Insecure

May 5, 2019

I joined a dating app. One of my best friends, Haley, helped me set up my profile, and as her birthday present, I gave her complete control over the content. I promised I wouldn’t object to anything she wrote about me, I only had one stipulation, that she mention I was waiting on the Happy Rant Podcast Dating App to launch. She knows me very well. What she writes is authentic and a great representation of who I am, plus she watched a Ted Talk on how to put together a successful dating profile, so I couldn’t be happier with the result. It’s a great mix of light-hearted while also showing I have depth. Looking at the final result, I’d date me!  

So I start swiping. She’s sitting next to me at a diner in downtown DC. “Diner” is kind of an inaccurate description. We’re at Crimson. It has three floors including a rooftop bar and a basement whiskey bar. Haley loves whiskey and Crimson has a great trivia night which I enjoy watching, but tonight we’re on the main floor. It’s carefully decorated in a diner-style but it’s just too clean and too put together to really be an authentic diner. It’s a little too designer. But hey, it’s DC. 

We’re sitting at the bar, Haley drinking an Old Fashioned and I have a glass of wine in front of me. We’re splitting an oversized slice of chocolate cake, Haley is visibly trying to pace herself on both her drink and the cake. We love going to get drinks together but, as she says, no one can milk a glass of wine like I can. So usually her ice melts into her drink long before I’m ordering a second round. But it’s not my usual slow pace that’s got her antsy tonight, it’s the fact that we’re starting to swipe. But instead of focusing on dating profiles, I’m focusing on the mint and sunflower checkered floor, the vinyl-covered cushions on the bar stools, the whipped cream slowly melting on the plate, the conversation of the couple next to us, anywhere else. She’s got my phone in her hand and she’s talking through the different profiles, “oh, this guy is funny!” “look, he’s kind of cute” “oh hey, we’ve got a like!”

So I pull myself back to the task at hand wondering what I’m doing even though I’m the one that decided to do this! I’ve never dated, I’ve never had a relationship. In high school, my parents had a rule, I wasn’t allowed to date until after I was married. Makes sense, right? Really, my dad’s rule was that I wasn’t allowed to date until I was ready to get married. So I’d try to skirt around it with things like, “well if I met someone, maybe I’d be ready to get married, you never know!” He’d just look at me, waiting out until I answered truthfully. So I wasn’t allowed to date in middle or high school. It didn’t matter anyway, every year around prom season my guy friends would tell me that I was intimidating with too high standards and that’s why no one asked me. I’d snarkily asked if they’d polled all of the guys in our 2000+ person school and that truly was the general consensus. “Well, guys talk,” was their response. So there’s that. 

I didn’t date in college either. I was only on campus freshman year and while I did have a crush on a guy who was on the speech and debate team with me, my version of flirting was looking at a guy a few times and hoping he didn’t realize I liked him, so that didn’t go anywhere. Go figure.

And then I was in hospitals. It’s really hard to meet someone when you’re always the youngest person in the vascular surgery unit by forty years. When you have a bunch of medical students who are close to your age seeing your boobs while they examine the incision site on your chest, you suddenly don’t really find them attractive anymore, oddly enough.

So when I moved to DC I thought maybe I would start dating, but I’ve been so embroiled in medical stuff yet again that it hasn’t been feasible. But I have to decide to live my life at some point. Medical concerns will never end. I can’t wait until I’m dead to live. So here I am, swiping through dating profiles with Haley on a Friday night. But as I’m looking at the number of men who are interested in my profile grow during these thirty minutes we’re sitting here, I feel my panic grow in proportion. Oh, I am so not ready to date.

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