You Say You Don’t Want A Boyfriend, But You Know That’s Not True

I know; I say the same thing. I write about it on my personal blog — the one where people I really know can read me and maybe talk amongst each other about how strong I am. It’s kind of odd how many of my posts over the last few months have been so intensely anti-man. I wonder what it must look like to someone who has never met me. For a few weeks, I thought I would get “misandry” tattooed on my wrist. But I would probably get fired from my job.

“Boys are disgusting.” “I don’t want to put up with yet another manchild’s belated coming-of-age that he has vicariously through me.” Then a bunch of Sylvia Plath quotes. I don’t know, it’s all kind of a mess.

I say that I am working on myself right now, and I am. My job is pretty good, and I think I might get a promotion soon. Recently, I’ve been treating myself to all of the things I used to consider extravagances that were much too rich for my blood. My nails always look nice, and I have a lot of new shirts. Things are going pretty well for everyone but my check card. And all of this can go under the heading of “self-care,” of paying attention to what my body is telling me it needs.

But my body also feels alone. And regardless of how many times I have been hurt by something wielding a penis and a ludicrous sense of entitlement, a man is what I want to lie down next to it when it is aching alone in my bed. And I could walk outside and get with any of the number of leering strangers or cat-calling blue collar workers or friendly faces on my OkCupid homepage. I could put a band-aid over the bullet wound and fuck someone just because I want to feel them moving around inside me and doing some sad version of filling me up, but I don’t want that.

I want to be in love. I want to get it over with so that I can move along to all of the other parts of life that seem so easy to achieve when someone at home cares about you. I want that feeling of imperviousness, of security, of having that major thing checked off the list so I can attend to everything else. And for me, it will necessarily come in the form of a boyfriend. Someone who is bound to me by nothing other than his own desire to see me in the sunlight every morning. In my (sometimes messy) bed.

I was seeing this guy for a little while a month ago, and we both knew it wasn’t going anywhere. And even though I didn’t ever expect to fall deeply, madly in love with him, I was still torn to pieces when he stood me up to get back with his ex whom I should have known he was rebounding off of. There was something about it that just seemed so awful, and so predictable. And worse than feeling hurt, I felt incredibly bitter. I wrote a poem about it, and then threw it away, because that’s the last thing I need right now: More words dedicated to people who will never dedicate a single thing to me.