On dating

I am no good at dating. I even hate the word. I hate how it sounds like any other pastime. Like martial arts or cooking or crochet. The asking out, the picking the place, the predate stress over what to wear and say, how could that be enjoyable?

I also find that its as if the other person involved is just a prop. As if there are many boys milling about and if you just grab one, he'll do. This hasn't been my experience. My friends from high school seem to have this knack for finding suitable boyfriends. I am never quite sure how they do it, but there they are, suddenly a part of things. These boys are all suitably social and groomed. They tend to have non-descript jobs, they like music and a beer. They can fix a shelf. They're good blokes and your dad likes them too. They also seem to genuinely like my friends.

This is not what I do. Generally I do long-term unrequited love. I wouldn't recommend it. You sound like an emo kid if you go on about it, you spend your time daydreaming about what-ifs and at the end you have nothing to show for it except whole albums by Death Cab you can't listen to because they remind you of him. Also sometimes it means you don't get any sex. Perhaps my brain was muddled by too much Jane Austen and Anne of Green Gables* in my formative years but somewhere along the way my brain decided romance had to be epic and tragic or it hardly counted at all. Luckily by my early twenties I had decided that I could both have the epic romance and the friend with benefits, and while this worked out rather well for me it didn't help with the dating.

I realise none of this is revolutionary. Difficult relationships are everywhere, as are difficult almost relationships. The latter, which I have actually experienced, I find even more annoying because you can't smugly answer the "any men in your life?" question without getting a bit TMI and then having to explain that Orthodox Jews will barely shake hands with goy girls (ahem, just as an example). So this is all perhaps an elaborate way to explain away my lack of dating experience. I tend to either sleep with the guy straight off or endure a year of longing.

Perhaps I am using this as an excuse. Is dating always stressful? Would I be feeling exactly the same about it now at 23 even if I was one of those girls who always has a boyfriend? I think my wariness of comes from reading Dolly and Girlfriend when I was 14 and there were always these stories about the boy picking you up and then going out for dinner. As I was almost entirely reliant on my parents for transport dating seemed very much like something that grown ups did.

*Of course, ironically, the whole point of Anne of Green Gables is actually that Anne has to give up on grandiose ideas of romance.