How to Have a Pregnancy Scare

Have the kind of sex that involves the condom breaking. Think nothing of it until you realize you are probably ovulating because of you have an insatiable craving for carbs and recently bawled at work for stupid reasons unrelated to your job. Take the only emergency contraceptive that’s available in a country where Plan B is considered an abortifacient: 4 Trust pills within 72 hours of unprotected sex, then another 4 pills 12 hours later. Go to bed thinking, “Any day now, my period will come. Any day now.”

Three days later, be 100000000 times more emotional and sensitive than you normally are when you’re PMSing, because the hormones are now working their anti-pregnancy magic on your body. Be aware that hormone-bombing your body makes you go a little crazy and prepare yourself for the emotional shitstorm ahead.

Do the groceries, clean your apartment, go for a swim – anything to get your mind off things. During a break in between laps, finally release the tears you’ve been choking back all day. Spend the rest of the evening throwing a pity party of epic proportions on your living room floor, hair still damp from the pool water. Start smoking again, because fuck this shit. Think about all the coincidences and choices that led you to this moment. Think self-defeating thoughts about how inherently unlovable you are. Feel very scared and alone.

Decide to take a pregnancy test a week and a day after the broken condom episode. Have friends over for moral support and draw courage from half a bottle of wine. Feel relief at seeing just one red dash. Think that any day now, your period will come. Any day now.

Cat-Pregnancy-Test-Meme

Panic a little when there are is still no signs of blood three days later. Panic some more when you discover you’re supposed to take pregnancy tests first thing in the morning, not close to midnight on a Friday after downing half a bottle of wine. Decide to take another pregnancy test the coming weekend, and to somehow keep it together until then.

Have your secret spill out of your mouth at lunch on Monday because your panic can’t be contained. Feel relieved and expect words of comfort when one of your friends says he thought of something to make you feel better. Shake your head in disbelief as your coworkers start brainstorming names for your potential future child instead.

Reevaluate your beliefs about abortion. Decide that even though safe and legal abortions should be made available to women everywhere, it’s not an option that you would choose for yourself. Find this to be an odd decision, because selfish choices are the only choices you know how to make. Maybe it’s all that Catholic school brainwashing. Maybe it’s because you know someone who died too young. Maybe it’s because you’ll spend the rest of your life hating yourself for denying anyone the chance to love and be loved and live. Because despite all the suffering in this world, you know that life is a wonderful thing, and in spite of your issues, you have a lot of love to give.

Also, you don’t want to risk death from a botched back-alley abortion. You don’t even know where to get a back-alley abortion done.

Talk to your mother because she is probably the only person in the world who loves you. Find the nerve to bring up your fears as you listen to her gossip about someone who just got disowned by her parents. What would make a parent disown their child, she wonders out loud.

“Oh, I don’t know,” you say with false nonchalance. “Wouldn’t you disown me if I got accidentally knocked up?”

“Gaga,” your mother replies. “I would be happy if you got pregnant.”

“Even if the father was a one night stand?”

“Well I’d rather that he weren’t.”

Yep, abortion is definitely no longer an option.

safe sex

Have another hormone-induced crying fit. Think about all the nights you’ll never have at your favorite bar because you have to breastfeed or sing nursery rhymes or do whatever it is mothers do on Saturday nights. Think about how being a single mother will make you REALLY undateable now. Think about how thrilled your frenemies will be and how your relatives will give you so much shit for getting knocked up by some tourist whose name you can barely remember and whose last name you don’t know. Realize that single motherhood comes with so much unnecessary judgment and shame. Think about how unfair it is to be a woman. Think about how fucking expensive it is to send a kid to school. Think about how you sometimes can’t afford to take a cab to work.

At work the next morning, Google the following search terms:
chances of pregnancy from pre-ejaculate
chances of pregnancy from broken condom
false negative on a home pregnancy test
are there any infertility gods i can pray to
how early in pregnancy does morning sickness occur because i feel really nauseous right now

See your favorite aunt who is visiting from San Francisco. Hope that you can get some of her Buddhist calm through osmosis and meditation because your friends are getting sick and tired of your moaning. Listen reluctantly as she lays down the facts.

“If you are pregnant despite all the precautions you took,” she says, “then you are ready to be a mother. I’m not religious, but I believe in serendipity and synchronicity. The universe will send you a teacher when you are ready. In this case, your teacher can be a baby.”

“But motherhood will mean that my life is over,” you whine. “I got out of a relationship because I felt stuck and trapped. I don’t want to spend the next two decades raising a kid.”

“It helps to visualize the positive. Imagine all the beautiful things you could teach a child. You might end up with a very precocious baby who’ll be reading Socrates at five years old.”

Meditate. Feel comforted by the thought that everything happens as it should. Accept that if the universe gives you a baby, then you’re going to make damn sure that kid grows up to be a smart and compassionate human being. Start making up rules on raising your child: no photos of your kid on social media until he or she is old enough to give consent, gender-neutral toys only, an enriching early academic life that will make your kid qualify for Philippine Science High School or the Philippine High School for the Arts. Begin to curate a list of books you plan to read out loud every night. Feel a little excited about your parenting project. Fall asleep wondering how to break the news to your parents.

a period is never late

Wake up with fresh blood stains on your pajamas and bedsheets. Realize that this means you get to live the life you’ve enjoyed up until your pregnancy scare – the life you’ve always wanted for yourself. Text a non-pregnancy announcement to your friends. Sterilize your menstrual cup. Allow yourself a minute to feel irritated because you just changed your sheets two days ago and now you have to change your sheets again. Quit smoking.

Walk to work with a skip to your step, your iPod playing a more cheerful soundtrack to your life. In between songs, listen to a tiny part of yourself cry, the part that felt real excitement at the thought of loving and raising your own child. Allow yourself a few seconds to feel a slight pinprick of disappointment. Decide that you definitely want a kid, someday, on your own terms. And hope that when you are ready, you’ll get to have that baby with someone who’ll stay longer than a night.

I Finally Quit After Three Months of Serial Dating

I don’t know why I didn’t just delete my online dating accounts the first time I swore to Never Date Again. I had been freshly dumped by a guy I had been casually seeing for a month, which wouldn’t have been so humiliating if the dumping did not happen via a harried SMS in the middle of a hectic work morning. Without any sort of warning that things were going awry, he texted me saying that he had fun hanging out, but seeing me again would probably be a bad idea because he has no commitment in him. You know, typical Boy-Gets-Too-Close-and-Panics explanations. Never mind that the only commitment I ever expected was the next date! Never mind that I didn’t dare say that my feelings were becoming more-than-casual because I sensed that would scare him off. Seeing me further was apparently a Bad Idea.

I managed to make it through the day without losing my shit, but my feelings could not be contained without work to distract me. The evening found me ugly crying over a glass of beer at my secret bar, my friend Tere sympathetically listening to my drunken ramblings while trying to make sure I don’t embarrass myself further. After two hours of wailing, “How could he think that I am a bad idea???” and failing to find the answer in my Pale Pilsen, I somehow managed to cheer up and insist that we go to McDonald’s for nuggets. By the end of the night, we were singing along to the radio in Adrian’s car.

It goes without saying that making a drunken spectacle of myself is pretty out of character for me, but everyone needs to purge their emotions in public at least once in their lives. It feels oddly liberating, and you get a shit ton of perspective afterwards. Like how this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever been rejected by a guy, and suddenly I felt like an asshole for always being the dumper in relationships. And how dumping someone through text is the worst thing you can to do a person, because there’s no reply to a Text Dumping that doesn’t sound defensive, pathetic, or passive-aggressive (in the end, I chose to say nothing and deleted all traces of him from my phone). And that a guy who makes you sad enough to ugly cry at a bar is not worth holding on to.

secret bar
The bar of drunken, broken-hearted ramblings.
Little did I know that I’d have my last date here a month later.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have jumped into the dating pool so soon after my last relationship. But after nearly a decade of serial monogamy, I didn’t know how to deal with being alone for the first time in years. Oh sure, I used my free time to explore new hobbies and reconnect with old friends. But every now and then I’d be in the mood to do coupley things with someone cute. I wasn’t after a relationship per se, but I wanted a casual arrangement where you like each other enough to hang out often, sans the boyfriend-girlfriend label and the serious things attached to it.

Seeing as my new job keeps me busy 12 hours a day, and dating friends-of-friends seemed incestuous, I used online dating to meet guys without ever leaving my ergonomic chair at work. And for a while, it was a brilliant solution. OK Cupid ended up being a favorite, not just because of its compatibility algorithm, but because the lengthy dating profiles became a convenient way to judge whether a guy is worth meeting in person. (It also made it easier for me to use my intelligence and taste to compensate for my looks.) Tinder, on the other hand, was perfect for one-off spontaneous dates, as most of its users are tourists or guys on business trips looking for someone to have dinner with.

Through the magic of WhatsApp and some internet stalking, I’d make sure that the guys I liked were not secretly insane before taking our conversation to the corporeal world. My verification process resulted in some really fun dates, though I never saw the same guy more than twice. With the exception of the squirrelly dude who would eventually dump me through text, my dates don’t live in the Philippines, because those are the kinds of guys I like apparently.

I enjoyed the ability to choose next week’s date with a flick of a thumb and some carefully-worded messages, and kept it up even as I started getting serious with Mr. Squirelly. I was starting to like him enough to want to spend ALL THE FREE TIME with him, but I needed to date other guys so that I don’t look like I’m getting attached. BRILLIANT LOGIC, I know. I did eventually realize that my serial dating was becoming borderline unhealthy, and that I was fine seeing the same guy until we tired of each other. Unfortunately, I didn’t think that he’d get tired of me first, and that he would dump me through text that Friday, and that I would make an idiot out of myself in a bar.

i don't want a boyfriend

Christmas break happened a few days later, which of course was a perfect time for my ex-boyfriend to surprise me with an emotionally harrowing Facebook conversation about our failed relationship. Among other things, he was concerned about how I had been ugly crying at a bar over some guy, because I was stupid enough to write a drunken Facebook status about it, and our mutual friends were asking him what happened. (Thanks, mutual friends, for asking my ex-boyfriend how I’m doing instead of, you know, asking ME.) He then started talking to me about his hot new job and how he’s earning more money than I am. I’m sure that he didn’t mean anything by these unsolicited life updates, but in my emotionally volatile state, all I could hear him saying was, “If you only held on for a few months, you would still be blissfully relationshipped with me, The Most Perfect Guy in the Universe, rather than this sad mess who still sucks at adulthood and is probably developing alcoholism.” Merry Christmas to you too.

Drained, uncentered, and distrustful of people, I took down all my social media accounts, retreated to my parents’ house, and refused to emerge for Christmas parties. I hate everyone, I thought. I hate myself. December was a dark time, but it also gave me the chance to rethink my priorities and ask tough questions like, What am I doing? What makes me think I should be dating when I’m clearly horrible at relationships? If I’m going to be single for the rest of my life, what can I do to make myself the kind of person I’d be happy to be forever alone with? Etc. etc.

walking around bui vien

An amazing solo trip around Vietnam restored my faith in the universe and taught me to feel comfortable in my own company. I came back to Manila feeling refreshed, optimistic, and eager to start becoming a Better Human Being. “My only priorities are work, surfing, making new friends, and reconnecting with old friends,” I wrote in my notebook. “I am so done with dating.”

So why the hell was I on OK Cupid a few days later, rating guys with stars and striking up a conversation with one about my favorite foreign films? Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to give dating one last shot? Maybe I really wasn’t as comfortable being single as I thought I was?

The following Monday, I came to work wearing heels and looking nicer than usual.

“I have a date tonight,” I finally admitted when my coworker Ange cornered me in the bathroom and asked about my outfit.

Not one to tiptoe around my feelings, she said, “Please don’t say you met this guy online.”

“Um. Yeah. He’s an OK Cupid date.”

She rolled her eyes. “Why do you do this to yourself?”

And for once I had no answer.

foooooood
This photo was actually from a lunch out with coworkers.
I put it here to break up the wall of text and keep things interesting.

The date turned out to be an unexpected success. He was a lot cuter in person, with a disarming smile that made me feel oddly self-conscious every time it was directed at me. We were so absorbed in the getting-to-know-you conversation that an entire hour passed before realizing that we hadn’t ordered anything. After dinner, I thought of taking him to the secret bar for drinks, and it turns out he had the same plan in mind. This is the shit those stupid romantic comedies are made of, I thought as we ordered our drinks and proceeded to play a round of drunk Jenga. God, he’s really cute.

I normally keep a wide emotional distance on the first date, but there was something about this guy that made me like him instantly. We made plans for dinner the following Thursday, and like an idiot I found myself counting the days until I saw him again. At the same time, I also started getting very anxious. “What the fuck are you doing?” I asked myself. The last thing I needed was to hop back on the emotional roller coaster of Really Liking Someone, and I could already feel my stomach turning in anticipation of the drop.

Thursday morning came after a Wednesday spent working all night, and I put extra effort into my makeup to disguise my zombie face. I shouldn’t have bothered, really, because that afternoon I got a Facebook message from him canceling our date. “I’m really sorry to do this at the last minute,” he wrote, “but I’m really not ready to start dating right now.”

Normally I would have found that totally respectable. Part of me was actually quite relieved to get off the roller coaster and travel the flat, uncomplicated roads of Not Dating Anyone. Mostly though, I felt incredibly humiliated. Not only had my coworkers already guessed my evening plans based on my nicer-than-usual appearance, but I checked his OK Cupid account and it was active with a new profile picture, and OMG I can’t believe this is happening to me AGAIN.

is anyone on the internet

That night, my coworkers took me to a boxing gym, and I found peace hitting a speed ball over and over and over. As we entered a Chickboy to consume the calories we just burned, I realized how much un-self-conscious fun I was having with my work friends despite being zombie-faced and sweat-stained, and how secure I felt knowing that none of them would ever surprise me with a text message saying, “I’m not ready to make new friends, sorry can’t hang out anymore.” It was stupid to spend so much effort trying to get these flaky OK Cupid assholes to like me, when there are people who already appreciate who I am. And until recently, I never made an effort to try to get to know anyone without having a hidden romantic agenda.

The first thing I did when I got home was delete my OK Cupid account.

I’ve been thinking really hard about why I made that last-ditch attempt at dating even though I knew that it was a dumb move. My sense of self is growing more solid by the day, and I was finding confidence in my small victories at work, so it wasn’t because I needed men for validation. Traveling alone in Vietnam cured me of the need for romantic companionship, so it wasn’t that either.

And assuming that one of these casual dates became serious, would I have really wanted to be in a relationship with that guy? I like the idea of being partnered up with someone. I like knowing there’s someone there for movies and food and spontaneous midnight bus rides to the beach. And I am capable of love – or at least, very intense feelings for someone. But feeling intensely for someone isn’t what makes you ready for a relationship; it’s about having the maturity to handle someone else’s intense feelings. And the truth is that when reality hits, and I need to see my partner through a crisis like unemployment or money issues, I get no less selfish and panicky than the guys who ditched me through digital means.

Realizing this made me want to be more present, accepting, and respectful of people’s emotions instead of running away when someone shows vulnerability. And it’s not because I want to be ready for a relationship. It’s what good friends do, and lately I’ve been too absorbed in the drama of my late twenties to be a good friend to anyone.

More than overcoming loneliness, I think I was dating to distract myself from things I don’t want to deal with. Dating was a convenient excuse to avoid the hard work required to create a healthy, independent self. Dating filled up the empty spaces in my calendar that could have been spent overcoming my shyness to make friends, reading the books in my Kindle, or writing to make sense of my personal life. None of these things come with the instant gratification of snagging an Internet date, but they’re exactly what I need to live the life I want. I owe it to myself to work towards that life.

I Finally Quit After Three Months of Serial Dating

I don’t know why I didn’t just delete my online dating accounts the first time I swore to Never Date Again. I had been freshly dumped by a guy I had been casually seeing for a month, which wouldn’t have been so humiliating if the dumping did not happen via a harried SMS in the middle of a hectic work morning. Without any sort of warning that things were going awry, he texted me saying that he had fun hanging out, but seeing me again would probably be a bad idea because he has no commitment in him. You know, typical Boy-Gets-Too-Close-and-Panics explanations. Never mind that the only commitment I ever expected was the next date! Never mind that I didn’t dare say that my feelings were becoming more-than-casual because I sensed that would scare him off. Seeing me further was apparently a Bad Idea.

I managed to make it through the day without losing my shit, but my feelings could not be contained without work to distract me. The evening found me ugly crying over a glass of beer at my secret bar, my friend Tere sympathetically listening to my drunken ramblings while trying to make sure I don’t embarrass myself further. After two hours of wailing, “How could he think that I am a bad idea???” and failing to find the answer in my Pale Pilsen, I somehow managed to cheer up and insist that we go to McDonald’s for nuggets. By the end of the night, we were singing along to the radio in Adrian’s car.

It goes without saying that making a drunken spectacle of myself is pretty out of character for me, but everyone needs to purge their emotions in public at least once in their lives. It feels oddly liberating, and you get a shit ton of perspective afterwards. Like how this is the first time in my life that I’ve ever been rejected by a guy, and suddenly I felt like an asshole for always being the dumper in relationships. And how dumping someone through text is the worst thing you can to do a person, because there’s no reply to a Text Dumping that doesn’t sound defensive, pathetic, or passive-aggressive (in the end, I chose to say nothing and deleted all traces of him from my phone). And that a guy who makes you sad enough to ugly cry at a bar is not worth holding on to.

secret bar
The bar of drunken, broken-hearted ramblings.
Little did I know that I’d have my last date here a month later.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have jumped into the dating pool so soon after my last relationship. But after nearly a decade of serial monogamy, I didn’t know how to deal with being alone for the first time in years. Oh sure, I used my free time to explore new hobbies and reconnect with old friends. But every now and then I’d be in the mood to do coupley things with someone cute. I wasn’t after a relationship per se, but I wanted a casual arrangement where you like each other enough to hang out often, sans the boyfriend-girlfriend label and the serious things attached to it.

Seeing as my new job keeps me busy 12 hours a day, and dating friends-of-friends seemed incestuous, I used online dating to meet guys without ever leaving my ergonomic chair at work. And for a while, it was a brilliant solution. OK Cupid ended up being a favorite, not just because of its compatibility algorithm, but because the lengthy dating profiles became a convenient way to judge whether a guy is worth meeting in person. (It also made it easier for me to use my intelligence and taste to compensate for my looks.) Tinder, on the other hand, was perfect for one-off spontaneous dates, as most of its users are tourists or guys on business trips looking for someone to have dinner with.

Through the magic of WhatsApp and some internet stalking, I’d make sure that the guys I liked were not secretly insane before taking our conversation to the corporeal world. My verification process resulted in some really fun dates, though I never saw the same guy more than twice. With the exception of the squirrelly dude who would eventually dump me through text, my dates don’t live in the Philippines, because those are the kinds of guys I like apparently.

I enjoyed the ability to choose next week’s date with a flick of a thumb and some carefully-worded messages, and kept it up even as I started getting serious with Mr. Squirelly. I was starting to like him enough to want to spend ALL THE FREE TIME with him, but I needed to date other guys so that I don’t look like I’m getting attached. BRILLIANT LOGIC, I know. I did eventually realize that my serial dating was becoming borderline unhealthy, and that I was fine seeing the same guy until we tired of each other. Unfortunately, I didn’t think that he’d get tired of me first, and that he would dump me through text that Friday, and that I would make an idiot out of myself in a bar.

i don't want a boyfriend

Christmas break happened a few days later, which of course was a perfect time for my ex-boyfriend to surprise me with an emotionally harrowing Facebook conversation about our failed relationship. Among other things, he was concerned about how I had been ugly crying at a bar over some guy, because I was stupid enough to write a drunken Facebook status about it, and our mutual friends were asking him what happened. (Thanks, mutual friends, for asking my ex-boyfriend how I’m doing instead of, you know, asking ME.) He then started talking to me about his hot new job and how he’s earning more money than I am. I’m sure that he didn’t mean anything by these unsolicited life updates, but in my emotionally volatile state, all I could hear him saying was, “If you only held on for a few months, you would still be blissfully relationshipped with me, The Most Perfect Guy in the Universe, rather than this sad mess who still sucks at adulthood and is probably developing alcoholism.” Merry Christmas to you too.

Drained, uncentered, and distrustful of people, I took down all my social media accounts, retreated to my parents’ house, and refused to emerge for Christmas parties. I hate everyone, I thought. I hate myself. December was a dark time, but it also gave me the chance to rethink my priorities and ask tough questions like, What am I doing? What makes me think I should be dating when I’m clearly horrible at relationships? If I’m going to be single for the rest of my life, what can I do to make myself the kind of person I’d be happy to be forever alone with? Etc. etc.

walking around bui vien

An amazing solo trip around Vietnam restored my faith in the universe and taught me to feel comfortable in my own company. I came back to Manila feeling refreshed, optimistic, and eager to start becoming a Better Human Being. “My only priorities are work, surfing, making new friends, and reconnecting with old friends,” I wrote in my notebook. “I am so done with dating.”

So why the hell was I on OK Cupid a few days later, rating guys with stars and striking up a conversation with one about my favorite foreign films? Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe I wanted to give dating one last shot? Maybe I really wasn’t as comfortable being single as I thought I was?

The following Monday, I came to work wearing heels and looking nicer than usual.

“I have a date tonight,” I finally admitted when my coworker Ange cornered me in the bathroom and asked about my outfit.

Not one to tiptoe around my feelings, she said, “Please don’t say you met this guy online.”

“Um. Yeah. He’s an OK Cupid date.”

She rolled her eyes. “Why do you do this to yourself?”

And for once I had no answer.

foooooood
This photo was actually from a lunch out with coworkers.
I put it here to break up the wall of text and keep things interesting.

The date turned out to be an unexpected success. He was a lot cuter in person, with a disarming smile that made me feel oddly self-conscious every time it was directed at me. We were so absorbed in the getting-to-know-you conversation that an entire hour passed before realizing that we hadn’t ordered anything. After dinner, I thought of taking him to the secret bar for drinks, and it turns out he had the same plan in mind. This is the shit those stupid romantic comedies are made of, I thought as we ordered our drinks and proceeded to play a round of drunk Jenga. God, he’s really cute.

I normally keep a wide emotional distance on the first date, but there was something about this guy that made me like him instantly. We made plans for dinner the following Thursday, and like an idiot I found myself counting the days until I saw him again. At the same time, I also started getting very anxious. “What the fuck are you doing?” I asked myself. The last thing I needed was to hop back on the emotional roller coaster of Really Liking Someone, and I could already feel my stomach turning in anticipation of the drop.

Thursday morning came after a Wednesday spent working all night, and I put extra effort into my makeup to disguise my zombie face. I shouldn’t have bothered, really, because that afternoon I got a Facebook message from him canceling our date. “I’m really sorry to do this at the last minute,” he wrote, “but I’m really not ready to start dating right now.”

Normally I would have found that totally respectable. Part of me was actually quite relieved to get off the roller coaster and travel the flat, uncomplicated roads of Not Dating Anyone. Mostly though, I felt incredibly humiliated. Not only had my coworkers already guessed my evening plans based on my nicer-than-usual appearance, but I checked his OK Cupid account and it was active with a new profile picture, and OMG I can’t believe this is happening to me AGAIN.

is anyone on the internet

That night, my coworkers took me to a boxing gym, and I found peace hitting a speed ball over and over and over. As we entered a Chickboy to consume the calories we just burned, I realized how much un-self-conscious fun I was having with my work friends despite being zombie-faced and sweat-stained, and how secure I felt knowing that none of them would ever surprise me with a text message saying, “I’m not ready to make new friends, sorry can’t hang out anymore.” It was stupid to spend so much effort trying to get these flaky OK Cupid assholes to like me, when there are people who already appreciate who I am. And until recently, I never made an effort to try to get to know anyone without having a hidden romantic agenda.

The first thing I did when I got home was delete my OK Cupid account.

I’ve been thinking really hard about why I made that last-ditch attempt at dating even though I knew that it was a dumb move. My sense of self is growing more solid by the day, and I was finding confidence in my small victories at work, so it wasn’t because I needed men for validation. Traveling alone in Vietnam cured me of the need for romantic companionship, so it wasn’t that either.

And assuming that one of these casual dates became serious, would I have really wanted to be in a relationship with that guy? I like the idea of being partnered up with someone. I like knowing there’s someone there for movies and food and spontaneous midnight bus rides to the beach. And I am capable of love – or at least, very intense feelings for someone. But feeling intensely for someone isn’t what makes you ready for a relationship; it’s about having the maturity to handle someone else’s intense feelings. And the truth is that when reality hits, and I need to see my partner through a crisis like unemployment or money issues, I get no less selfish and panicky than the guys who ditched me through digital means.

Realizing this made me want to be more present, accepting, and respectful of people’s emotions instead of running away when someone shows vulnerability. And it’s not because I want to be ready for a relationship. It’s what good friends do, and lately I’ve been too absorbed in the drama of my late twenties to be a good friend to anyone.

More than overcoming loneliness, I think I was dating to distract myself from things I don’t want to deal with. Dating was a convenient excuse to avoid the hard work required to create a healthy, independent self. Dating filled up the empty spaces in my calendar that could have been spent overcoming my shyness to make friends, reading the books in my Kindle, or writing to make sense of my personal life. None of these things come with the instant gratification of snagging an Internet date, but they’re exactly what I need to live the life I want. And I owe it to myself to work towards that life.