It’s called Speakeasy Magick. It takes place in a gorgeous room, dimly lit, that you enter through a sort of trap door.

The magic is in the magic, but it’s equally in the atmosphere. You’re seated at a speakeasy table with ten people, great cocktails, and an empty seat for magicians to rotate through and perform their individual 15-minute acts in the closest proximity you could imagine. They even tell you to “come closer,” so naturally we all scoot in, apparently believing the difference between being fooled and gaming the magic system is about six inches.

I caught one trick in all of 90 minutes. I was extremely proud of myself.

How strange it is that you can be so close to something and still not see what’s happening.

Unfortunately, I know this feeling. I do a version of it to myself all the time in relationships.

The sleights of hand, or little tricks, I play on myself when I want to feel secure inside of them.

I am guilty of being the magician
who plays tricks on herself.

In my years of doing this, I’ve started to catch some of my own sleight of hand. So let me show you the tricks, in case you are also playing magician on yourself.

Sleight of hand #1: safety through words

I’m a superuser of words.

I bestow compliments and adoration on people I love daily. I tell them how much they mean to me, how much I love them, how brilliant or beautiful or important I think they are. This comes very naturally to me. I consider it a gift.

And most of the time, I mean it and I need nothing in return, because I’m doing it from security. I know where I stand with the other person. There is a mutual exchange and I feel that.

Or, I’m simply giving a gift and I need nothing back.

Let’s call that 92% of the time.

The other 8%?

I’m not giving a gift. I’m giving myself safety.

I’m saying the thing because some part of me wants to hear it said back. Or because saying “I’m always here” makes always feel a little more real. Like maybe if we name the permanence out loud, it gets released into the atmosphere and becomes part of some official record.

This is one I’ve gotten much better at catching in myself. And once you can recognize it in yourself, you start to recognize it in other people.

Especially in dating.

Here are some of the things I’ve heard, and said, in early relationships:

“You’re perfect.”

“I’ve never felt this way.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“I can see us doing this when we’re 80.”

“I want you in my life no matter what.”

And the tricky part is, I think we usually mean these things when we say them.

But sometimes I think we’re also doing something else.

We’re reaching for words when the relationship itself can’t give us that level of certainty yet. A little hope, a little anxiety, some dreaming, some projecting, a touch of grabbiness. A deadly combo.

If I tell you I’m not going anywhere, and you tell me you’re not going anywhere, then for a minute, neither of us has to deal with the fact that we actually have no idea.

We’ve said it.

And for a minute, there is something so settling about that. The future has been spoken for. We can stop wondering.

Except, of course, it hasn’t.

Sleight of hand #2: safety through physical togetherness

This one is particularly sneaky because there is nothing quite as temporarily convincing as someone physically being there.

You can be confused about where you stand with someone at 4pm and then be curled up next to them on the couch at 8pm and think, oh, never mind. We’re good.

Nothing has actually been resolved. They’re just… right there, instead of not.

I’ve done this with sex. With sleepovers. But also with dates, trips, running errands, spending three days together, having plans many nights of the week. Letting the sheer amount of time we are in the same physical space answer questions that neither of us has actually answered.

Somehow, whatever was bothering me in the space between seeing someone can disappear once we’re back in the same room.

Because when someone is right there, you don’t have to feel the space between you.

You don’t have to wonder whether they’ll reach for you when you aren’t already within reach.

And maybe the harder question underneath all of this is:

Do you want to be with this person, or are you escaping your own aloneness?

Are you moving towards someone, or simply away from yourself?

I don’t always know.

And I think that’s part of the trick. Being together can temporarily answer a question that only being apart will actually answer.

Sleight of hand #3: safety through plans (and dreams)

When I was married, and it had been very challenging for years, I would close my eyes and trick myself.

Nothing can happen, you have that wedding in three months. You already bought the plane tickets.

There were things on the calendar. There were things we had talked about doing. There was a future we had planned for, and somehow, a plane ticket confirmation email was enough to bring me right back down to okay, okay, everything is fine.

The future had become evidence for the present.

I see versions of this everywhere in dating. Clients and friends. New relationships talking about trips six months away, mapping out next summer, looking at homes, planning marriage and baby timelines.

And then there’s catching myself, mid-trick.

In my own most recent relationship, I thought I was being very responsible about this. I had learned things! I was only planning a month or two out, occasionally teasing the idea of something a little further away to see how it would land.

Burning Man. A concert in September. Ideas for a summer road trip, cities to explore, an island adventure for our dogs.

Very responsible future projection. No babies in sight.

The trick still tricked me.

Not a single one of those plans happened.

And not because they were lies. I don’t think they were. I think we both wanted those things when we talked about them.

But plans don’t necessarily mean what we think they mean.

Sometimes they’re a test of potentiality. What would it feel like to imagine ourselves there?

Sometimes they’re hope.

Sometimes, and maybe more often than sometimes, they’re safety.

And sometimes they’re the ghosts of old dreams. The trip you didn’t take, the house you didn’t buy, the baby you didn’t have. They linger long after the relationship they belonged to is gone.

But when we can imagine a future together quietly transforms into we have a future?

That’s some master-level sleight of hand.

That night at the magic show, all ten of us scooted our chairs closer, apparently convinced that if we just watched carefully enough, from close enough, we’d catch the trick.

None of us did.

Focusing so closely on one thing that we lost perspective on the whole.

And in relationships, the words, the plans, the hand you’re holding, they’re all pieces. Easy things to point to and say, see? That.

But the pattern matters more than the pieces.

I’m trying to remember to look up.

I casually opened Instagram, which I don’t actually do that often. It was a reflex, I wasn’t really going anywhere specific with it. I had posted a video earlier in the day and glanced at it on my grid. All my other posts had view counts on them, typically a 1,000 to 10,000 range. This one didn’t have a count. I clicked on it to see why.

It had 82,000 views.

I didn’t really know what to do with that information. I had never experienced that kind of reach from a video or post, and there was something strangely disorienting about realizing that while I had been going about my day, this thing I posted had also gone off and had a day of its own. I decided the only thing to do was to put it on a mental bookshelf and boarded the plane in a bit of a complex state.

When I landed, the view count had risen to 245,000. A day later, it landed at 412,000. A week later, over 700,000.

By then, the video no longer really felt like mine. It had entered that strange part of the internet where people who had no idea who I was were being suggested (and then served) my face and forming opinions about me, my advice, dating, masculinity, and apparently the entire social contract between men and women.

If you’re curious about the video, it’s here. It’s a video of me ranking the importance of basic things men do on first dates, from the perspective of a woman. It’s not even that interesting or provocative, in my opinion. I wrote a piece summarizing it here which I think it much more interesting than the video itself.

But I’m not here to talk about the video.

Now, if this has ever happened to you- as in, you have a video that suddenly goes viral, you know that the universal advice is not to read the comments.

I happened to be with my dear friend Nicolle, who runs ‘Both Sides of the Slash’ on kink and relationships, when she was processing a very similar viral moment about a post on consent. She had some different thoughts on how to weather the comments.

In summary? The comment section is your playground. Not necessarily an attack on you. A reaction to something that activated them. Which means their offense is actually information. Get curious about it. Learn from it. Also, play a little with them. Why not?

So I read. And I found them fascinating. They were overwhelmingly from men. Through the noise, a message:

“We’re hurting. We don’t know how to make you happy. We’re getting mixed signals. Mixed information. Rejection sucks. We’re exhausted. It’s never enough.”

And yeah I get it. Dating right now asks men to navigate a damn confusing set of instructions. Pursue her, but make sure its wanted & don’t come on too strong. Show interest, but not so much that you seem desperate or weak. Be masculine (whatever that means this week) but also emotionally available.

A lot of men seemed genuinely unsure of what women wanted from them, and increasingly suspicious of the answers they were getting. Suspicion that expressed like frustration and hopelessness at times even anger.

The flavor of many of the more combative comments felt like tendrils of the Neil Strauss era. Hating on my advice, which essentially was to be a gentleman and communicate and create safety. Their replies? Hold back. Play hard to get. Game game game. All said with a heavy dose of snark.

It was interesting to me that advice I considered almost aggressively basic could inspire that much resistance. I wasn’t telling men to arrive with flowers and a five-year plan. I was ranking things like confirming the date day of and sending a text afterward if you had a good time.

But to some of these men, even that seemed to represent a kind of dangerous over-investment. As if the moment you show her that you like her, you have already lost your power.

Here I was, a woman talking about what women like, and a bunch of men were essentially saying: don’t listen to her. Ask us.

And one of them stuck out to me in particular. Because it was commented about seven times.

It basically said:

“Never learn to fish from a fish.”

I replied to every single one asking them to tell me more. I was genuinely curious. Unfortunately, none of the fishermen wanted to elaborate.

And it kinda stopped me in my tracks. Like, I had to really sit and think about the logic of this.

Never learn to fish from a fish.

On its face, sure. If you want to get better at fishing, talk to someone who knows how to fish. I can follow that logic.

But that isn’t quite what this phrase is saying.

Baked into “never learn to fish from a fish” is something more specific. If you want to understand what attracts women, don’t ask women… ask men.

Not even necessarily men who are particularly good at attracting women. Just, men.

Do not take advice about the thing from the thing itself. Take it from, essentially, the opposite of that thing.

So, let’s talk about the fish.

The fish knows things.

It knows what bait looks attractive and what looks like a trap. It knows what makes it want to swim closer and what makes it turn around. It knows the water intimately, because it has been living there its entire life.

The fish may not know much about fishing, but it knows quite a lot about being a fish.

And women? We know what it feels like to be approached and pursued in many shades. We know what makes us feel safe and what puts us on alert. What draws us closer and what makes us pull away. We also know our water, intimately.

Now, let’s talk about the fisherman.

He knows which bait has worked before and which hasn’t. He has watched the water, studied patterns, learned from experience. Maybe he’s been fishing for years.

And men? They know what it’s like to date women... as men. To approach, pursue, initiate. To risk rejection. To try something, have it work, try something else, have it fail. There are things about dating women that men know because they’re the ones dating us.

Now, let’s talk about the relationship between the hunter and the hunted.

Anyone I’ve ever spoken to who is really good at hunting (or fishing) eventually talks about it as something more than skill.

There’s a relationship to it. An intimacy, even. He becomes deeply attuned to an animal whose experience of the world is entirely different from his own.

This is the part people describe to me as almost spiritual. And the thing that seems to separate being good from being great.

The best fisherman isn’t just listening to other fishermen. He’s listening to the fish.

So when I saw seven versions of “never learn to fish from a fish,” what struck me wasn’t that men shouldn’t be learning from other men. Of course they should.

It was the idea that listening to women might somehow betray the collective, or make them worse at understanding us.

For me this is where some of the dating advice aimed at men loses the plot. It turns women into something to figure out. Even a game to win.

I understand the appeal of that. A system gives you something solid to hold onto. It gives you the feeling that if you can just learn the rules well enough, you might not have to get hurt or rejected so much.

But truly relating to another person asks something different of us.

It asks us to tune into the other. To let the person in front of us actually complicate some of what we thought we knew.

Women are not withholding the secret. We’re telling you things all the time. Sometimes explicitly. Sometimes in how we respond. Sometimes in how we move closer and how we pull away.

And no, one woman cannot tell you what all women want. I certainly can’t. We disagree. We have different histories and preferences and desires. We have group chats devoted almost entirely to trying to understand ourselves.

But that doesn’t make the tuning in useless. It actually makes it more important.

So yes, learn to fish from the fisherman.

Just maybe don’t forget to ask the fish.

A few weeks ago I posted a video ranking things men do on first dates. Tier list style. About a minute long. (For anyone who isn’t chronically online, S tier is simply the highest ranking.)

Apparently, a one-minute tier list on first dates was worth half a million views.

Which, I’ll be honest, I didn’t see coming. (I thought maybe 17 people would argue with me and we’d all move on with our lives.)

The comments were a whole thing. Men defending themselves. Women sending it to men. Men telling me I was outright wrong. Men asking why I wasn’t talking about what women should do on dates. Men assuming that by ranking things men do on first dates, I was somehow implying women should do nothing at all.

One guy, whose comment racked up 1,477 likes, wrote: “These are all cringe if she don’t like you.”

Which, fair point, my guy. We’ll get to that.

What fascinated me wasn’t that people disagreed. Dating advice, especially from women to men apparently, always generates disagreement. What fascinated me was how quickly a conversation about first-date etiquette became a conversation about something much bigger.

People weren’t really arguing about confirmation texts or dinner bills. They were arguing about effort. About generosity. About whether genuine interest is attractive or embarrassing. About what we owe each other when we’re getting to know someone. About the leap of faith required to trust a stranger sitting across from you.

The older I get, the less interested I become in dating rules and the more interested I become in what those rules are trying to accomplish. Because while I don’t think there’s one right way to date, I do think certain behaviors communicate certain things. And when someone is deciding whether they’d like to see you again, those signals matter.

Not as rules, but as clues.

Confirming the day of: S Tier

It takes thirty seconds, maybe less.

“Still on for tonight. Looking forward to it.”

That’s the whole thing.

Here’s why it’s S tier.

It tells her she’s on your mind. Not in a grand romantic way. Not in an “I’ve been staring out the window thinking about you all day” way. Just in a quiet, low-key “I am a person who remembered the plans we made” way.

Trust me, no woman has ever received this text and thought, “Wow, that’s a bit much.” This move signals thoughtfulness, stability, and perhaps most importantly, genuine interest. It will also likely ignite a response that shows off her warmth, gratitude, and probably an emoji or two that reveals a little more about her.

Now that’s an exchange you want before a first date.

A confirmation text also eliminates a very specific kind of low-grade anxiety that many women carry into first dates. Is this still happening? Does he actually want to be here? A quick confirmation kills all of that before the date even starts.

You walk in and she’s already slightly more relaxed because you handled something before you even arrived. That’s a win for everyone.

The men who skip this usually fall into one of two camps. Either they think it’s unnecessary or they think it’s too eager. She knows we have plans, why would I confirm? Or: I don’t want to seem like I’ve been thinking about it.

I’m here to tell you that both are the wrong read.

What’s interesting is that the very thing people are trying to avoid here, appearing interested, is often the thing the other person is hoping to see.

The older I get, the more attractive consideration becomes. Not because it’s exciting. Because it’s calming.

And after enough years of dating, you start to realize that calm has a lot more staying power than excitement.

Or, think of it this way: calm is the new excited, guys.

Paying: S Tier

I knew this one would get comments, and it did.

Host (and pay for) the first date. That’s my position.

But what fascinates me about the paying debate is how quickly it stops being about money... and how heated it gets.

Most people aren’t actually arguing about the cost of dinner. They’re arguing about generosity, fairness, gender roles, reciprocity, and what we owe each other when we’re getting to know someone. Which is why these conversations tend to feel much bigger than any bill could.

So let’s keep it simple.

You invited someone into an experience. Host the experience. Trust that you’re not going to have to every time, unless you want to. That will be a future conversation between you and the other person. If you can’t have that conversation in a way that feels good, that’s a sign you’re not a fit. But for now, in hour two of knowing this person, you’re the host.

I understand that the practical dollars & cents matter here. So pick a place that’s an easy yes for you. Don’t take someone somewhere that’s going to make you anxious when the bill comes. A casual dinner or coffee or drink you genuinely enjoy is infinitely better than a fancy reservation you’re secretly stressed about.

People often confuse generosity with spending. They’re not the same thing. A generous person can make someone feel cared for over a cup of coffee. A stressed-out person can spend $300 and still make the evening feel uncomfortable.

And please, don’t do the dramatic reach. Don’t stare at her while the check sits there. Don’t comment on the price. Don’t sigh. Don’t make a face. Don’t make it a thing.

The most attractive version of this is actually pretty boring. The bill comes. You pay it. Everyone survives. The conversation continues.

What I think many women are responding to isn’t payment itself. It’s generosity.

The feeling that someone invited them somewhere and wanted them to have a good experience. That someone wants them to relax and feel cared for.

And maybe that’s the real lesson hiding underneath this debate. People remember how much they enjoyed being with you far longer than they remember how much you spent.

Texting after to say how it went: S Tier

This is one I feel strongly about because, as I said in the video, it is wildly underused.

After a good first date, text her. That night or the next morning. Something simple.

“I had a great time tonight. I’d love to see you again.”

Or, if you really want it to land, let your personality out a bit. Send her a link to a video you mentioned. Pull on the threads of an inside joke about the couple next to you at the bar. Tell her you’re excited to come to her neighborhood next.

One of the underrated benefits of following up is that it allows the date to continue existing outside the date itself. Instead of pausing the connection, you’re building on it. That creates far more excitement than days of silence ever will.

I want to explain why this matters so much, because I think a lot of men have been told some version of “wait a few days,” “don’t seem too available,” or “let her wonder,” and I think that advice is costing you.

What happens in the absence of that text is not mystery or intrigue... at least not the kind most people are hoping for.

Yes, uncertainty can create a form of desire. But it tends to be the anxious kind, not the healthy kind.

One of the biggest misconceptions in modern dating is that uncertainty and attraction are the same thing. They’re not. Uncertainty creates preoccupation. Attraction creates connection.

Instead of feeling excitement, she spends the next 24 to 48 hours running an analysis. She replays the date. She looks for the moments that went well, the moments that might have been off, the thing you said that she can’t quite read. She talks to her friends about it.

None of this is because she’s unstable. It’s because she’s a person who had a nice time and wants to know if you did too.

The text ends all of that.

It says, “I had a good time and I’m secure enough to tell you that.”

People who are genuinely secure rarely spend much time trying to appear less interested than they are.

By the way, I’d put this on the women’s list, too. I think of it as a race to the text. Whoever gets there first wins. Really, everyone wins. Because the goal isn’t to protect your feelings. It’s to keep the momentum going.

Planning the date and giving her a heads up: A Tier

The tier drop from S to A just indicates that I understand this requires a little more effort and doesn’t make sense in every scenario.

It goes like this: plan the date. Make a reservation. Tell her what you’re doing and give her enough notice to figure out what to wear.

That last part sounds small, but it’s not. Women think about what to wear on dates. That is just a fact. It’s not vanity. It’s a form of preparation, the same way you might think about what to talk about or where to park. If she knows you’re going somewhere with a dress code or somewhere very casual, she can show up feeling like herself. If she doesn’t know and guesses wrong, she walks in already a little off-balance.

The reservation thing is practical, too. Nothing deflates the energy of a good first date faster than, “Oh, they’re full. Let me look something else up,” while she stands there watching.

What’s interesting, though, is that none of this is really about logistics.

Making the plan signals something important: you are someone who thinks ahead. You are someone who considers another person’s experience before they arrive.

That is attractive in a way that is hard to overstate.

And I think it becomes more attractive as we get older.

In our twenties, spontaneity tends to get all the credit. By our thirties and forties, many of us have learned that there is something deeply attractive about someone who can make a plan, communicate it clearly, and follow through.

Walking her to her car: C Tier

Context dependent, and not particularly indicative of any deeper trait. That’s why it’s C tier.

Sometimes it’s sweet. End of a great date, you walk her out, there’s a moment.

Sometimes it extends something that was already complete. You leave the venue on a high and then you walk to the car and stand there, and neither of you is quite sure what happens next. The energy shifts slightly and suddenly the date’s landing is a little muddier than it was five minutes ago.

I’ve seen this happen more than once. A date that ended perfectly at the restaurant somehow acquires an awkward extra scene on the walk to the car.

The attractive thing isn’t walking her to her car. The attractive thing is reading the room.

Knowing when a moment wants to continue and when it wants to end.

One of the underrated social skills in dating is knowing when to add and when to stop. Not every good moment needs an encore. More isn’t always more.

So read the room. Pick the ending that closes things out cleanly.

That’s a form of leadership she’ll appreciate far more than being walked to her car.

Picking somewhere really fancy: D Tier

I want to be precise about what D tier means here. It doesn’t mean fancy places are bad. It means making “fancy” the goal of a first date is.

Here’s what actually matters on a first date: connection. Ease. Can we hear each other? Can we relax?

Thoughtful beats fancy every time.

A good wine bar, a place with a great patio, somewhere with food you actually love and can talk about, a spot with good lighting and reasonable noise levels. That is what makes a first date work. Not the Michelin star.

One of the reasons I think people get this wrong is because it’s easy to confuse impressive with meaningful.

A loud restaurant where you’re shouting across the table isn’t romantic. A reservation that’s impossible to get isn’t romantic. A place so formal that neither of you can relax isn’t romantic.

It’s just... expensive.

Impressive is being a person who knows how to create a good evening. That has almost nothing to do with how expensive the reservation was.

You can’t buy chemistry.

And, the goal isn’t to impress them. It’s to get to know them.

Foster the environment for that.

What the comments were really saying

Let’s go back to my guy with the 1,477 likes on his comment.

“These are all cringe if she don’t like you.”

This is great clickbait for sure, and not totally untrue. But also not the whole story.

If she is not interested in you, confirming the date and texting after and paying will not fix that.

But the inverse is also true and worth paying attention to: if she is interested in you, or on the fence, doing these things well will matter. And doing them poorly, or not at all, can tip that fence.

What I think this comment gets right is that attraction matters. What it misses is that attraction isn’t the only thing being evaluated on a first date.

The “if she don’t like you none of this matters” logic leads to a place where you do nothing and then wonder why things never go anywhere.

Not a winning system.

The paying pushback

Multiple people pushed back on this. Many stated a very reasonable point that whoever proposed the date should pay. I hear that.

What I find fascinating is the people who seemed almost offended by the idea of paying at all, or who wanted to immediately redirect to “what about what women should do.”

Women also have responsibilities on dates. Plenty.

That’s a different video.

This one is about men.

How am I supposed to fit both into 75 seconds?

“Now do the one on what women should do on dates”

This comment got 422 likes.

It’s coming.

The guys who didn’t want to send the after-text

The idea of texting after triggered support for a different strategy, in summary: less communication is better, you should “let her wonder.”

I think this advice was written for a dating landscape that no longer exists (if it ever did). Kind of like the Atkins diet.

The “let her wonder” strategy mostly just creates uncertainty, and uncertainty is not the same thing as interest.

And it gets misinterpreted most of the time.

And, lastly, for those who commented that this is all super basic advice: yes. I agree.

Not my finest or most interesting work by a landslide.

That’s kind of the point.

The bar is low.

Clear it.

Love,

Dani

Dani on Sports

I had always written off sports.

I didn’t play them as a kid. Well, soccer for a minute, but my parents lovingly describe me as the player who would “only kick the ball if it came to her”… and they aren’t wrong.

I didn’t watch them, either. You could say I never learned the language.

My ex-husband didn’t centralize sports, and neither do most of my friends, so the bubble remained intact well into my thirties.

But in the almost two years since my separation, I’ve been forced to face the music:

Men, to some degree or another, really like sports. Not just as a niche hobby. "Not just as a niche hobby. As a full blown way of experiencing community and, apparently, themselves.

And in my efforts to connect with men, I’ve offered myself a bit of a renaissance. A clean slate. An opportunity to get curious about things I had previously dismissed.

I even briefly dated someone who worked for a major sports league.

To be clear, my version of embracing sports was not actually watching sports. It was watching him watch sports and asking a question every 40 seconds. I wasn’t studying the game. I was studying the people studying the game.

The strategy interested me a little. The ritual fascinated me. The cinematography, the storytelling. The way grown men rearranged entire weekends around a shared narrative. The way loyalty could survive decades of disappointment. The way strangers became allies because they were rooting for the same outcome. And the thing that got me most: men wearing the same colors would greet each other on the street like they already knew each other. Like the jersey was enough. Like belonging could be that simple.

When the Knicks won, I wasn’t really watching the game.

I was watching New York.

I’ve lived here for twenty years, and one thing I’ve learned is that when New York collectively decides to feel something, it’s worth paying attention.

The night Obama got elected remains one of the most electric nights of my life. People poured into the streets. Strangers talked to strangers. Car horns became a form of language. For a few hours, the city stopped acting like millions of separate people and started acting like one organism.

New York has a specific gravity to it. A city full of people who came with nothing and still gave it everything. Who love this place almost against their better judgment. Deeply cynical and wildly hopeful at the exact same time. When it exhales together you feel all of it. Every dream, every hustle, every quietly held hope, all existing alongside each other, somehow getting along. It's unhinged in the best way.

The next day, I biked to Williamsburg to meet a friend and lend some thoughts for her latest Substack piece.

The entire city felt lighter.

After our meeting, I had some time to kill and decided to walk. Humid with a light breeze, the kind of June day New York occasionally produces just to remind you why you stay.

Everyone was wearing orange and blue. Jerseys, hats, old sweatshirts that hadn’t seen daylight in a minute.

What struck me wasn’t that people were happy. New Yorkers are happy sometimes. We have rooftop happy. First-date happy. Summer Friday happy. Promotion happy.

This felt different.

The men felt different.

And to take it one step further, the men were acting kind of like... women.

Stay with me.

There’s a specific quality to the way women move through the world socially. They check in. They linger. They process collectively. They send voice notes that are really just an excuse to share a feeling that feels like it can’t be contained. It’s infrastructure, so automatic most women don’t even notice they’re doing it. What I was watching on those Brooklyn sidewalks was men doing exactly that.

Men were smiling. Cheesy smiling. Hanging on corners in groups. Walking slowly down the street like they had nowhere to be and were totally cool with it. Saw some arms around each other. Phones out, unable to keep it all to themselves. At some point I overheard a guy tell his friend it had been one of the best days of his life. Not his best sports day. One of the best days of his life.

My feed was full of videos.

One was posted by a guy I know peripherally. Successful tech founder type, mid-forties. The kind of guy whose feed is usually pretty composed. He and his older brother had both flown in from LA. The video captured the exact moment the Knicks won, the two brothers and their father exploding into each other. Jumping, screaming, hugging. Both of them completely gone. Red, blotchy, wet. The kind of faces you probably hadn’t seen on them since they were nine years old. Three grown men for whom this was one of the best days of their lives.

Another video: a woman I know, filming from a bar. The camera is a close-up of half her face, but the real subjects are three heavyset, middle-aged New York guys, the kind that look like they could have stepped out of a Scorsese film. They’re grabbing each other and sobbing. Not elegant tears. Full-body, ugly, blubbering tears. The kind that seem to surprise the person crying, like they haven’t done it in fifteen years and are simultaneously relieved and shocked by the sheer act of it. She’s cracking up into the lens as she films them.

The caption read: “The men in my family really need therapy, but I guess this will suffice for now.”

I laughed. She nailed it.

It was men on holiday from something. Temporarily clocked out from the exhausting business of masculine performance. The hyper-individualism, the forward-facing tunnel vision, the transactional quality that can make men move through spaces like they’re executing a mission rather than living a life. The energy that is always toward something and rarely just with someone.

All of that, set down for a day.

As I walked through Brooklyn, I kept wondering what would happen if men felt like this more often.

Not just every 53 years often. Deeply connected often. Excited to call each other often. Part of something greater often.

Maybe what really happened when the Knicks won wasn’t that New York got a basketball victory.

Maybe millions of men got permission to love something together.

And for a day, the rest of us got to live in the world that created.

I’ve been talking about it for ten years, and I’ve never talked about it like this.

I’ve mostly covered the obvious stuff. So let’s move past that. You know it already. The texting too much, the overthinking, or the attachment styles you’ve read about a hundred times.

Let’s get to the weird stuff.

The stuff you’ve never seen named in a book, but felt last week.

Because relationship anxiety doesn’t always look anxious.

Sometimes it looks self-aware. Sometimes it looks logical. Sometimes it even looks like you’re handling things remarkably well.

And sometimes it looks completely backwards from what you’d expect.

Let’s talk about what it really looks like in real life. The sneaky stuff.

I’ve got a list for you.

1. A really great date makes it worse, not better.

You had an amazing night. The conversation flowed, you laughed a lot, you felt completely yourself. And on the way home your brain just... ignites.

Because now there’s something to lose.

Relationship anxiety doesn’t get activated by disinterest. It gets activated by investment.

When things are mediocre you’re fine. When things are genuinely good, the anxiety has something to work with. So instead of riding the high like a normal person, you’re catastrophizing about all the ways it could go wrong, all the reasons they’ll change their mind, all the evidence you might be reading too much into it.

A great date doesn’t calm relationship anxiety. Sometimes it feeds it.

2. You “milk” texts out of people without ever technically asking for reassurance.

This one is very specific and very real.

It can happen consciously... or a little subconsciously.

You need to hear from them. You need contact.

But you don’t want to just say “hey, thinking of you” because that feels too exposed.

So instead you ‘accidentally-on-purpose’ text them something.

You ask a question you already know the answer to. You send the meme. You react to the story. You suddenly remember that article you meant to forward three days ago.

You manufacture a reason to be in touch that isn’t “I just needed to know you were still there.”

And when they respond, you feel better for about eleven minutes.

Then the clock resets.

Nobody talks about this one because it’s a little embarrassing. But it’s one of the most common things relationship anxiety does. It finds sneaky, deniable ways to get the reassurance it needs instead of asking for it directly.

3. You’re not anxious in the relationship. You’re anxious in the gaps.

When you’re together, you’re fine. Great, even. Present, connected, completely yourself.

And then they leave. Or the conversation ends.

Or there’s a quiet Tuesday where nothing is wrong and nothing is happening. And that’s exactly the problem.

The anxiety often lives in the in-between.

In the hours between texts. In the Sunday afternoon when you haven’t heard from them. In the week before you see them again.

The relationship itself can be completely healthy. The gaps are where your brain goes to work.

This is why so many people with relationship anxiety describe feeling like two different people.

The version of them that’s actually in the relationship is calm and connected.

The version of them that’s alone with their thoughts is conducting a full investigation.

4. You need the talk. Not because something’s wrong. Because the ambiguity is unbearable.

Everything is actually fine.

You know it’s fine.

And yet you need to say something, address something, clarify something, just to make the uncertainty stop.

It doesn’t even have to be a big talk.

It can be a small one. A check-in. An “are we good?” when you’re pretty sure you’re good. A “what are we doing?” when you already know what you’re doing.

The ambiguity is physically uncomfortable. Like an itch you can’t reach.

Some people move through relationships assuming everything is okay unless told otherwise.

People with relationship anxiety often run the opposite software.

They assume something might be wrong until proven otherwise.

And so you manufacture a conversation not because there’s a real problem, but because saying it out loud, hearing them say it back, makes the ground feel solid for a little while.

5. When someone is really consistent, you don’t trust it. You might even chase the tension.

Another one nobody wants to admit.

You meet someone stable. Kind. They do what they say. They show up on time. They text back without drama.

And instead of feeling relieved, you feel suspicious. Bored. Vaguely unsettled.

Like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Meanwhile, somewhere in your dating history is a person who took twelve hours to text back but somehow had you convinced you’d found your soulmate.

Relationship anxiety often grows in environments where love felt unpredictable. Where connection came with tension, distance, inconsistency, or having to earn it.

So when someone just gives it to you calmly and consistently, it doesn’t always register as love. It registers as unfamiliar.

And unfamiliar can feel wrong even when it’s right.

So sometimes you poke. Not because you want chaos. It’s an old strategy still running in the background.

But certainty can feel strangely flat, and unpredictability can feel strangely alive.

Your nervous system isn’t chasing drama. It’s chasing familiarity.

And those are very different things.

So what do you do with all of this?

First, name it. Seriously.

Half the work is recognizing the pattern in the moment.

“I’m milking this text.”

“I’m anxious because this is going well.”

“I’m about to have the talk because I want certainty, not because there’s actually a problem.”

You don’t have to fix it immediately. Just notice.

Second, get curious about what happened right before the anxiety showed up.

A delayed text.

A plan that didn’t get confirmed.

A quiet afternoon with too much space to think.

Something happened… Start there.

Third, practice sitting in the uncertainty without acting from it.

Twenty minutes.

Just twenty minutes before you send the meme, have the talk, pick the fight, or seek the reassurance.

See what happens.

Most of the time the urgency passes.

And finally, if you’re seeing yourself in these examples, don’t use them as evidence that you’re broken. Use them as data. These aren’t character flaws. They’re adaptations.

Remember, the goal isn’t to never feel relationship anxiety again. The goal is to recognize it faster.

To catch yourself milking the text.

To notice when a great date has suddenly become a fully developed disaster movie in your head.

To realize you’re about to start a conversation you don’t actually need to have.

Awareness doesn’t solve relationship anxiety overnight.

But it’s usually the moment you stop being run by it.

I was once in a relationship where we did everything right.

We took all the steps. We looked the way a relationship is supposed to look. And he wasn’t a bad guy. He showed up. Took the steps. We built a life together.

But he didn’t want me. Not really.

And I knew it the whole time. I just didn’t have words for it yet.

It took me a long time to figure out what was actually missing. And once I could name it, I started seeing it everywhere. In my own dating life after that. In the clients I work with. In the messages I get from readers who say some version of: I have nothing to complain about. So why do I feel so lonely?

Here’s what I’ve come to understand: being chosen and being wanted are not the same thing. And we mix them up constantly.

What does it mean to be chosen?

Being chosen is a decision. It’s someone looking at their life and deciding you fit in it. It looks like it “should”. They merge with you. They take the steps. They show up when they say they will. They don’t flinch when the future comes up.

And listen, this is not nothing. If you’ve dated people who couldn’t manage basic follow-through, being chosen feels like finally being able to breathe. It feels like safety. Like proof you’re worth sticking around for.

You are. That part is true.

But chosen is really about someone’s life, their timing, their decision that a relationship is what they want right now. You can be the right person at the right time and get chosen. You can also just be a good enough fit and get chosen. The choosing doesn’t always tell you which one you are.

What does it mean to be wanted?

Wanted is not a decision. It’s a pull. It’s someone being drawn to you specifically, not just to the idea of having a partner or checking a box. It’s the feeling that when you walk in, something in them shifts. That they think about you when you’re not around. That you’re not just a good match to them, you’re a specific person they feel genuinely lucky to know.

It shows up in the way someone listens to you. Like what you’re saying actually matters. In the way they look at you sometimes. In the small moments where you can just feel it, quietly and unmistakably.

Wanted feels like being seen. Not evaluated. Not generally appreciated. Actually seen.

What chosen without wanted feels like

This is the situation people stay in the longest because from the outside, everything looks fine. Great, even. There’s nothing to point to.

But inside it feels like this:

You feel secure and somehow lonely at the same time. You’re with someone reliable and you still feel this low hum of emptiness you can’t explain. So you start wondering if something is wrong with you. If you’re asking for too much. If this is just what relationships feel like after a while.

You start performing. You become the version of yourself you think they want because the version that just exists doesn’t seem to land anywhere. You tell a story at dinner and watch their face and get back polite interest, and somehow that makes you feel more alone than if you’d stayed home.

You fish for it. You say something vulnerable or funny or real and you wait to see if they’ll meet you there. Sometimes they’re warm. Sometimes they’re kind. But it doesn’t feel like contact. It feels like being responded to.

You feel grateful and kind of resentful at the same time. Grateful because they’re good. Resentful because good doesn’t feel like enough, and feeling that way makes you feel guilty, and the guilt makes the whole thing worse.

You start to shrink. Not because anyone asked you to. But being fully yourself in front of someone who isn’t hungry for you starts to feel embarrassing. So you edit. You get easier to be around and harder to actually find.

What wanted without chosen feels like

This one is electric. And exhausting. And so easy to mistake for love.

It feels like being someone’s favorite secret. They want you when you’re together. They want you when you’re not. The chemistry is real and you can feel it clearly.

What’s also real: they don’t show up consistently. They’re not building anything with you. They disappear and come back on their own schedule. They say things like “I’m not in a place for a relationship right now” and then act like someone who is, until they don’t.

Day to day it feels like this:

You feel chosen in the moments and abandoned in the spaces between. When you’re together everything feels possible. When you’re not, you’re white-knuckling it, checking your phone, replaying the last conversation looking for clues.

You rationalize constantly. They’re just scared. They’ve been hurt before. What you have is rare and you’d be an idiot to walk away over some arbitrary timeline. Some of that might even be true. But you’ve been saying it for months and nothing has changed.

You feel like you have to earn the choosing. Like consistency and commitment are almost within reach and if you’re just a little more patient, a little more available, a little more something, you’ll finally get there. And then the distance opens back up again.

You stop trusting yourself. Because the desire is real, you can feel it, so you keep second-guessing the part of you that knows something is off. You turn into a detective in your own relationship, building a case that it’s actually fine.

You feel special and invisible at the same time. They want you. They just won’t choose you.

Why we settle for one or the other

Most of us don’t end up here by accident.

People who stay in chosen-without-wanted usually have some deep belief that real desire isn’t safe to trust. They’ve been wanted before and it didn’t hold. So they pick stability and learn to call it enough.

People who stay in wanted-without-chosen usually believe somewhere that they have to earn love. That if they’re just patient enough, good enough, easy enough, the wanting will eventually turn into choosing. That love requires this kind of proving.

Neither of those things is true. Both of them feel completely true when you’re inside them.

The work isn’t just finding someone who does both. It’s deciding you’re allowed to need it.

What both together actually looks like

Quieter than you’d expect.

It’s not fireworks every day. It’s not someone who is obsessed with you or falls apart without you. (That’s not desire, that’s anxiety in a trench coat.)

It’s someone who shows up reliably and also lights up a little when you walk in. Someone who makes plans and sometimes looks at you like they can’t believe their luck.

Someone whose behavior says chosen and whose attention says wanted.

It feels like being held and seen at the same time. Secure but alive. Present without performing.

Not every day is like that. But it’s the baseline. The thing you keep coming back to.

That’s what you’re looking for. And it’s real.

So the question worth sitting with isn’t just “are they showing up.” It’s: when they look at me, do I feel seen or just selected?

You already know the answer. You’ve known for a while.

Love, Dani

And yet: fruit.

Somehow, by some measure, it’s supposed to mean the same thing.

Hinge at least tries to separate berries from melons. They give you ten options for what you’re actually looking for, which still doesn’t fully capture the experience, but I’m grateful for the attempt. “Not sure” alone has saved me more awkward situationships than I can count.

You can be looking for a life partner. Long-term, but open to short. Short-term, but open to long. Or the honest, slightly exhausted “not sure.”

None of those options can capture the part where what you’re looking for changes. Constantly. Sometimes without warning. Sometimes on a train.

Last summer I was on Amtrak, about an hour into my four-hour journey home from Boston. I’d been going up there a couple times a month to explore what I can only describe as “relationship lite.” I’d met this man while he was visiting New York. This was early 2025. The only context I would have even considered was casual. I wasn’t on Hinge, but if I were, I’d have filed somewhere between “surface level only, nothing difficult please” and “don’t look too closely at me because I’m still licking my wounds.” Or just a good old-fashioned “not sure.”

He was supposed to be in town for work, looking for a date. I was supposed to be that date.

It turned into more. And while I never really considered him my person, he cracked something open. I started doing things that were less about him and more about me practicing for the next version of my life.

I introduced him to my friends, because I was tired of keeping my dating life so separate. I cooked for him, because I wanted to nurture someone again. We made travel plans we both knew we’d probably never keep. I wanted to dream them anyway. That was enough.

On that train home, I did something with all of it. I downloaded Hinge.

I’d only ever been on Feeld before. Feeld doesn’t ask what you’re looking for. It doesn’t have to. The whole vibe of the platform is the answer.

Hinge is a different country. Hinge has an entire category for people who want a Life Partner, capitalized, like it’s a job title.

Benefits unclear. Interview process ongoing. No one fully agrees on the role.

When I first heard that, I thought it was ambitious. I also felt extremely far from being one of those people.

That day on the train, I became one of those people.

But here’s what nobody tells you: you don’t just become a serious dater overnight. It’s a transition. One that took me about six months to fully complete. The pool changes. The conversations change. You change.

Here’s what to expect.

1. The pool is smaller. This is a feature, not a bug.

If you’ve been hanging out in the land of casual and curious, there’s a lot going on there. It’s lively. It’s fun. It’s also, if we’re being honest, a little bit of a free-for-all.

Cross over into serious-dater territory and the numbers thin out. But the quality of the conversation goes up. You’re no longer sorting through people who aren’t sure they even want to be there. The ones who are there? They showed up on purpose.

2. A lot of people are “in transition,” which means they want to want partnership, but they’re still adjusting to wanting it.

Just because someone checked “life partner” doesn’t mean they’ve emotionally arrived there. They might be exactly where you were six months ago: practicing. Testing. Seeing if they can let someone in without flinching.

Be patient with this. You were there too.

And you’ll recognize it when you see it.

3. People will not be patient with you if you don’t know what you want.

Serious daters don’t have time for ambiguity. Or at least, they don’t pretend they do.

A friend of mine went on a date recently with someone who was, by all accounts, genuinely ready. She thought she was too. When he asked her direct questions about what she was looking for, she didn’t have the answers he wanted. He called her out. It wasn’t kind, exactly. But it wasn’t wrong either.

If you’re going to play in this bracket, you have to know your answer. Or at least be honest that you’re still finding it.

4. Be prepared to move quickly.

Serious daters are not in the business of slow-rolling things into ambiguity. They want to know if there’s something there, and they’d like to find out before another six months passes. First dates move faster. The “what are we” conversation comes sooner. Things either have momentum or they don’t.

This isn’t pressure. It’s efficiency. Honestly? It’s kind of a relief.

Things tend to reveal themselves faster.

5. Be prepared to get real.

The conversations are different here. People are more honest about what they want, what they’ve been through, what they’re afraid of. The small talk is shorter. The real talk comes faster. You will be expected to meet that.

It’s a little terrifying.
And a lot harder to hide in.

The transition from casual to serious isn’t a switch you flip. It’s more like a slow dial.

One day you’re booking a casual Amtrak to Boston, pretending it’s all very low stakes.
And the next, you’re on that same train, downloading Hinge, selecting Life Partner, and realizing you have accidentally become a woman with intentions.

No announcement. No clean break from your former self.
Just a quiet shift in what you’re available for.

And once that dial moves?

It’s actually very hard to turn it back.

I’ve worked on it, a lot. I used to move so quickly, I stubbed my toe every single day. Not even kidding. My ex witnessed this, and it became almost comedic. It also became, I realized later, a pretty good metaphor for my entire approach to life. Move fast, get somewhere, hit a wall, ice the bruise, repeat.

The thing is, I like to move quickly. And I happen to like the way it feels.

In dating, it’s been mostly a blessing. It means I know fast. I don’t waste time on something that’s not right. I can get in, feel it out, and get out cleanly. More data, fewer drawn-out endings. I’ll take it.

In real adult relationships… well, the jury is still out.

To my credit, I recently met someone who moves just as fast. So at least this time the barreling ahead is a team sport.

A month & change into my new situation, I got a voice note from one of my besties. She’s a particularly wise one, and also an expert in human relating.

Her question: “So… how are you thinking about pacing here?”

I laughed. It was very generous of her to frame it that way, as opposed to “Are you thinking about pacing at all?” Which, honestly, would have been fair.

We were deep in it. Spending almost every night together. Blurring the edges of our lives like we’d been doing it for years. The dogs had already met. You get the picture.

Her question stopped me in my tracks.

Am I thinking about pacing?

Well. Now I am.

Here’s what I’ve figured out since then: pacing isn’t one thing. It’s at least two. And once you see the difference, you can get your hands back on the wheel.

The first I’d call the outer container. This is the life stuff. The logistics. How much time are you spending together? Are you staying over? Meeting the friends? Doing the Sunday errands, feeding the dog, becoming a fixture? Attending the birthday party of someone you’ve never heard of because that’s just where you are now?

This is visible, measurable, and crucially, you can choose it. You can turn the dial up or down, even when the chemistry is yelling “more please!”.

The second is the inner container. This is the connection. How deep are you going? How much are you revealing? How much are you letting yourself be known?

This one is subtler and, in some ways, harder to regulate. Because when it’s good, you don’t notice you’re doing it. It just feels like talking. Like you just happened to land on the most intimate conversation of your life on a Tuesday.

But you can choose it, too.

A close friend of mine took a trip with a new guy and they worked through multiple “date decks” over the course of a week. Questions designed to go deep. Nothing left unturned. Inner container speed: ten.

You can also, for the record, just not do that.

The thing about pacing is that it’s much easier to slow down before you’ve fully accelerated. Once both containers hit a ten, you’re not really pacing anymore. You’re inside something that already feels like a relationship, whether it is or not.

I’m probably still going to move fast. Was never not going to.

Good thing pacing isn’t about stopping yourself.
It’s about deciding what gets to move, and when.

So when I say this, I mean it. Consider this a hill. I’m on it.

If they wanted to, they would. Or they would, very soon.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

And I know you’ve heard it before. I’m writing about it anyway, because I spent a long time not actually believing it.

In the early stages of dating, words are easy. They cost nothing. Someone can tell you exactly “who they are” over and over, and show you something completely different with their behavior, and the gap between those two things is information.

Not a puzzle. Not a project. Information.

Last year I was seeing someone who described himself as a respectful gentleman. He was quite insistent about it. His actions said something else. He was late to every single date we had. Not “caught in traffic” late. “It’s the time we were supposed to meet and I am still at a happy hour and need to go home and shower and change, are you okay with 90 minutes?” late. Some apology. Zero behavior change.

Inaction is not a mistake. Not 99.9% of the time.

Same person, with the most maddening communication patterns I’ve ever encountered. 24-hour gaps between messages. Last-minute plan confirmations that left me frozen, followed by his breezy check-ins as if nothing was strange. Selective answers. Cryptic everything. I offered a small library of explanations for his behavior. Avoidant attachment. Busy season at work. Overwhelm.

When we ended things, he told me he’d had a thread of uncertainty the whole time. That he wasn’t ready for what I wanted.

He’d felt that way from the beginning.

The answer was never complicated. I just refused to accept a simple one.

If he had wanted to, he would have.

I’ve watched this pattern up close in other people’s lives, too. A client fell for someone who was unavailable, not just emotionally, but structurally. He never said he’d leave his marriage. His behavior gave no indication he was considering it. She built an entire architecture of reasons why he might, and excuses for why he hadn’t moved toward her.

A friend recently fell for someone at a different stage of life. He didn’t step up to meet her readiness. She ran dozens of scenarios for why not. What could be holding him back. What she might be misreading.

We are so good at this. The explaining away. The generous interpretation. The elaborate alternative theories. And I get it, I do, it comes from love, and from hope, and not wanting to do the math when the math is hard.

And yet. If they wanted to, they would.

Another truth you can count on? When someone does want to, you know. You don’t have to decode it. You don’t have to squint at the evidence and build a case. It’s just there. Clear. A little boring, almost, compared to everything that came before.

That’s the part I’m still getting used to.

I am setting up for an event with my best friends at my apartment. Three of us are hosting, about twenty more will arrive soon.

It’s our biannual clothing swap, a cherished tradition. You can reinvent your wardrobe, or just drink wine on the floor and have opinions.

I love this evening, but something in me is tugging. A small-medium discomfort. A stomach thing.

Except, it isn’t my stomach. Not really.

It’s a when is he going to text back thing.

This new guy has me on some kind of rotation spit.

I know he likes me. I’ve done the math. I can feel it. The in-person connection is the kind that makes you forget you’re a person with standards. It’s that rare mix of talking and kissing where every time you switch from one to the other, you’re surprised all over again by how good it is.

And the other side, the part that activates when we’re not together... that part is cold. Texts are sparse. They come in one batch a day. They don’t carry the depth or momentum that would make sense for what happens between us in person.

It doesn’t add up.

But when someone takes a game off the shelf and sets it up for you, what do you do?

You sit down and play.

Even when you know you shouldn’t.

So I join a game that feels wrong in my body, because some part of me whispers: maybe your version of normal isn’t normal at all. Like, what even is normal communication? What is a normal amount of time to wait? What is the correct level of warmth to expect from a person who looks at you the way he looks at you?

I have completely lost the plot.

I say “congrats, you’re normal” a lot. To friends, to clients, to the internet. It’s my shorthand for reminding us all that there is no normal. Usually, there isn’t.

And yet.

Things I notice: he mentions dates for next time, but never finalizes until a few hours before. Always dangerously close to the wire. His pacing is unlike anything I’ve experienced. I try to match it, spacing out my responses even when it knots my chest, but most days I don’t hear back for twelve to twenty-four hours.

And when he finally messages, it arrives with an energy of nothing to see here. No “sorry I was swamped.” No “let me clear this up.” Just cool.

And the quality? Also cool. Cool in a way that makes my whole system tighten.

Because my system does not feel cool.

Something in his communication is angling toward detached, and because I’m playing too, I try to orient myself the same way. But I can’t quite manage it. My responses still come quicker. They’re warmer, fuller, more colorful. Even my ‘cool girl’ cant find her footing here.

Which means I’m playing with odds stacked against me, and rules I didn’t agree to.

My friends notice. They haven’t seen me this nervous since my marriage, another chapter I tried to file under “normal” for far too long. I try to explain how good it is in person, how maybe he’s slow pacing, maybe this is just his style.

I can hear myself defending him. And the sound feels like a betrayal of the woman I’ve worked hard to become.

One friend hears the discrepancy. The gap between how I feel with him and how lost I am in the space between. She asks: “But how does it feel in your body? That’s what you need to listen to.”

And my body says: it feels like shit.

Another friend reminds me that being with a man is not just being with him in person. It’s the whole ecosystem. Even the negative space.

And in this negative space?

Horrible.

About 30 minutes into the swap, I see his name pop up on my phone. My stomach ache vanishes. For the next twelve hours.

Here’s what I know: there is no normal. We’re all figuring it out as we go, and most of the time you can count on “congrats, you’re normal too.”

But sometimes you get a whiff of something else. Something that doesn’t need a name or a diagnosis or a friend to confirm it. Your body already ran the numbers.

Absolutely. Not. Normal.

I don’t say that lightly. I am 38 years old. I am, professionally, a love nerd. I attend two to five weddings a year.

She is someone I have known for many years. We spent several of them together in a weekly women’s group, a self-imposed, self-led form of group therapy that served us well across the covid era and beyond.

I was in one relationship the entire time, struggling in it, with couple privilege covering up a large portion of the struggle (all my thoughts on couple privilege here). She was in and out of them. Boldly falling for the not-quite-right guy, not because she had bad taste, but because she was actively putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Weathering real heartbreaks. Getting sharper and clearer.

She called it her 10,000-hour boyfriend training.

The reference is Malcolm Gladwell: roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to achieve mastery in a complex skill.

So when she met her person, I was the most delighted, and not the least surprised.

Not even a very good Claude prompt could have built him. He is ten times more right than anyone I ever imagined for her, in a way that made me want to grab someone at the welcome drinks and say: see? SEE? This is what the hours are for.

Why people expect great love to fall into their laps is genuinely beyond me. The mastery of any other craft does not fall from the sky. Improvising on an instrument, cooking food that makes someone close their eyes, understanding quantum physics: these take time, dedication, and the willingness to be clunky at it first. Romantic love is no different. And yet it is the only area of human life where people shrug and say “it’ll happen when it happens” (said, by the way, by the same people who also believe the right apartment just finds you. In New York. At your price point.)

Do not be fooled. Those who find this kind of love as adults have taken careful, considered steps to get there.

They may not call it mastery. They may not like to say they’ve worked for it. But they have.

Every hard conversation, every relationship that taught them something, every time they chose to stay curious instead of bitter: that’s the training. The one who only texted after 10pm. The one who texted too much. The one you confused for growth but was actually just tall. All of it: training.

I have worked for love. My close friendships are at a level I did not know was possible. I had never seen real intimacy in friendship modeled for me, yet I worked toward it anyway, until I had friends who don’t ask “are you okay” because they already know.

And the romantic love that has emerged recently: the man who embodies everything I hoped for, in a package so much better than anything I spent years dreaming up and moving towards. He is so specific and so right that I genuinely cannot take credit for conjuring him.

But the training hours? Those I can take credit for.

If love is important to you, don’t be afraid to work for it. Not in a grim, grinding way. In the way you work on anything you actually care about. With curiosity. With humor about the catfish moment. With the willingness to get it wrong a few more times.

The hours are not wasted.

They’re the whole point.

How someone shows up for that small, easy ask is a preview of how they show up for everything else.

So I switched my location on a dating app. Kinda like a precursor to packing for the trip.

And then I matched with someone.

The thing about communication in dating is that it’s hard to pull back. Once you establish a cadence, it increases. Forward in dating almost always looks like “more.” More texts. More back and forth. More voice notes. Photos. More of you.

But more isn’t always better, especially when you’ve never met someone IRL.

Things started to escalate with Mexico guy. I didn’t pace it. Intimacy was created. It wasn’t just sexy, it was also vulnerable. Deeper questions were asked. FaceTime calls became routine. Closeness was felt.

And yet we were still three weeks from meeting.

Too long for a countdown. Not long enough to pause and say “let’s pick this up a few days before I arrive.” The train had left the station.

Normally I would never carry on with someone online for weeks. That’s not the optimal way to use the system, and it is a system. Once you get past ten days without meeting, you’re stuck in a digital courtship. All that intimacy and closeness? It’s typically not real without the 3D reality of the person.

By the time we met, I had a whole person built in my head. I remember walking up to dinner. Seeing him. And feeling, immediately, that all of the things about him that could have “gone either way” had gone the other way.

Certain qualities were dialed up. And not in a direction I found attractive.

As my mom had said to me on the phone: “Well, it’s either going to be better than you expected, or worse!”

It was the worse option.

And now I was in a situation. I had invested time, energy, and I had gotten my friends invested too. So I stuck it out for the duration of the trip. And it kept being not quite right.

Lucky for me, I love to learn from things almost as much as I love to experience them. I made myself a guideline: if I was traveling somewhere and wanted to meet people there, I wouldn’t start exploring that city until a week before I arrived. And if I met someone online, I would keep it light until we were actually in the same room.

I followed it for a year.

Then I broke it.

I met someone a week before I was meant to be in Austin. We were both coming in from other places. We dropped into a connection that involved sharing real things. Deep questions. Voice notes. A FaceTime. It was all moving, steadily, in a direction.

Then he got delayed. A week became ten days. Ten days stretched to two weeks, maybe more. No confirmed landing date.

I saw the fork in the road. Keep the ball in the air, for an undetermined amount of time? Or put it down.

Nine out of ten times, I would have put it down.

But I didn’t. For some intangible reason, I couldn’t. The trick was staying in it without leaning into it. Present but not pressed.

When he finally announced his arrival, and the next day I was getting ready for our first date, my mom again: “It’s either going to be better than you expected, or worse!”

I don’t have the word for what it was. Better doesn’t cut it.

Walking in. Seeing him. Sitting down. Feeling every single fiber of my body say yes. We thanked each other that night for sticking it out. Recognized that not many people would have. We didn’t totally know why we had, either. Except now, standing there, we did.

Make the rules. Use them. And remember why you made them so you know exactly when to break them.

What actually builds something is pulling on a small moment from the night, not pulling up a calendar. You are not closing a deal. You are extending a feeling.

If I ran my business in 100 percent feminine energy I would be creating beautiful things and shipping absolutely none of them. My guideline in a relationship is 80/20, not 100/0.

Then I stopped trying to use a period placement to predict what would happen. Turns out most of the anxiety was never about him. It was about someone who came before him.

And… I stopped myself.

I felt it coming on like a sweet surprise. We both did. He was a wonderful guy. Full stop. We had found each other in that strange, specific, small window that opens after a marriage ends. When the world feels both terrifying and also full of a fantasy of possibility you’d completely forgotten existed. We shared that. The awakening of it. The slight disbelief that a connection like this was still available.

There were also huge structural issues. Combined with some medium emotional ones. We both knew it. We knew it from the beginning, actually, which maybe made the whole thing easier to hold.

But spring was turning to summer, and we had a chance to ride it out together in the sweetest, most seductive way. Plan little trips. Drink white wine. Beach. Seafood. My post-separation body wasn’t ready to adventure through the world the way it typically wants to, so the simplicity of quiet Amtrak rides from New York to Boston were just what the doctor ordered.

We were two second-act adults tasting the fantasy of possibility together, with a strong summer override softening everything around the edges.

It was relationship lite. It arrived at exactly the right moment. It was romantic and sexy and healing.

And, it had an end point. The question was… when?

Because let’s be honest. It is just so much easier to stay in something than to leave it. Especially when it’s good. Or pretty good. Or even when it has problems you’ve already named out loud.

The devil you do is somehow easier to stomach than the one you don’t.

Our brains will choose the familiar texture of something over the uncertainty of nothing, almost every time. Especially when you’ve been starved of it. Especially when someone is warm and present and smiling and reaching for your hand the minute you get off the train.

What I started to feel, somewhere around July, was a push and a pull happening at the same time. Loving energy on one side. Square peg, round hole on the other.

And instead of going numb to the second feeling, the way I once would have, I let myself actually hear it.

I realized I could use both things. The love lite, and the clarity. I could hold them together and ask: what does the natural arc of this look like? Not force an ending. Not cut the head off of something beautiful. But read it. With a little wink. Like a book you’re close to finishing… and already know won’t be the last book you ever read.

Something told me the end of summer made sense. So that’s what I aimed for.

If things had shifted, if alignment had started to feel smoother, if the structural issues had dissolved somehow, my internal clock would have shifted to meet that. I wasn’t executing a firm plan. I was following a read. And my read was correct.

October brought someone different. The pull was strong. And familiar. So were the core issues. I was magnetized to someone who wasn’t ready to do more than spend casual time together.

What I noticed, faster this time, was the same internal signal. The connection was real. The ceiling was also real. I could hold both and make sense of it.

Instead of negotiating with the ceiling, I accepted it. Gave the thing the time it wanted. Let it be what it was.

Then ended it before it went on too long to matter.

January was even briefer. Because I saw it almost immediately. The arc. The shape of the thing. I let myself enjoy it for what it was and didn’t harp on what it wasn’t going to be.

I got better and better at this. At seeing the natural course of things without forcing them faster or slower than they wanted to go.

Here is what I want to say clearly, because I spent years unable to leave anything before it left me.

Leaving things in this way is not an avoidant pattern.

Avoidance looks like leaving before you’re in it. It’s the person who ghosts after date three because things were getting real. What I’m describing is the opposite. The ability to be fully in it, and also, at the same time, holding the knowledge of what it is and what it isn’t, and where it’s most likely going. It requires more presence, not less. It requires you to be honest with yourself about your own needs and your own future, even when the present moment is warm and lovely and offering you another glass of white wine at a beachside restaurant.

It was the thing I was unable to do in my marriage. I kept expecting the ceiling to raise itself. Kept believing that if I stayed long enough, wanted it badly enough, the shape of the thing would change. It didn’t. Ceilings are structurally fixed, it turns out.

What dating after divorce has given me, among other things, is the ability to see a ceiling without catastrophizing it. To say: this is the size of this particular dynamic. And this is still worth something.

I don’t know if I can teach this exactly. I think it arrives when you’ve stopped needing the relationship to be the answer and started letting it just be the present experience.

But if I had to name the thing that has shaped my path more than anything else this last year, it’s this.

Knowing what something is. And knowing, sometimes weirdly ahead of schedule, when it’s done.

To understand the gift, you have to understand the gap.

Spend eighteen months single and you will see exactly how the scaffolding is built.

Society quietly (and sometimes not quietly) organizes itself around the belief that being partnered is the most legitimate form of being alive.

This may seem controversial or uncomfortable to hear, especially if you’re in a relationship. But there is a thing called couple privilege, and I did not make it up in a rage spiral on a Saturday night.

It is structural. It is also subtle. So baked into the scaffolding of adulthood that we barely see it.

Rent in most major cities is priced for two incomes. Groceries are cheaper in bulk. Group accommodations are priced per room, not per person. Weddings come with registries that outfit entire kitchens.

Where is the registry for “just moved into my first apartment alone after a divorce and need literally everything?”

Taxes reward filing jointly. Health insurance extends to spouses. A marriage certificate unlocks legitimacy that chosen family does not.

Socially as well, we organize around couples. There is an engagement party. A bridal shower. A rehearsal dinner. A wedding. An anniversary. A baby shower. And nothing, not one public ritual, for ending something that shaped your entire nervous system. No ceremony for doing a great job selling the house you owned with your ex-husband. No bachelorette party to celebrate actually becoming a bachelorette.

Workplaces participate. Single people are quietly expected to be more flexible, more available, more willing to stay late, because they “don’t have a family.” As in: don’t have a life.

Almost every Disney movie and rom-com ends with union. The narrative arc bends toward coupledom as completion.

When we make romantic partnership the highest form of belonging, we create a hierarchy. And hierarchies don’t only live in tax codes and wedding seating charts.

They live in living rooms.

I’ve watched this play out inside my own friend group.

Since my separation, the invitations have shifted. In share houses, I get placed in the smaller room. The twin bed. The office that converts. Not because anyone is trying to diminish me. Logistically, it makes sense.

And then there’s the part we don’t say out loud.

Many couples gravitate toward other couples. It’s easier. The rhythms match. The schedules sync. An eight-person reservation fills cleanly when it’s 2x4. There’s a coherence to it. A symmetry.

And for the past year and a half, I have been the asymmetry in this equation.

What they sometimes don’t understand is that we can’t always keep up.

They are splitting life. We are not.

They divide rent. Divide emotional labor. Divide dog walking. Divide holiday prep. Divide grocery runs. Divide, even, the occasional existential dread.

We carry the whole thing.

So when the group ski trip is priced per chalet and the expectation is equal split… or the baby shower requires a cross-country flight… it lands differently on one person than on two.

And then there’s the even more tender truth.

Some couples slowly stop investing in friendships with single people. Not in a cruel way. Not even in a conscious way. Their social world just begins to naturally mirror them. Pair with pair. Like with like. And as the asymmetry, it can start to feel like you are now orbiting a planet that used to be your home.

But some couples really fucking don’t.

These ones make room at the table in ways that are intentional. Not “I have one random spot” logistical.

They notice when you are the only one walking into a room without a home base human, and they shift their body toward you. They understand that you are carrying the full weight of your life alone, and they do not minimize that because it is invisible. They ask how your heart is doing, not just who you are dating. They don’t treat you like you’re simply biding your time until the one comes along.

There is one couple in particular who has shown me what that looks like.

When I became single, they opened their arms in a way that still makes me want to tear up. It started with little things. A key to each other’s apartments. Rides to events. A group text. Inside jokes. Then we started to build. Monthly movie nights. I’m invited to Christmas. Birthday dinners just them and me. Called “aunt.” Planning sessions for my dog’s Halloween costume. Growing my individual friendships with each of them, and with their kids.

And then their daughter wrote that family holiday card.

At the beginning of the year we discovered we would all converge in Austin over the same week. They had an extra room in their house. I joined the family vacation in a way that most people will never experience outside of blood relation.

I was in the daily planning sessions. I took turns watching the kids. There was no separation, no “we want to do a family thing today.” Full inclusion. Which means I saw the arguments. I was even part of some of the arguments. And I was so grateful.

This was not: single person comes to dinner, kids get whisked off to bed after fifteen minutes, everything is perfectly arranged. This was the behind-the-scenes. All the in-betweens. We trekked around Austin as a weird little circus, clearly confusing people as to whose child was whose, and where does this dog fit in, and why are these adults also acting a bit like children.

As the end of the trip neared, them heading back to New York, me continuing on to the next chapter in Austin, I watched the kids move through genuine disbelief that we would no longer all be together.

“Why aren’t you and Olive Oyl coming back with us?” one of them said.

I gave an easy answer because it was late and I was tired.

But what I wanted to say was: because of you. Because of all of this. Because immersing in your family, the beautiful mess of it, the utter joy of it, has been a fire in the darkest few years of my life. And something is telling me to go follow the path towards my own.

To the couples who make room: I see you. And so does the person you do it for.

It goes: “I wouldn’t say I’m looking, per se… but I’m open to it.”

And even as I say it, I can hear what a lie it is. Like an audio recording of myself played back slightly wrong. Same words, wrong frequency. The voice of someone performing casualness she doesn’t feel.

It’s coolgirl stuff. I see it now. The casual tone. The if it happens, it happens. The performance of someone who wants love with the same level of intensity you want a table at a restaurant you didn’t bother to book. Would be nice, but not losing sleep. (Btw, my friend Allie wrote about a different lie we tell ourselves in dating. She absolutely nailed it.)

But my eyes? They are wide open. I am always looking. I have never not been looking.

At myself. At my own patterns, the ones I keep repeating and the ones I’ve finally broken. At other people, what they’re really saying underneath what they’re saying. At what’s happening in a room before anyone names it.

And yes, looking for a specific person. The kind that makes the looking feel worth it.

I just didn’t want to get caught.

Here’s what “looking” admits: that I actually want it. Not theoretically. Not eventually. Now. And wanting something, really wanting it, on purpose, out loud, means it might not happen. “Open to it” is wanting with an escape hatch. It lets you want without being seen wanting.

There’s a difference, by the way, between looking and hunting. I know hunters. We all do. The ones who will say anything, fill any shape, become whoever the room needs them to be. Men do it too. The ones who show up with reservations at places you can’t pronounce, buying your love before you’ve even ordered. That’s not looking. That’s an attempt at acquisition.

Looking is quieter. Looking means you know what you actually want and you’re paying attention. It means not getting distracted by shiny, misaligned objects. Shiny with an “I don’t want kids” disclaimer, shiny with highly avoidant communication patterns, shiny with a man who is still becoming. Looking means taking an active role in your own life. Deciding you’re a person who participates in her future instead of waiting for it to arrive.

It is not desperate. It is not embarrassing. It is just honest.

So if you’re looking, stop saying you’re “open to it.”

I finally did. Things got interesting.

Call it a small win over cool girl :)

I signed up out of equal parts desperation and intuition.

The desperation wasn’t dramatic. It was that quieter, more unnerving feeling of realizing that more than a year into my relationship transition, there were still aspects of my life deeply reorienting themselves. Not yet claimed as my own.

And somewhere inside that Thanksgiving-week fog, the intuition came in. I knew I needed to make a move.

Something that said: I am choosing my path now. 2026 will be for me.

I just didn’t know what “for me” meant yet.

I got the promo email from a teacher I’ve followed and respected for years. I didn’t read the full description. Or study the schedule. Or review the testimonials.

I just scanned it, got an internal yes, and signed up.

This is not like me.

I am more planned than not. I research. I even read FAQs.

And suddenly, I was answering questions like:

“So what exactly will you be doing?”
“Why are you going?”
“Who’s going to be there?”

…with the answer that I simply didn’t know.

I watched my friends and family tilt their heads in confusion, trying to reconcile this version of me with the one who usually sends elaborate detailed voice notes.

As February approached, I watched myself bathe in resistance.

I grew deeply attached to the cozy safety of my Brooklyn apartment. I avoided booking flights and reaching out to friends who lived 10 minutes from the workshop location. I justified all the reasons to cancel. At one point I opened my laptop and started typing a message to the organizer about postponing.

Why, exactly, had I decided to spend Valentine’s Day weekend in a room that included dozens of couples doing deep intimacy work?

Work that would almost certainly remind me of my past relationship at its peak.
Work that would almost certainly remind me of my dream future partnership.

It basically sounded like exposure therapy. Triggering to say the least. So I booked the flights.

The retreat was large, nearly two hundred people. Within a few hours I had found a small cluster of women. My anchors for the weekend. Most of them partnered.

“You are so brave to be here alone,” they told me.

I laughed. But also, yes. Correct.

They shared why they came. What they wanted to shift in their relationships. The dynamics they hoped to soften. The patterns they were tired of circling. Their reasons felt straightforward.

Mine felt more abstract. More like standing at the edge of something without knowing exactly what I was stepping into… or why.

The first afternoon, I felt slightly suspended and tender. I was in the room but I had yet to land.

The somatic practices we did were powerful. Intimate. Disarming.

As a single person, I was paired with complete strangers. My new friends worked with their partners.

One of the first exercises involved eye gazing and expressing needs and desires around (PG) touch. At the end, the facilitators opened the floor for shares.

A man stood up. I had noticed him earlier with a woman. They had that easy, affectionate body language of people who know each other well.

His voice carried both steadiness and strain as he described what had surfaced between them. Old trust fractures. Attachment history. The way one small moment in the exercise opened up years of relational material.

Another partnered woman shared that she felt her partner had “done it wrong.” Which triggered a cascade of memories of not feeling fully held.

As couple after couple spoke, I felt something strange happen in my body.

Deep recognition.

I had been each of them at one point. I knew the walls that came up over the years, despite even the best intentions to keep them down. And with them, that growing ache of wanting to be met differently in the day to day of partnered life.

The emotional texture of partnership lives in me. It’s imprinted.

And yet…at the same time…

I wasn’t in it.

I wasn’t scanning a partner’s face for reassurance. Or wondering if we were aligned enough.

Instead I was moving through the room on my own timeline. Talking to who I wanted. Brining my full expression to the exercises without managing anyone else’s response.

I was having an entirely different experience than the one I had thought I wanted.

I wasn’t longing to be part of a couple. And I wasn’t aching for someone to turn toward.

I felt solid. And free.

And this woman- who has loved partnership more than almost anything, who built her identity for a decade around being part of an “us,” who has historically felt safest when tethered-

felt deeply happy to be there alone.