I spent a greater portion of the last year wanting a boyfriend. I have been working on a long term writing project which causes me to spend most of my day thinking about love and relationships. Then I would go out at night, donning my best mom jeans and platform sneakers, hoping that the evening would end with me being graciously chauffeured to my future (albeit currently anonymous) boyfriend’s off-campus apartment in an Uber Black that had the vibe of a pumpkin carriage. It never did.
I would make eye contact with someone cute at a party or in a bar or walking on the street, and I would wonder if it would be him. I knew I wanted one in the same way that a small child wants a puppy—the idea of it is nice, and I got so quickly and rashly sucked up in it that I never actually realized when and why I felt that it was missing from my life to begin with. Like puppies, some of my friends had them, and they seemed really fun.
When you are little and ask your parents for a puppy, they often deny your proposition. “Are you going to pick up the shit?” my mom would stare me straight in the eyes, both at the same damn time, which I’m sure is what every parent does.
Once, about ten years ago, I dog-sat for my neighbors. On the first walk we went on, Puppy, their puppy, took a shit. It was the first time I had ever seen a dog’s poop steaming in the way dog poop does on a crisp morning, and I swear I have never been the same since. I bent over to pick up Puppy’s shit, and I started gagging as if I was about to vomit. I am also terribly afraid of vomit, so the act of gagging made me feel the need to gag even more. I ended up picking up the shit and not throwing up, both of which are miracles unto themselves, but I learned a lot about what it might actually be like to have a dog that day.
Puppies pee, shit, and bark. These are things that you might not see your friend’s puppy do. They are things that you, from afar, can admire but don’t have to deal with. This is how I felt about having a boyfriend.
I told one of my guy friends that I didn’t even want a boyfriend––I just wanted someone to go home with at the end of the night once or twice a week and be with and talk with sometimes, and I wanted him to have sex with nobody else besides me. He laughed.
The next period of my boyfriend-less life consisted of a lot of dating in New York. Dating made me feel better about not having a boyfriend, which sounds like an obvious statement but wasn’t so obvious to me. Dating was fun. All of a sudden, not having a boyfriend felt like a possibility rather than an emptiness; an energy and ability to try men on like sweaters (in a non-objectifying way). Some fit better than others; some don’t fit at all. Life can become like a season of The Bachelor very, very quickly if you so choose to make it. Just some food for thought.
As quickly as it had begun, dating season came to a close, and I returned to school for senior year. And as quickly as it faded, the feeling that something or someone was missing returned, and I thought that maybe, just maybe, if I did something right, I would find it.
And then, like any spicy margarita within two feet of my grasp, it disappeared again.
I don’t exactly know or understand why there are times in which I feel like I want a boyfriend and times in which I feel like I don’t. There is something to be said about waking up next to someone, or feeling skin-to-skin contact, which is something I can sense is missing from my life when it’s been gone for too long. And I’m not even talking about sex. I literally mean touching. One summer, while traveling in Turkey, I spent two weeks without hugging anyone, and I have never sensed a lack of something like that so deeply in my life.
I have some theories, of course. I think I can sense how close I am to the end of college. I think I really like my life as it is right now, even sans boyfriend, and don’t feel a need to change it. I think I’ve accepted that when love chooses to come for me, it will.
When I was younger, my parents delayed adding a puppy to our family because their hands were full with me and my two younger brothers. When the first of them was born, my parents didn’t get a dog because they had two kids under the age of five, and that is probably enough of a nightmare in and of itself. When the second was born, my mom wanted to wait until he was old enough to walk and communicate so that having a dog around him would be easier. “You have your brothers,” she would say to persuade me. “You don’t need a dog right now. You have Jonah and Eli!” she said in a way that unintentionally implied that my two brothers had the consciousness and intelligence of labradoodles.
Now, I get it: instead I have other people. We go on walks together, and we get dinner a lot. We make coffee runs, and go grocery shopping, which I have always thought of as an incredibly romantic activity. We cuddle and hug when we’re alone in a room. This weekend, we even went to the jewelry store. We text each other when life is shitty and when good things happen. We tag each other in memes, which is the true sign of a strong relationship. I am honestly obsessed with them. Like, sometimes, I just have to squeeze the heck out of them. My best friends seem to be enough for me. I feel whole.
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