sugarrush-77

I was sitting on a curb having the kind of revelation that only hits when you're at the exact intersection of self-pity and dehydration.

The context is that nobody wants to date me. I've tried the apps. I've cold-approached strangers on the street like some guy handing out flyers for a restaurant nobody's going to. I've asked friends to set me up, which is the romantic equivalent of having your mom call the teacher. Nothing has worked. People tell me I’m a fashion terrorista — okay, fair, but you don't have to volunteer that information unprompted. I'm also short, which means I’m automatically ugly to most women. So there's that.

I'm mid-20s. This doesn't mean anything about how life turns out. I know that intellectually. But I was in the pit — the real pit, the one where your brain starts looping I'm gonna kill myself like it's a Hatsune Miku song stuck on repeat — and somewhere in the middle of that loop my brain just went: wait. Why do you even need to get married?

Like actually why. Life is short. People try to convince you it's some great thing, and I mean yeah, feeling loved and loving someone is probably wonderful. That's why so many people do it. But there are a lot of different things that can bring you fulfillment and happiness and satisfaction, and it's not like the point of life is to sustain those feelings forever, so why is this one particular arrangement elevated above everything else? I don't get it. I've never gotten it. I'm sitting on this curb and I genuinely cannot produce a reason.

And look, even the people who do get married — even the happy ones — it's not like it's this smooth, pleasant experience. My parents are happily married. They're also in the same argument they were in ten years ago. You can't fix people. You really can't. Whatever the issue is, it's going to be the same issue at year one and year twenty and year forty, and you're just going to have to live with it. Men have their specific faults. Women have their specific faults. And because they're so different from each other, sometimes one side genuinely cannot understand or sympathize with what the other side needs. It's not malice. It's just that you're wired differently and some gaps don't close no matter how much goodwill there is. Maybe if you're gay or lesbian it's easier. Same wavelength, at least. I don't know. But the point is that marriage is not this effortless beautiful thing people make it out to be. It's a grind. It's a daily grind that you're signing up for permanently.

And the divorce rate is insane. People will stand at an altar, say “till death do us part” with their whole chest, and then three years later they're splitting a Vitamix in mediation. I think of marriage as something you don't break. Period. That's what the commitment means. Unless someone is under genuine imminent threat, you stay. Personality difference? You stay. You're annoyed? You stay. That's the deal. That's what “till death” means. And yet people treat it as the most important decision of their life and then bail when it gets hard. So either the commitment doesn't mean what they said it meant, or they didn't think about it seriously enough before they made it. Either way, I'm not seeing a great advertisement here.

So I'm doing the math. Let's say I die at 65. I have 40 years left. 40 years is not a lot of time. If I get married I spend those years on kids, family, all of that, and I guess it can be very fulfilling. I'm not denying that. But you shouldn't have a kid to give your life meaning. You shouldn't need a family to feel like your existence has a point. There are things that fundamentally have meaning apart from all of that. If you're a Christian, the essence of life is to love God, love your neighbor. Being single doesn't subtract from that. It's not even in the equation.

I spent a good 30 minutes on this curb — which is a long time to sit on concrete, for the record, my ass was completely numb by the end — and I could not produce a single reason why you need to get married. Not one. I tried. I sat there and I tried to argue the other side and I kept coming up empty.

Thought experiment time!

I ran this thought experiment on myself. Let's say I wake up tomorrow and I'm inexplicably attractive. Just overnight, something changed, and now there's a horde of people who want to date me. They're knocking on my door, telling me I'm handsome, the whole thing. Do I want them?

No. I'd hate every single one of them. Because I know what happened. Yesterday they wouldn't have looked at me if I was on fire, and today some switch flipped and now they're interested. That's not real. They don't like me. They like the version of me that crossed whatever arbitrary threshold they have for attractiveness, and that version didn't exist 24 hours ago. Everything I actually am — all of it, the good and the bad and the boring and the weird — none of that changed. The only thing that changed is my face or my height or whatever, and that was enough. That tells me everything I need to know about what they actually value.

Or let's say I got rich. A billion dollars, just appeared in my account. Suddenly everyone thinks I'm interesting and attractive and worth their time. That doesn't draw me towards them. That makes me want to walk into the ocean. You didn't want me when I was broke and invisible, and now I'm supposed to believe this is genuine? We both know what this is. Get out of my house.

I realize I'm getting increasingly worked up about hypothetical people who don't exist. I'm developing resentments towards women I have never met over scenarios that have not occurred. This is probably not a sign of great mental health. But the point underneath all of that is real, I think. What I actually want — what anyone actually wants, if they're honest about it — is someone who likes them when they're not impressive. When they're sick, broke, annoying, ugly, boring. Not just when everything's going great and you're easy to love. The love people actually crave is the kind that doesn't have conditions.

And that kind of love is almost impossible to find between two people. Parental love comes close, but even that has limits. If your kid is a three-time serial killer, even Mom is going to have a hard time. Really the only place you find truly unconditional love is God. That's it. That yearning you have — that deep, bottomless thing that makes you feel like you'll die if nobody ever really knows you and loves you anyway — that's pointed at God whether you realize it or not. Romantic love is great. I'm not trashing it. But it's not the answer to that particular ache, and it never was, and treating it like the answer is how people end up devastated when it doesn't fix them.

So where does that leave me.

I think the issue was never that nobody wants me. I think the issue is that I was staring at the wrong scoreboard. I've been depressed about something that doesn't actually matter as much as I thought it did. My priorities were misaligned. I was pouring all this energy and anguish into the fact that I'm not valuable in the dating market, and the whole time the answer was just: so what? It doesn't take away from the things that actually matter. It doesn't diminish my life. It's fine. It is genuinely fine.

And I mean that. I'm not just repeating “it's fine” to myself like a mantra, trying to brainwash myself into believing it. I actually sat with this for a while and I cannot find a hole in it. There's no reason this should be ruining my life the way it has been.

I think I can own it. I'm a chud. Possibly an extreme chud. I have zero aura. I get nervous in big open rooms and feel safe in capsule hotels where everything is tight and enclosed and nobody can see me. I am most at peace in a basement in front of a computer. Complete self-deception can fix a lot of things, but there are some objective truths that no amount of gaslight-yourself energy is going to override. I am who I am. The dating market has weighed me and found me wanting, and I have decided that the dating market's opinion is not one I need to care about.

Do I talk to anyone about this? About any of it? No. Should I? I don't know. Will I? Absolutely not. I keep everything buried all the time. Everything is embarrassing. Everything is shameful. I don't know where that comes from — this feeling that any interior thought, once spoken aloud, becomes humiliating — but it's been there as long as I can remember. Sometimes I think I would rather die than describe what's going on inside my head to another person. That's probably its own problem. A big one, actually. But I'm choosing not to engage with it right now because I can only have one crisis at a time and this curb is not comfortable enough for two.

I do all my thinking alone, which means my thoughts are becoming increasingly feral. I'm drifting further from what normal people think. I'm aware of this. Every week I spend processing things in complete isolation is another week my worldview gets a little more strange, a little less compatible with polite conversation. I'm developing opinions and frameworks that I could never say out loud because they'd sound insane, but they make perfect sense inside my head, which is either a sign that I'm onto something or a sign that I've lost the plot entirely. I honestly don't know which one it is and I'm not sure it matters.

I wanted to write all of this down before I forgot it. That's the only reason this exists. I thought about something for 30 minutes on a curb and I want to be able to come back to it later and remember what I was thinking, because usually these things just evaporate and then I'm back in the pit again with no recollection of ever having climbed out. So here it is. My ass hurts. I'm going inside. I don't know if I'm convinced or if I'm just tired, but either way I'm done sitting on concrete.