I am nothing if not romantic. For love. For life. The good and the bad. Not in an annoying thespian/drama kid way, just in the kind of way where I think the next moment, every moment, is going to be the one to change my whole life. I’m annoyingly optimistic about it all. That said, for the sake of this story, I will be focusing on the romantic love kind of stuff.
So like most women my age, I grew up on the classic Disney princess fairytales — or to quote the iconic Diane Barrows in the Olsen twin classic, It Takes Two, I grew up on that “can't eat, can't sleep, reach for the stars over the fence, world series kind of love.“ And it unfortunately shaped my outlook on love and dating and is something I’m very much looking forward to talking to my therapist about.
I remember being in sixth grade thinking that, by some miracle, the “hot”* “guy”** was going to make his parents stop by my house on the way to the movies with all the other “cool”*** kids, because he all of a sudden couldn’t go another day of his eleven-year-old life without me in it. As his girlfriend, of course. I would put on my slickest Delia’s look, some roll-on body glitter, and practice my caught-off-guard-by-this-sudden-interest-in-me reaction on the off chance that this fantasy was definitely, totally going to come true.
*Air quotes were deployed here to imply that my crush was not hot, nor a guy — he was eleven, he was a boy — and that no one is cool in sixth grade.
I remember a time when I thought my ex was going to pull a 180 on his entire personality, like literally become a different person, and execute a large scale public declaration of his love for me; realizing that he, too, could not live another day without me. (Ahh, a theme emerges). I genuinely thought he was going to orchestrate some sort of surprise party with my family and friends to officially ask for me back. That didn’t happen. I’m fine, I’m fine. Yet despite my imagination being right 0% of the time, I’m still pretty hyped on the thought of what or who comes next.
The most recent form of this romantic idealization caught even me off guard, though. I was walking to the fluff and fold when I happened across a cutie guy. Before I even realized what it was doing, my mind was doing its *thing*. You see, I have recently become disenchanted by online dating (though I do think I deserve some sort of award or recognition from Hinge for being so resilient in the face of ghostage and other let downs), and have been noodling on the idea of deleting it and letting the universe step in and serve me up a real, live, breathing man in the wild. Was this him?! I love a chance encounter, and that’s where my mind prematurely filed this .001 second long interaction. I started thinking backwards and chronicling all the decisions and circumstances that had lead me to this exact moment on a dirty sidewalk in Brooklyn. These moments weren’t just, “I got bored and depressed at work and left early and thus am walking down this exact street at 5:41pm.” No, it was more like, “well, a global pandemic made it so I could go to California. And since I went home, I had dirty clothes I needed to drop off. And since that apartment search (which took years off your life) lead you to so many nos, it also lead you to the apartment you finally said yes to and now this is your neighborhood, and this is your laundry mat and maybe this is your dude.”
Anyway, he barely looked at me and kept on walking.