow to boil the issue down to one particular cause, but the culprit is legion. The culprits are the message makers bombarding us everyday with a multitude of choices, reducing us to bafoons unable to rest content. And I participate and perpetuate the charade with my “I woke up just like this” facade. The synthetic connections of glance and wink. The peacock dance of it all. I am weary, I have repetitive strain from the left swipe. And burn out from the matched flirt. I am perplexed by the chase and soured by the sweet nothings.
I feel It may be time to hang up my relationship hat whilst the children are small. It is too much upheaval to hope and feel and fall and then pick up all the little pieces afterwards. Pieces that are not just mine but theirs too. For they too wonder what it would be like, hope and pang and get attached. A constant absence is better than a perpetual loss, I think.
And yet I observe the world and know it true that the game does not grow more fair as women age. The words from Zoe Moss in 1970 goad us still today:
Listen to me! Think what it is like to have most of your life ahead and be told you are obsolete! Think what it is like to feel attraction, desire, affection towards others, to want to tell them about yourself, to feel that assumption on which self-respect is based, that you are worth something, and that if you like someone, surely he will be pleased to know that. To be, in other words, still a living woman, and to be told that every day that you are not a woman but a tired object that should disappear. That you are not a person but a joke. Well, I am a bitter joke. I am bitter and frustrated and wasted, but don’t you pretend for a minute as you look at me, forty-three, fat, and looking exactly my age, that I am not as alive as you are and that I do not suffer from the category into which you are forcing me.
As these words resonate, I know the only fit response is to live as If the categories do not exist. To rebel against them, straining against every chain. I do try. I try to live self differentiated from what I feel is expected and presumed of me.
But then again I don’t.
