Happy Valentine's Day...Ha!

"Are you seeing someone?"

My friends ask me this question, and I answer no.

This does not seem to satisfy them, and they often ask another question, related to the first, “Interested in anyone? Anyone cute on the horizon? Dating online?” etc.

When I answer no to any of these, the next question is always, “Why not?”

And my answer, for quite some time, has been either that I really wasn’t interested in anyone around me or that I wasn’t really all that interested in being with someone right now.

And both those things were true: there wasn’t anyone around me whom I couldn’t wait to see next time, on whose every word I was suspended, whose mere presence set me off kilter and I wasn’t actually feeling any need or desire to be with someone, to have someone in my life. It felt like it wasn’t really on my list of things to do.

But, your friends are your friends, and when they keep asking, you either get annoyed, or you start to ask yourself why they keep asking.

I did both. I got annoyed with them for not listening to my answer which was “Dude, it’s just not where I’m at right now. Maybe it’s where you’re at, maybe it’s what you spend all your time thinking about, but I don’t, I just don’t, so let it be.” And I wondered why they were asking. I knew that they were asking from a place of love and I was pretty sure that they were asking because they wanted me to be happy. But at the same time, I didn't feel unhappy or that being with someone was going to make me happy.

Recently, however, I made a joke when someone offered me a date to eat, “I’d like a date, but not that kind of date!” The person who offered me the date asked the usual question and we started talking about dating online and why I wasn't doing it. I gave my usual response about not being all that in to finding someone right now. I also thought in my head that on-line dating just "wasn't for me." But later, I reconsidered her question. I actually imagined myself dating on line. My immediate response was sudden and strong: “Nope, no no no no way, not doing that.”

I was surprised by the force and clarity of this response, and so I sat with it for a bit. I explored my relationship with on-line dating, recalling the times when I actually had signed up for Match and e-harmony and had put ads up on Craig's List. This is what I recalled:

Failure. Absolute failure.

This was a little hard for me to take, but I also knew that it was true. I knew that my experiences with online dating had been absolute failures (no one "winked" at me on match, e-harmony felt too much like an arranged marriage, and the discrepancy between a Craig's List ad and the actual person who wrote it was just disappointing beyond belief). Back then, when it was unsuccessful, I had blamed it on on-line dating itself: the system, the lies, the people on it, the websites, the selling yourself, etc. But this time I actually felt myself when I had dated on-line. And what I felt was failure, on my part, and rejection, by others. 

And then I thought about my dates in general, and my former boyfriends, and they all felt like failures too. I had broken up with each of my boyfriends, but it was for no other reason except that I thought that they weren't in love with me and never had been, and I wanted to reject them first, so that I wouldn't have to go through the pain of them actually rejecting me. Recalling this made me feel both totally unlovable and really inept at relationships in general.

And then I realized why I wasn’t dating right now, why “finding a life partner” wasn’t first on my agenda: it wasn’t that I didn’t want to find someone, it was that I didn’t want to go in to that arena in which I was a failure. I had no interest in setting myself up to be rejected by all these online websites again. I had no interest in only being pursued by guys who ended up being freaks. And, I was afraid of relationships, of being in one, of grappling with myself and another because according to my story, I wasn’t all that good at it.

The next day I thought about what does come up for me in my life right now and I realize that loneliness actually does come up for me, often. It doesn’t show up as wanting a romantic partner, but I know for sure that I am often lonely. I also know that finding someone isn’t how I want to address my loneliness. I honestly believe that I need to address loneliness by accepting it instead of trying to fill it with distractions or with others but it’s still true that I feel lonely, often. I also know, for sure, that I feel better when I am with others and so it isn't so much of a stretch for my friends to suggest that I might not be being honest when I say that it’s just not a priority in my life, it’s just not something I need or want right now.

But mostly I see that what I thought was an absence of interest on my part, what I had no desire or focus on had actually come from a place of denial, a shutting down, a blocking of what was actually my true feelings: fear and avoidance of rejection and failure.