In hindsight, watching a movie about a girl who meets a nice cute guy in the produce aisle of the grocery store who turns out to be a cannibal wasn’t the best idea as I start dating again.
But not all men are cannibals. Some are creative entrepreneurs.
There’s nothing left to say about dating in New York. You’ve heard it all already. You’ve watched Sex and the City, Girls, the Sex and the City movies, And Just Like That, and no doubt you’ve listened to the myriad podcasts about the aforementioned. I’m never going to tell you that I’m “my generation’s Carrie Bradshaw” because I’m not. I’m my generation’s Rachel Ordan. Actually there is another Rachel Ordan in my generation but I can’t get into that again.
Carrie Bradshaw existed in a fictional world where you and your three best friends all had lunch breaks at the same time. Where a newspaper columnist had an HBO sized wardrobe budget. Where your boyfriend is referred to as “Big” and not “drummer guy”, or “doctor man.”
In your midsection-twenties, so many people want to give you advice about dating and love and guys and girls and marriage and soulmates and high protein breakfasts. It’s too much information and people often forget that everybody is different. The way you met your boyfriend is different from how I’ll meet mine. Your protein shake would give me stomach cramps.
It makes sense. These are the questions we must ask each other. In high school it was, where do you want to go to college? In college it was, what do you want to do after you graduate? After you graduate it was, how’s your job? After that it was, are you dating? When you date it’s, when are you getting married? When you get married, when are you having kids? When you have kids, when are you buying a house? When you buy a house, when are you finishing the deck? When you finish the deck, when are you retiring? When you retire, where are your kids going to college? When your kids go to college, have you picked out your burial plot yet? You know I saw this Etsy shop with really cute burial plots, I’ll send you the link.
So the meet-cute doesn't really matter anymore. We have bigger questions to ask. Or maybe it matters, existentially, but it doesn’t happen often. More than half of my friends in relationships met their person on Hinge. It’s not taboo anymore. We’ve seen enough TikTok psychologists tell us that “butterflies in your stomach are actually anxiety” and people have opted for the slow burn. Taking 3-5 dates to really know someone. Fucking on the first date and falling in love on the 10th.
Dating isn’t scarier than anything else. It is a numbers game like Poker and America’s Got Talent. It is about patience, persistence, and sparkly eyeshadow. It’s fun, if you just remember that everyone is as normal and as weird as you are. And you can keep swiping, knowing that the guy in your phone is most likely not a serial killer. The killer is probably in the grocery store.