My brother’s best friend may have been thirty years ahead of his time. Long before social media was filled with stories of experienced hikers abandoning their less experienced girlfriends on the trail, family legend says he backpacked through South America with his Bosnian girlfriend. Two weeks into a six-week trip, somewhere around Machu Picchu, the relationship imploded resulting in Tim leaving her on a mountain top while he continued the hike alone.

To this day, we jokingly refer to him as the originator of the Alpine Divorce. I don’t remember what they argued about, and honestly, I don’t think anyone else does either. That’s the funny thing about family folklore. The details fade away while the headline becomes immortal.

Thirty years later, Tim is exactly who he was back then. He never married, never had children, and proudly describes himself as a lifelong bachelor with no interest in finding a partner. Looking back, maybe Machu Picchu didn’t destroy a perfectly good relationship. Maybe it simply revealed that partnership wasn’t the life he wanted.

Lately, I’ve been noticing stories online about experienced hikers leaving less experienced partners behind on the trail. Sometimes it’s after an argument. Sometimes it’s because one person can’t keep up. Sometimes it’s shared as a funny story. Other times it ends with search and rescue.

While those stories are obviously more dramatic than most relationships, I think they resonate because they expose something much deeper than hiking. A mountain strips away pretense. Someone gets tired. Someone gets scared. Someone has to slow down. Eventually one person has a choice to make: do they adjust their pace, or do they keep moving and expect the other person to figure it out?

Years ago, my then-husband and I used to go running together on weekends. He worked in the fitness industry, so naturally he was much faster than I was. That part never bothered me. I never expected someone whose job revolved around health and exercise to pretend we had the same level of fitness.

What bothered me was that he seemed determined to make sure I knew he was faster. He’d sprint ahead, stop, turn around, point at me, yell, “Catch up! You are so slow! ” and then accelerate again before I ever had the chance to reach him. Later, he’d ask with complete sincerity, “Where did you go?” as though we’d somehow become separated by accident instead of by design.

For years, I thought our problem was that we simply ran at different speeds. Looking back, I realize the pace had very little to do with it. Running exposed something much larger about how we viewed partnership. A stronger runner always has choices. They can slow down. They can circle back. They can explain they’re doing intervals. They can encourage the other person without humiliating them. Or they can use their advantage as proof that they’ll always be one step ahead. The issue was never that he was faster. The issue was that we weren’t actually running together.

I have another family member whose mountain had nothing to do with athletics. She fell in love with a man who earned significantly less money than she did. Before they married, he was remarkably honest about who he was. He knew his income was modest. He knew not having a high school diploma limited his employment opportunities. He admitted he had no interest in going back to school and no real ambition to earn substantially more money because his lifestyle suited him just fine. He wasn’t hiding any of it. There was no deception, no false promises, and no grand vision about who he hoped to become in five years.

Despite her reservations, she married him anyway. She spent years searching LinkedIn for better jobs on his behalf, rewriting and embellishing his résumé, forwarding job postings, encouraging him to apply for positions with greater responsibility and better pay, convinced that if she just found the right opportunity something would click. It never did.

Today she works two and a half jobs while he goes through long stretches of unemployment. When he eventually finds another job, he usually complains about how much he hates it. She’s spent years trying to pull him up a mountain he never wanted to climb.

Another woman I knew spent nearly seven years with a man who had been remarkably honest from the beginning of their relationship. He told her he couldn’t see himself marrying her. Despite living together and blending their families, marriage simply wasn’t part of the future he envisioned. Unfortunately, it was exactly the future she wanted.

Instead of accepting that their paths were different, she convinced herself she could love him into changing his mind. She became the woman she imagined the perfect wife would be. She kept the house spotless, packed his children’s lunches, drove them to school, set up his online banking, paid the household bills, and quietly carried the invisible mental load that keeps a home running while he spent weekends watching football with his friends at the bar.

Years later, the relationship ended under the weight of the same conversation they’d had at the very beginning. He wasn’t leaving because she hadn’t done enough. He left because he wanted the same future he had always wanted, and she wanted one he had already told her he couldn’t give her.

These stories have very different endings, but they’ve all taught me the same lesson. Tim never wanted partnership, and thirty years later he’s living exactly the life he envisioned for himself. I divorced the man who used to sprint ahead of me on weekend runs more than a decade ago. My cousin is still trying to pull her husband toward ambitions he has never claimed as his own. The woman who longed for marriage eventually learned that no amount of sacrifice could turn someone into a husband when he had already said he didn’t want to become one.

For a long time, I believed relationships ended because people changed. Now I wonder if many relationships end because they don’t. We spend years hoping someone will become more ambitious, more affectionate, more emotionally available, more financially responsible, more adventurous, or more committed. We convince ourselves that enough love, encouragement, patience, sacrifice, or selflessness will eventually transform them into the partner we imagined instead of the partner standing in front of us.

One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is that sometimes it is not about deciding whether someone is a good person or a bad person. It’s about believing them. Sometimes people tell you with words. Sometimes they tell you through their actions. Either way, they’re telling you. Every relationship eventually reaches a mountain. Sometimes it’s Machu Picchu. Sometimes it’s a Saturday morning run. Sometimes it’s a LinkedIn job posting. Sometimes it’s an engagement ring that never arrives. The mountain itself isn’t what determines whether the relationship survives.

The real question is whether you’re willing to accept the person standing beside you, or whether you’ve spent the entire climb hoping they’ll become someone else.

Disclaimer: If you’re an experienced hiker taking a less experienced hiker out on a hiking date, do not ditch them on the trail because you’re annoyed. That is not dating etiquette. That is a safety issue. Also, the hiking gods are absolutely keeping score. Seriously. Don’t do this.

Better yet, just take her to watch a movie. Or stay single.

I spent almost ten years celibate after my divorce.

Whenever people find that out, they usually react one of two ways. Either they look at me with deep concern, as though I’ve been stranded on a deserted island surviving on coconuts and sheer willpower, or they react with a surprising amount of admiration, as though I’ve completed some kind of spiritual Ironman competition. Neither reaction feels quite right.

The truth is considerably less dramatic, although after enough years something strange starts happening to your brain. You begin to feel...accomplished. Not in a normal, healthy way, but in the same way I imagine someone who has successfully completed a seventy-two-hour fast or attends CrossFit six mornings a week begins to feel. You’ve endured something difficult for so long that it quietly transforms from something you do into part of your identity.

Every hobby seems to have these people. The marathon runner who somehow finds a way to mention their personal best before the appetizers arrive. The intermittent fasting enthusiast who casually announces they’re on hour sixty-eight while everyone else is ordering mozzarella sticks. The person who starts every sentence with, “Well, in the keto community...”

None of these things are inherently annoying. In fact, many are genuinely impressive. But spend enough years doing anything and you begin carrying yourself with the subtle confidence of someone who’s cracked a secret code the rest of society hasn’t figured out yet. Somewhere around year six or seven, I realized celibacy had become my version of CrossFit. I wasn’t talking about it constantly, but internally I was absolutely awarding myself imaginary merit badges.

In my mind I had somehow become this highly evolved creature who had transcended earthly desires. I imagined the saints giving me an approving nod as I walked by. If there were a heavenly rewards program, surely I was accumulating points. “Congratulations, Pamela,” I pictured St. Peter saying. “You’ve reached Platinum Abstinence Status. Please enjoy priority boarding into Heaven and complimentary lounge access.”

It’s ridiculous, of course, but that’s what the human mind does. We start believing that because we’ve endured something difficult, we’ve become just a little more enlightened than everyone else.

Meanwhile, my actual life looked hilariously ordinary. I wasn’t meditating on a mountaintop or living in a monastery. I was driving my kids to school, attending work meetings from my kitchen table, wandering the aisles of Costco wondering why I suddenly owned enough berries to feed a family of twelve, and trying to remember if I’d switched the laundry into the dryer before it started smelling like mildew. There was nothing particularly mystical about any of it. My “journey of abstinence” looked suspiciously like suburban motherhood with a side of trauma recovery.

Looking back, I think I accidentally confused endurance with enlightenment. That’s easy to do when you’ve maintained any kind of streak for a long time. We humans love streaks. We count days sober. We count consecutive workouts. We count steps, meditation sessions, Duolingo lessons, books read, miles run, and apparently, years without having sex.

There’s something deeply satisfying about watching a number get bigger because it feels like objective evidence that we’re becoming a better version of ourselves. The number itself starts carrying emotional weight. You don’t just have a streak anymore. You have an identity.

The irony is that my celibacy wasn’t originally some noble lifestyle choice. It was self-preservation. I had just left a marriage that fundamentally changed my understanding of trust. My energy wasn’t focused on romance. It was focused on surviving family court, raising two little boys, rebuilding my finances, untangling years of manipulation, learning how to sleep through the night again, and slowly figuring out who I was when nobody else’s voice was louder than my own. Dating simply wasn’t a priority because healing was— served exactly the purpose it needed to serve.

But somewhere along the way, the healing quietly became a badge of honor. Instead of thinking, “I’m not dating because this season of my life requires something different,” I started unconsciously thinking, “Look how disciplined I am.” That’s when I realized I had fallen into the exact same trap as every CrossFit enthusiast, marathon runner, and fasting evangelist I’d ever lovingly teased. I’d mistaken the streak for the achievement.

Then I broke my celibacy.

The funny part is what happened next.

Absolutely nothing.

I half expected some sort of existential crisis. Surely I’d spend the next several weeks lying awake at three in the morning, staring at the ceiling with my eyes bugging out like a cartoon character.

“I can’t believe I just threw away almost ten years of celibacy!”

Maybe I’d feel like a sellout. Maybe I’d think I’d failed some invisible exam. Perhaps St. Peter would quietly revoke my Platinum Abstinence Status. Maybe there’d be a tiny committee of nuns shaking their heads in disappointment. After all, hadn’t I spent the better part of a decade becoming the CrossFit enthusiast of celibacy? Surely there would be some emotional fallout.

Instead, I brushed my teeth.

I went to bed.

The next morning I answered work emails, made coffee, folded laundry, and wondered what to make for dinner.

That was it.

I didn’t feel like a sellout. I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t have remorse. I didn’t suddenly question everything I’d spent the previous decade doing. I also didn’t launch into a full-blown hoe-tation as though I’d been patiently waiting ten years for the gates to open. There wasn’t a dramatic pendulum swing from one extreme to the other. It simply became one part of an otherwise ordinary life.

There wasn’t a single moment where I lay awake staring at the ceiling thinking, Well...there goes almost ten years.

Instead, I found myself surprisingly at peace.

If anything, I realized I’d accidentally assigned way too much meaning to the streak itself.

Breaking celibacy didn’t erase the healing I’d done over the previous decade. It didn’t undo the discernment I’d developed. It didn’t rewind the years I spent rebuilding my life after divorce. It didn’t somehow restore the frightened version of me who had decided she needed that season in the first place. Those things were never stored inside the streak.

They were stored inside me.

That’s when I realized the point of almost ten years of celibacy was never to remain celibate forever. The point was to become healthy enough that celibacy no longer had to be my identity.

I think we do this with all sorts of things. We become so attached to the identity we’ve built around a habit that we stop asking whether the habit is still serving us. We cling to streaks because streaks are measurable. They make us feel accomplished. They tell a neat story about who we are. But life isn’t measured by how long we can keep a streak alive. Sometimes the goal of the streak is to become the kind of person who no longer needs it.

I’m still grateful for those ten years. They gave me exactly what I needed during one of the hardest chapters of my life. They gave me time to heal, to become comfortable in my own company, and to learn the difference between loneliness and peace. But they didn’t make me holier than anyone else. They didn’t earn me bonus points with the universe. They certainly didn’t qualify me for some exclusive abstinence rewards program.

If anything, they taught me something far more ordinary and far more freeing. I didn’t betray my celibacy by ending it.

I simply graduated from needing it.

A few weeks ago, I told my seventy-five-year-old mother that I planned to take a short break from dating. I wanted to focus on my writing, spend more time with my girlfriends, and enjoy having a little more room in my schedule.

She looked at me as if I’d just announced I was taking a break from oxygen.

“But why?”

“Because I want to.”

“But you’re not doing anything.”

“Exactly.”

She stared at me for another moment before asking the question that had apparently been bothering her for weeks.

“I don’t understand. You’ve gone on so many dates. Why don’t you have a boyfriend?”

My mother is deeply troubled by the fact that I haven’t settled down. From her perspective, I’ve met enough men by now that surely one of them should have become my boyfriend. Maybe I’m too picky. Maybe my opinions intimidate men. Surely, somewhere in Seattle, there has to be one good—or at least good enough—man willing to put up with me.

What she couldn’t understand was my discernment. Why would I willingly walk away from someone kind, respectful, and perfectly pleasant simply because I didn’t think we were the right fit? To her, compatibility seemed much simpler. If two decent people enjoyed each other’s company, why keep looking?

Eventually, I realized we weren’t actually talking about me. We were talking about dating—or more accurately, the fact that there no longer seems to be a shared cultural script for what dating is supposed to look like.

My mother grew up in the Philippines, where courtship was taken seriously. A young man wasn’t simply a boyfriend. He was a suitor. Boys didn’t just show up at your house because they felt like it. They needed your parents’ permission, and they were expected to make their intentions known from the very beginning. Holding hands and public displays of affection were considered inappropriate.

That was the world my mother understood.

When my father became one of her suitors, his intentions were never a mystery. Their outings weren’t elaborate. Most consisted of a walk, sitting together on a park bench, or going to a movie with her grandmother serving as the official chaperone. There was almost always a bottle of Coke and a snack involved.

Instead of sending text messages, my father wrote my mother long, handwritten letters. In them, he told her exactly how he felt, what he admired about her, and that he intended to build a life with her. His feelings didn’t arrive one emoji or one carefully timed text at a time. They arrived in complete sentences, folded neatly into an envelope.

A year later, they were married.

Courtship wasn’t simply one possible path to marriage. In my mother’s world, it was the expected path. Of course, not every relationship lasted forever, but there was a broad cultural understanding of what everyone was trying to accomplish.

Most people knew the script.

Today, I’m not sure anyone knows the script anymore.

Over the past several months, I’ve done my best to explain modern dating to my mother. We’ve discussed dating apps, ghosting, situationships, exclusivity, and the increasingly creative vocabulary we’ve invented to describe people who refuse to simply tell each other how they feel.

I’ve explained that some people date multiple people at the same time until they decide to become exclusive. Others naturally stop dating anyone else the moment they’re interested in one person. Some are looking for marriage. Others never intend to marry. Some couples date other people while married, which remains controversial to some and perfectly ordinary to others. Some people simply want companionship.

Every time I think she’s beginning to understand, she asks another question that reminds me just how dramatically the dating landscape has changed. The more I try to explain 2026 to my mother, the more I realize I’m translating an entirely new language into one she never had to learn.

Dinner at my brother’s house only made matters worse.

Around the table sat my sisters-in-law, Jodi and Tilly, our family friend Blanca, my mother, and me. At thirty years old, Blanca was the youngest person there by a wide margin. My mother absolutely adores her. She’s bright, funny, thoughtful, and the kind of young woman my mom can’t stop feeding every time she sees her.

Somehow, the conversation drifted to dating.

Blanca mentioned that she was seeing a man who happened to be legally married.

My mother’s dessert fork stopped halfway to her mouth.

“But Blanca,” she said, “you’re so pretty, you’re so sweet, and you’re so kind.”

She paused for a moment.

“So... you’re a mistress?”

It wasn’t an accusation. It was simply the closest word she had. My mother wasn’t judging Blanca. She was trying to fit a brand-new concept into a vocabulary she’d been using for seventy-five years.

Blanca explained that she wasn’t a mistress at all. The man and his wife had mutually agreed to open their marriage, and everyone involved knew exactly what was happening.

My mother leaned in with sincere curiosity.

“So... the wife knows?”

Blanca nodded.

“In fact,” she explained, “she’s dating other people too. It’s called Ethical Non-Monogamy.”

My mother’s eyebrows climbed even higher.

“So the wife has a boyfriend too?”

“No,” Blanca said. “Right now she’s only dating women.”

Mom sat quietly for a few seconds, and you could almost see her mentally reorganizing the filing cabinet she’d been using to understand relationships for the past seventy-five years.

“So...” she asked cautiously. “He’s looking for a sister wife like that Kody Brown from the TLC show? The man with the Top Ramen hair?”

We explained that it wasn’t the same thing.

Still trying to absorb everything, she asked Blanca what the man did for a living.

“He’s a baker,” Blanca replied. “He makes gourmet bagels.”

Trying to highlight one of the relationship’s perks, Blanca smiled.

“He can get us as many bagels as we want.”

Mom thought about that for a moment.

“Do the bagels taste like adultery?”

Blanca assured her they tasted exactly like regular bagels.

Mom nodded thoughtfully.

“So... can he get us schmears too?”

At that point, my mother appeared to decide that ethical non-monogamy was above her pay grade. She might not understand the relationship, but she understood free bagels.

Blanca wasn’t the only person confusing my mother. There was also my friend Jayne.

Mom had followed Jayne’s dating adventures almost as closely as I had. She watched Jayne fall headfirst into a whirlwind romance that ended almost as quickly as it began. Two days later, Jayne was already excited about someone new she’d met online.

Mom looked at me in disbelief when I told her about Jayne’s potential new paramour.

“Already?”

I nodded.

“But she was just in love.”

“I know.”

Mom sat quietly for a moment before asking the most reasonable question anyone had asked about modern dating in quite some time.

“Doesn’t she need a little rest?”

Re-entering the dating world felt less like following a map and more like opening a choose-your-own-adventure novel where everyone seemed to be reading a different edition.

After an entire dinner spent explaining married boyfriends, open relationships, dating apps, and Jayne’s romantic recovery time, Jodi finally looked at me and shook her head.

“I think we need to stop teaching Mom so much.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because one day she’s going to come home and announce she’s in a polyamorous relationship with two men and a woman, and then this is going to be our fault.”

Given everything we’d managed to cover over dinner, it no longer sounded completely impossible.

Mom’s confusion probably isn’t helped by the fact that she spends much of her free time watching K-dramas. You know the ones. The Korean soap operas where two impossibly attractive strangers accidentally meet, spend sixteen episodes misunderstanding each other, and then, just when all hope seems lost, the handsome male lead runs through the pouring rain to confess his undying love.

I tried explaining that dating in 2026 is considerably less cinematic. Sometimes romance isn’t a dramatic declaration in the rain. Sometimes it’s making it to a second date—and deciding there shouldn’t be a third.

At one point, after another one of our marathon conversations about modern dating, I finally threw up my hands.

“Sheesh, Mom, don’t you read my work? There’s even an audio button. Going on a date doesn’t mean there’s going to be a relationship. Being in a relationship doesn’t mean anyone is getting married.”

She looked at me matter-of-factly.

“Of course I do,” she said. “I’m even more confused.”

I couldn’t blame her. Of all the things I’d rather teach my seventy-five-year-old mother, modern dating ranks surprisingly low on the list. I’d much rather teach her how to set up the Wi-Fi, create separate Netflix profiles, or explain how to tell the difference between an AI-generated video and a real person on TikTok.

Somehow, all of those seem easier than explaining whatever new relationship term we’ve invented this week.

To her credit, my mother didn’t always understand what I was telling her, but she never dismissed it. She asked thoughtful questions, listened to the answers, and genuinely tried to make sense of a world that looked nothing like the one she grew up in.

A few days later, she came home from a doctor’s appointment with unexpected news.

“There was a very nice man that sat next to me in the waiting room,” she said. “He was about my age.”

Apparently, the two of them had spent the morning comparing primary care physicians, debating which medical office had the longest wait times, and lamenting the ever-increasing price of meat.

It was, by all accounts, peak senior citizen flirting.

When the nurse finally called them back for blood work, he was ahead of her in line. Instead of going first, he stepped aside, smiled, and said, “Ladies first.”

Afterward, he asked if she’d like to get coffee.

Without thinking, I immediately launched into an interrogation.

“What kind of man picks up on a random woman at a medical lab? Who is this silver-haired lothario? Does he have a wife? Does he have a home? Does he have all his teeth? Does he have diabetes? Did he ask how much you get in Social Security every month?”

I looked at her through gritted teeth. “I watch Dateline. I know things.”

“He’s friendly. He’s very good looking,” my mother answered.

“No,” I said. “I mean, what are his intentions?”

My mother smirked.

“I thought you told me there weren’t any rules anymore.”

I opened my mouth.

Nothing came out.

She was right.

Dedicated to my mother. Do not give your number to strangers. I watch Dateline. I know things.

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After approximately six months, nearly fifty dates, and enough material to sustain Love and Other Disasters for the foreseeable future, I am officially retiring from the dating apps.

Someone once told me online dating was easy. “There are so many men out there,” they assured me. “You’ll have no problem finding dates. The apps are like shooting fish in a barrel.”

What no one bothered to mention was that the barrel was less of a barrel and more of a bottomless abyss. The fish themselves often arrived freshly divorced, carrying unresolved trauma, or possessing the emotional capacity of a packet of uncooked Top Ramen.

Still, there was no shortage of material. I met weirdos, romantics, lonely men, overconfident men, men who had absolutely no idea what they wanted, and some genuinely lovely men I was lucky enough to meet even though we weren’t right for each other. I consumed an unreasonable amount of coffee with strangers and enough strawberry-matcha swirl soft serve after bad dates that the ice cream shop should seriously consider giving me profit sharing.

Over those six months, I met a man I could see myself falling in love with, only to realize his loneliness had made us feel closer than we actually were. I was stood up. I was told I would make a great wife. I kissed men I thought I would never want to see again right up until the kiss made me reconsider. I conducted the research, gathered the data, and accumulated enough field notes to qualify for some kind of honorary degree in middle-aged male behavior. Mother is tired, but Mother is now extremely well informed.

The original experiment was simple: I would give myself six months on the apps and see who was out there. I had been out of the dating world for almost a decade, and part of this was an exercise in discernment. I wanted to know who I actually liked now, at forty-seven, after marriage and divorce and children and therapy and enough life experience to understand that a handsome face and a clever opening line are not qualifications for anything.

Sometimes I wasn’t even looking for romance. I was trying to confirm that there were still people out there and that my romantic life had not quietly ended sometime during the previous decade without anyone bothering to notify me. I never really dated to a type because I’m still not convinced I know what my type is. I went on dates with men as young as thirty-five and as old as seventy-five, and I regret to report that neither age bracket has cornered the market on emotional intelligence or knowing what the hell they want.

Instead, I tried to pay attention to something much more useful. Who did I feel good around? Who made me comfortable? Who made me curious? Who made me laugh? Who made me feel like myself? And, occasionally, who made me want to fake a medical emergency so my best friend could extract me from the restaurant?

Most of these men never made it past one date. We would have coffee or hit golf balls, talk for an hour or two, shake hands in the parking lot, and go our separate ways without ever exchanging phone numbers. There was no tragedy in that and, increasingly, I stopped treating it like one. Sometimes two perfectly decent people sit across from each other and realize there is simply nothing there. Nobody failed. Nobody needs closure. Sometimes the answer is just no.

To be fair, there was no shortage of male attention. Depending on the app and the day, I could receive anywhere from fifteen to seventy-five likes or matches. This sounds impressive until you realize that abundance and compatibility are not the same thing. Walking into Costco and seeing two hundred varieties of cereal does not mean you suddenly become passionate about bran flakes.

Eventually, I realized the apps were essentially Instacart for human beings. Browse the inventory, apply filters, inspect the packaging, place an order, and occasionally discover that what arrives looks suspiciously unlike the photograph. There was always another option waiting behind the first one, which made dating feel less like meeting people and more like continually shopping for the person who might finally convince you to stop shopping.

That was one of the more uncomfortable things I learned about myself. Whenever a connection started winding down, I had a tendency to reopen the apps. Another notification, another match, another stranger waiting to remind me that I was still desirable. The apps made disappointment remarkably easy to anesthetize. One man faded out and twenty-seven more appeared. Someone didn’t text back and I could swipe, match, collect another little hit of dopamine, and keep moving. It took me a while to recognize that I wasn’t always looking for the next person because I genuinely wanted to meet him. Sometimes I was simply reassuring myself that there would always be someone else.

By then, modern romance had started to feel less like “shooting fish in a barrel” and more like The Hunger Games with better lighting and significantly more push notifications. When those matches progressed to meeting in real life, the whole thing became speed dating except you were trapped with the same person for an entire hour over coffee. You sit across from a complete stranger and somehow attempt to determine whether he is kind, emotionally available, financially solvent, capable of intimacy, secretly married, still obsessed with an ex, and whether you would eventually like to see him naked. It’s a lot to ask of two people who have never witnessed each other chew.

The strange thing was that once we got past the profiles and actually sat across from each other, most of these men stopped feeling like inventory. They became people. I also discovered that I am apparently a very fun date, which surprised me more than it probably should have. Years of therapy have turned me into a good listener. I can usually find something to laugh about with almost anyone, and people tend to tell me things. Men especially seemed relieved when someone sat across from them and simply listened without judgment.

I heard a lot. Some men were lonely. Some needed validation or companionship. Some apparently needed a temporary unpaid therapist to hear the complete oral history of the ex-wife, ex-girlfriend, or occasional ex-mistress who had ruined their lives. I heard about divorces and estranged children, careers that hadn’t turned out as expected, dreams deferred, betrayals, addictions, anxieties, dead bedrooms, childhood wounds, disappointments, and futures they still hoped might somehow materialize. After enough dates, I started to wonder how many of us had gone onto the apps looking for romance when what we really wanted was someone willing to witness us for an hour.

Sometimes I mistook that disclosure for intimacy, and that was one of the harder lessons. Someone can tell you the saddest thing that ever happened to him and you can feel incredibly close for a few hours without actually knowing him very well at all. Loneliness can create a strange kind of accelerated intimacy. Two people can sit in the darkest corner of a bar confessing wistful longings and temporarily feel as though they have known each other much longer than they have. The feeling may be real, but the history is not.

Thankfully, not every connection carried that much emotional weight. Some were simply unexpected. I accidentally matched with my brother’s friend and realtor, a man I had briefly met years earlier and somehow remembered as being 5’2”. Imagine my surprise when his profile confidently declared he was 6’2”. Height exaggerator? Maybe.

I immediately took a screenshot to send my brother so we could either confirm or mock the suspicious growth spurt. Unbeknownst to me, I hit the match button instead. Phil matched back, and a week later we met for coffee. As it turned out, he really was 6’2”. It also turned out that there was absolutely no romantic chemistry between us, but we liked each other enough that I fully intend to use him as my realtor when I eventually buy a house. Apparently, online dating can also function as LinkedIn.

Connections like that helped me understand that a date did not need to lead anywhere romantic to have been worthwhile. They also clarified what I actually wanted when I did feel attraction. I wasn’t particularly interested in being impressed. I wanted curiosity. I wanted someone who wanted to know me, and those are not the same thing.

Phil also gave me an unexpected glimpse into what the apps looked like from the other side. When I told him I could receive dozens of likes or matches in a day, he laughed. There was no avalanche of women flooding his inbox, and there were stretches where absolutely nothing happened.

The more I compared notes with my male friends, the more I realized they weren’t competing in the same arena at all. While my girlfriends and I were sorting through abundance, many of the men I knew were struggling to get noticed in the first place. Another friend described the apps as “throwing words into a void.” He carefully read profiles, sent thoughtful messages, and received little in return.

A man I briefly dated described another kind of frustration. He found himself constantly trying to decode women’s intentions. Women who appeared to be looking for one thing sometimes wanted something entirely different, while others would initiate conversations, seek companionship and attention, and then disappear without explanation. My female friends were often exhausted by the number of possibilities in front of them; many of my male friends were exhausted by how few possibilities seemed to materialize at all.

It was as if we had all been dropped into The Hunger Games, except the Capitol had handed men and women completely different instructions. Many women were trying to survive the sheer volume of contestants while many men were standing around wondering whether they had even been selected for the arena.

Listening to everyone, I began to suspect that men and women weren’t living in entirely different worlds after all. Women complained about emotional labor while men complained about invisibility. Women were overwhelmed while men were underwhelmed. Yet once you stripped away the details, the disappointment sounded remarkably similar.

There was an undercurrent of loneliness running through app dating, but there was also something surprisingly earnest and hopeful beneath it. Everyone seemed to be reaching for some version of connection: attention, sex, companionship, validation, a witness, a second chance, a wife, a girlfriend, a person to send memes to, someone to wake up beside, someone who would simply listen. The strange part was how often we seemed unsure what to do once some version of that connection actually appeared.

I certainly was. I entered this experiment thinking I needed to practice discernment around men, and I’m leaving realizing I needed to practice discernment around myself. For starters, I am nowhere near ready for a boyfriend. Can I still call him a boyfriend in my late forties? It sounds suspiciously like someone who should be waiting outside my high school locker. “Partner” sounds more age appropriate, but I’m not convinced I want one of those either.

I have spent years building a life around autonomy, and I am deeply protective of it. I do not want to blend families. I do not want another adult integrated into every corner of my household, and I have no desire to remarry. As a single mother of two young boys, the thought of another living, breathing human being needing one more thing from me is not especially romantic. I have spent enough of my life performing emotional labor. I do not want to become someone’s household manager, social secretary, therapist, or primary source of emotional regulation.

For a while, I thought casual dating might solve that problem. If I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, maybe I could simply enjoy someone’s company without worrying about where it was going. It turns out removing the expectation of a relationship does not necessarily remove uncertainty. Sometimes it creates more of it.

What are we doing? Will I see him again? Do I even want to see him again? Do I actually like him, or do I just like that he likes me? Why do I care whether he likes me if I’m not trying to make him my boyfriend in the first place? I discovered that ambiguity could occupy an astonishing amount of mental real estate even when I wasn’t asking a connection to become anything more.

That was harder for me than rejection. Rejection, at least, is information. Uncertainty leaves room for interpretation, and apparently I can turn three hours without a text message into a full forensic investigation.

I would also be lying if I pretended I made it through six months without getting hurt. I did. There were men I liked more than they liked me, moments when someone’s withdrawal landed directly on an old bruise, and connections I mourned longer than their actual duration probably justified. Dating gave me plenty of opportunities to figure out what I wanted, but it also gave me plenty of opportunities to feel rejected, disappointed, exposed, and occasionally ridiculous.

I’m sure I disappointed some men too. I even accidentally unmatched with someone on Hinge the day before our date, unintentionally ghosting him and potentially earning myself some terrible dating karma. There were good men who wanted second dates I didn’t want to give them, men who were more interested in me than I was in them, and probably a few who went home wondering what they had done wrong when the answer was simply that I didn’t feel it.

I wasn’t merely the person being evaluated; I was evaluating too. That matters because it is easy to tell a story about dating in which we are always the wounded party and everyone else is doing the wounding. That was never true. I was participating in the same strange system as everyone else, trying not to mislead anyone, occasionally getting it wrong, and sometimes leaving another person disappointed despite having no intention of hurting him.

One of the most useful things this experiment taught me is that I no longer have to wait for a man to clarify uncertainty for me. I can decide too. I can decide that I no longer enjoy an arrangement even if nobody has technically done anything wrong. I can decide that ambiguity is costing me too much mental bandwidth, and I can decide that I am finished waiting around for another person’s behavior to tell me whether I should stay. That isn’t rejection. It’s agency.

The mental bandwidth may ultimately be the biggest reason I am stopping. What surprised me most about dating wasn’t how much time it consumed on my calendar but how much space it occupied in my head. A perfectly pleasant two-hour date could linger in my thoughts for days afterward.

At some point, I realized I had accidentally taken on a second unpaid job in amateur behavioral analysis, and Mother is resigning. I want that bandwidth back. I want to write my books and finish the essays already sitting in my queue. I want to be more present with my children instead of having part of my brain occupied by some man I met twelve days ago. I want to say yes when friends invite me somewhere without first checking whether I have scheduled coffee with a stranger. Mostly, I want novelty to come from my life again instead of whoever appears next in my match queue.

I would also be lying if I said I wasn’t a little sad. For six months, there was always another possibility waiting: another match, another coffee, another story, another person who might surprise me, another opportunity to feel attraction or chemistry or hope. The apps were exhausting, but they kept the future populated. Deleting them means deliberately choosing an empty space where “who’s next?” used to live, and that feels strange even though I know it is time.

I entered the apps as a relatively naive forty-seven-year-old single mother who hadn’t dated in almost a decade. Six months and nearly fifty dates later, I’m leaving as a forty-seven-year-old single mother who is still nobody’s girlfriend, but now has enough war stories to write a book. On paper, very little has changed. But I don’t think the woman who entered the arena is the same woman leaving it.

I learned that being chosen isn’t particularly interesting if I don’t want to choose the person back. Attention isn’t intimacy. Abundance isn’t compatibility. Chemistry isn’t commitment, and disclosure isn’t necessarily closeness. I can enjoy someone without needing to keep him forever, and a connection does not have to become permanent to have mattered.

I also learned that the opposite of loneliness may not be permanence at all. Sometimes it is simply being seen while we’re here, even if the person doing the seeing is only meant to stay for a little while.

Most importantly, six months in the arena didn’t make me hate men. If anything, meeting so many of them made them more human to me. Beneath the bravado, awkward sales pitches, thirty-year-old profile pictures, divorce stories, mixed signals, and occasionally questionable emotional capacity were people trying to be wanted while protecting themselves from the humiliation of wanting someone else. I wasn’t fundamentally different. I was protecting myself too.

So this week, I’m deleting the apps. There will be no dramatic announcement that I’ve “given up on love,” because I haven’t. I’m simply finished shopping for it. I don’t need another stack of matches waiting for me in the morning or another stranger scheduled for coffee because an algorithm decided we both enjoy bookstores and tacos.

I’m leaving the dating-app pool with no boyfriend, and strangely, that doesn’t feel like evidence that the experiment failed. I found stories, friendships, ridiculous memories, a future realtor, moments of astonishing tenderness, some extremely good kisses, and enough dating material to keep Love and Other Disasters alive for quite some time. More importantly, I earned enough stamps on my soft-serve loyalty card that my next strawberry-matcha swirl is free, so technically I am not leaving empty-handed.

I went on the dating apps because everyone told me it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Instead, I spent six months in The Hunger Games and discovered that the contestants weren’t really fighting each other. Most of us were simply trying to make our way through the arena without becoming so armored that nobody could reach us. I made it through, but now I would like my attention back.

Mother is tired.

🎮 Adventure #20: The Great Escape

Todd leaves Mindy’s door open and Lindsay Buckingkat makes a three-legged run for freedom. Mindy is distraught, Todd maintains that he thought an indoor cat would stay indoors, and rather than simply taking accountability, he decides to fix the situation by adopting the golden retriever they’ve always talked about.

Meet Stevie Nicks, a beautiful, lovable golden retriever who is dumb as a rock. Lindsay eventually returns, Stevie has approximately three brain cells, and Mindy now owns two pets because Todd’s HOA prohibits furry animals. Those damn pesky HOAs.

Should Todd and Mindy:

🐕 Accept that Stevie Nicks is now part of the family and Mindy owns two pets?

🪒 Shave Stevie Nicks and see exactly how specific Todd’s HOA intends to get about this “no furry animals” business?

The narrator does not endorse shaving golden retrievers. The narrator does, however, enjoy irritating HOAs.

My best friend, Lucy, and I spent Saturday morning wandering the aisles of Target.

Her latest test results had arrived, and we’d spent the previous half hour sitting in the parking lot, teary-eyed, talking through pathology reports and discussing the medical team that would help her deal with the recently discovered cancer. By the time we reached the cosmetics aisle, we’d exhausted ourselves trying to solve a problem neither of us could solve that morning.

Like we always do when life gets too heavy, we changed the subject.

“I have a first date in two weeks,” I said.

“Who’s the guy?”

“Matched with him on Facebook Dating. He’s in tech and he’s really into Dungeons & Dragons.”

She glanced up from a bottle of moisturizer.

“So? I know a few of those guys. They’re nerds, but they’re pretty cool.”

“So...” I hesitated. “What if he’s a LARPer?”

She looked genuinely confused.

“So what?”

“So what if he’s a Live Action Role Player? That’s what! A few weeks ago I was walking through the park with my brother when we stumbled onto an entire medieval battle. There were grown adults dressed as Vikings, elves, and knights. One guy looked exactly like Link from The Legend of Zelda. They had leather armor, foam swords, capes... some even had furry tails attached to their pants. They were completely committed.”

I looked at her.

“What if this guy shows up to our first date dressed like Hiccup from How to Train Your Dragon?”

Without missing a beat, Lucy turned back to comparing the ingredients on two bottles of moisturizer.

“If he shows up dressed like Hiccup, text me. I’ll run screaming into the driving range that you have to leave because my cancer is spreading in real time. I’ll extract you.”

I laughed so hard I nearly spit out my iced coffee.

She put one of the moisturizers back on the shelf.

“Besides,” she said, “everybody’s a LARPer.”

I snorted.

“No they aren’t.”

She pointed toward the front of the store where Seahawks gear had already taken over an entire display.

“People will spend hundreds of dollars dressing up in jerseys so they can cheer for other grown men playing football. LARPing.”

Then she pointed at me.

“You own golf shoes.”

“That’s different.”

“You own golf gloves. You own golf polos.”

“Those polos have moisture-wicking technology.”

Lucy rolled her eyes so far back I thought her soul was leaving her body. “You own golf clubs even though you openly admit your swing is atrocious. You show up to the driving range dressed like you’re making an appearance at the Masters.”

“I don’t like where this is going.”

She ignored me.

“Your ex-husband spent years dressing like every fitness influencer he’d ever followed. He owns almost nothing but gym shorts and shaves every hair from the top of his head to his ankles so he can personify the typical gym bro.”

She reached for another bottle.

“And speaking of fitness influencers, what about that annoying woman you used to follow that always filmed from the gym? The one who insisted women had no excuse not to be skinny and have a six-pack? She traded leggings and protein powder for crystals, sage, and manifestation journals. She has a fog machine running in her TikTok live streams.”

She shrugged.

“Same performance. Different costume.”

Now, I rolled my eyes.

“So you think everybody’s pretending?”

She shook her head.

“No. I think everybody’s trying on a character.”

She paused before tossing the moisturizer into the cart.

“Some people are just more obvious about their costumes than others.”

Before my potential Dungeons & Dragons LARPer and I were scheduled to meet, I matched with a venture capitalist on Hinge named Houghton.

The conversation started exactly the way every dating app conversation starts.

How are you?

Are you from Seattle?

What do you do for fun?

It was painfully ordinary and exactly why I hate chatting on dating apps. Every conversation feels like you’re interviewing for the position of Temporary Stranger #47.

I gave my standard answer.

“I play pickleball and golf. Otherwise I’m usually out causing problems with my girlfriends.”

The little typing bubbles immediately appeared.

I braced myself. He was probably about to tell me his favorite brunch spot or explain why eggs Benedict was the superior breakfast food. By mentioning golf, he’d almost certainly offer to fix my swing despite never having seen it.

Instead he wrote:

“Live. Laugh. Love.”

I nearly choked on my taco.

Who voluntarily says Live. Laugh. Love? Was this another man trying to convince me he was deeply in touch with his emotions and unafraid of intimacy, or did he simply have catastrophic taste?

I decided to find out.

“Do you have that on a decorative sign in your kitchen?” I wrote.

His response came back almost immediately.

“It’s tattooed across my back.”

I laughed. His response was enough for me to text him the next morning.

“Good morning. Just wanted to say... Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

“Well, shit,” he replied. “I feel seen. As our friends at Hobby Lobby would say... You Are Enough.”

Against my better judgment, I laughed again.

For the next several days we exchanged fake inspirational quotes, made fun of Hobby Lobby décor, debated expensive whiskey and high-end food, swapped travel stories, and gradually wandered into flirting. Along the way, Houghton volunteered stories about business school, his career in finance, and the COO position he’d recently been offered but was leaning toward turning down.

Over text, Houghton came across as sexy, serious, focused, and remarkably confident for a man I’d never met. He texted after the gym, after meetings, and to tell me what he was making for dinner. Normally that level of minute-by-minute reporting would have me sprinting in the opposite direction, but somehow I found him entertaining.

His messages became more frequent as did his flirting.

Around midnight one evening my phone buzzed.

“Are you awake?”

I was.

“I’m watching Industry. You should watch it with me.”

Before I had a chance to answer, another message popped onto the screen.

“Or we can use it as an excuse for you to come over and make out.”

Houghton came across as confident, bold, and entirely unconcerned with the fact that we’d never actually met. Somewhere between the Hobby Lobby jokes and the late-night flirting, he’d become the kind of person who existed much more comfortably behind a keyboard than most people ever could.

By the fourth day, though, I’d reached my limit. There are only so many flirty messages two strangers can exchange before they’re simply entertaining idealized versions of themselves. We’d started recycling old jokes, and I found myself wondering whether Houghton actually wanted to meet or whether he simply enjoyed having someone on the other end of his phone.

He always sounded excited about getting together, but somehow logistics never materialized.

“You’re the busy bee! I was free at that time, but you already had plans...”

The longer we texted, the more Houghton stopped feeling like a person and started feeling like a collection of blue chat bubbles.

I seriously considered ghosting him. Not because he’d done anything wrong, but because I started doubting Houghton was even real. Maybe he was a fourteen-year-old boy who knew an alarming amount about venture capital and had decided catfishing middle-aged women was a hilarious way to spend his summer.

Fed up with the constant texting and increasingly convinced I was developing a relationship with an iPhone, I finally demanded a date.

“Sunday. Four o’clock. I’m free. Pick a location.”

As I pulled into the parking lot of the dive bar we agreed on, I realized something.

I didn’t even know why I wanted this date anymore. If Houghton was real, the thought of spending two hours across from someone who seemed to exist entirely through bravado and flirtation felt exhausting. I’d already met enough men who sounded like they’d memorized the right script. Some proudly announced they were “doing the work” because they’d started journaling and listening to podcasts. Some believed saying they valued vulnerability was the same thing as practicing it. Others felt entitled to grab my leg halfway through dinner because they claimed physical touch was their love language.

First dates had become their own kind of performance for me. I showed up with my hair blown out, makeup on, and a flattering outfit—a sharp contrast to my normal uniform of leggings, a workout tank top, and my hair twisted into a messy bun.

I rarely volunteered much about myself. I avoided mentioning where I lived. I didn't bring up my kids unless someone asked. Some dates didn't even realize I was a single mother. I almost never admitted I was a writer. I smiled, asked thoughtful questions, laughed at the appropriate moments, and quietly took mental notes. I'd gotten very good at revealing just enough to keep a conversation going while keeping the rest of my life tucked safely out of view.

The man sitting at the dive bar looked exactly like his Hinge pictures. Six feet tall, freshly shaved head, blue eyes, and a salt-and-pepper beard.

That was where the similarities ended.

I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d expected when I finally met Houghton in person. Maybe a middle school kid catfishing me for his own entertainment. Maybe Christian Bale’s character from American Psycho. Either way, I had pepper spray in my purse, my iPhone location turned on, and a GPS tracker tucked into the back pocket of my jeans.

The truth was, I wasn’t chasing a love story— I just wanted to know whether the man I’d been texting actually existed.

Instead of harvesting my organs, he ordered us Bud Lights.

“Thanks for hanging out with me,” he said politely. He raised his can towards mine and tapped it softly.

Based on four days of text messages, I assumed Houghton would suggest we go back to his apartment within the first twenty minutes, continue the swagger he'd displayed over text, or try to convince me crypto was about to make a comeback.

Instead, he kept his chair a good two feet away from mine and, rather than reaching for my thigh while talking about touch as a love language, he gave me a detailed rundown of his morning.

“I went to the farmers market but came home empty-handed because the organic farmer I usually buy from wasn’t there. So I drove downtown to pick up a few things for my mom’s birthday.”

My ears perked up.

“What’d you get her?”

“A tea towel and a coordinating soap on a rope. It’s got dried flowers in it. She’ll like it.” He smiled before taking another sip of beer. “I also found one of those 365-day calendars with a different question every day. She raised me as a single mom, and I thought it’d be fun if she texted me one question every morning so we’d always have something to talk about.”

I found myself looking at Houghton differently.

He wasn’t just my latest Hinge match anymore. He was somebody’s son. I thought about my own boys and wondered if, twenty years from now, one of them might buy me something just because they knew it would make me smile. It was an unexpectedly tender thought to have over Bud Light.

“...and Applebee’s,” Houghton continued, pulling me out of it. “I really wish this neighborhood had a freaking Applebee’s.”

I blinked.

“But what I really miss is Hooters,” he added. “Man, they disappeared fast. That’s what happens when private equity gets involved.”

He shifted his attention toward me.

“You moved here from the Bay Area, right? You like it up here?”

“I miss the Bay. Seattle took some getting used to.”

“It’s really not that different,” he insisted. “You just moved farther up the West Coast. Same politics. Same people. Californians move up here all the time.”

He had a point.

Maybe I’d spent too much time focusing on the differences instead of appreciating the similarities.

“Except the strip clubs,” Houghton interrupted my train of thought. “The strip clubs up here are terrible. The quality is awful.”

I was beginning to understand why I’d had such a hard time figuring Houghton out over text.

When I asked why he’d left his last company, Houghton looked away before talking about one of his closest friends who had cancer. His voice softened as he explained that he’d taken nearly a year away from work to help care for him during treatment. There wasn’t any dramatic pause or announcement that this story was supposed to reveal something meaningful about his character. It was simply another chapter from his life.

I told him about Lucy’s diagnosis from just a few days earlier.

He sat quietly for a moment before saying, “That’s really tough. It’s hard watching someone close to you go through that. There’s not much you can do except be there.”

I wrapped both hands around my beer and let what he’d said settle for a moment.

“So...” Houghton said, taking another sip. “Our last company retreat was in this giant cabin in the woods.”

My ears perked up with curiosity.

“I heard those company retreats are basically hookers and blow,” I joked.

He looked genuinely offended.

“No, no. It’s a really small company. It’s all male employees right now, so no women are allowed at the retreat.”

He paused.

“And we don’t do coke.”

I nodded seriously, suddenly feeling a little guilty about every assumption I’d made about him.

“We’re really into LSD and mushrooms.”

I took a large swig of my beer.

By this point in the afternoon, we’d somehow wandered into talking about the male loneliness epidemic, incels, and modern dating.

I had fully expected Houghton to become a male apologist. Given his enthusiasm for Hooters, strip clubs, and the occasional off-color joke, I was already mentally preparing for a spirited debate about sexism and misogyny.

Instead, I found myself nodding along.

Somehow the conversation drifted to his previous job as the COO of an accounting firm. He admitted he was constantly worried about sexual harassment because he’d see male employees standing too close to female coworkers and immediately wonder whether the women felt uncomfortable.

“I know it sounds ridiculous,” he said, “but I’d see a guy standing too close to one of the women in the office and immediately think, ‘Back up, man. You’re making her uncomfortable.’”

A few minutes later he told me about a recent trip to his gym’s sauna where a group of college graduates were laughing about sexual assault.

He shook his head as he told the story.

“They were talking about interviewing for jobs, and all I could think was... what if somebody from one of those companies is sitting here listening to this? I’d throw every one of their résumés in the trash.”

This was the same man who had spent the previous week suggesting we use Industry as an excuse to make out. The same man who passionately mourned the disappearance of Hooters and believed the Pacific Northwest desperately needed better strip clubs.

To my complete surprise—and slight horror—I agreed with almost everything he was saying.

Apparently a man could advocate for buxom waitresses and strippers, and still have thoughtful opinions about misogyny and the way women should be treated in the workplace.

Human beings are weird.

Across the table, Houghton and I smiled at each other. He leaned forward and held out his hand. I looked at it for a second before interlacing my fingers in his and giving it a firm squeeze. He winked in response .

I won the first two rounds.

“You can’t use two hands!”

“I just did.”

Somewhere near the finish line of our arm wrestling match, I’d quietly added my second hand, shoved his arm onto the table, immediately declared victory, and refused to acknowledge that I’d committed what some might call blatant cheating. Houghton looked horrified by my complete disregard for the rules.

“History remembers winners, not rule followers, loser!” I declared.

Five minutes earlier I’d loudly informed Houghton that he sucked after insulting the 49ers. Now I was passionately defending the ethics of two-handed arm wrestling. I wasn’t carefully deciding which parts of myself to reveal or quietly cataloging red flags. I wasn’t wondering whether I’d said too much or too little.

Somewhere between the cheap beers and the arm wrestling match, we’d both stopped playing the people we thought we were supposed to be.

A few hours later, Houghton and I found the Bud Lights wearing off as we tried to plan the next part of our afternoon sober.

“The Farmers Market is still open but my produce man isn’t there. We can walk down to the wharf and make fun of tourists. Or…” he took a pause and looked at me, "we can go back to my place and watch Industry. I don’t mind starting it from episode one for you.”

I looked at him suspiciously, remembering that just a few nights earlier he’d suggested we use the show as an excuse to make out. I contemplated his proposal. I was done drinking for the day and over the dive bar but I wasn’t ready to end our time together just yet.

“Do you have a Plexiglas cage where you’re planning to hold me hostage?” I asked.

“No.”

“Are you a serial killer?”

“No.”

“Are you planning to sell one of my kidneys on the black market tomorrow?”

He looked at me and shrugged.

“No. You drank too much beer. Pickled kidneys don’t do well on the black market.”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s watch Industry.”

We walked the short block to his apartment. I kicked off my shoes, propped my feet on the coffee table, and settled into one end of the couch while Houghton wrapped himself in a throw blanket like a human burrito and searched Showtime for the first episode.

A defensive tower of throw pillows stood defiantly between us. The only thing that crossed that border all afternoon was a family-sized bag of organic baked potato chips I’d found in his kitchen.

The man who had spent four days suggesting we use Industry as an excuse to make out had apparently decided throw pillows were the real third wheel.

Instead of putting the moves on me, he spent the next hour explaining which parts of the show were realistic, occasionally reaching across the pillow barricade for another handful of chips, and loudly groaning when Lena Dunham’s name appeared in the closing credits as Executive Producer.

“I can’t stand Lena Dunham,” he groaned. “She’s such a fake feminist.”

My mouth, filled with half-chewed organic baked potato chips, fell open as I stared at Houghton.

Hooters advocate. #MeToo ally. Soap on a rope purchaser. Organic produce enthusiast. Mushroom evangelist. And now... critic of performative feminism?

I had officially given up trying to predict where Houghton was going with a conversation.

After we finished two more episodes, Houghton walked me to my car. We stood there for a moment, as though neither of us was quite sure how the afternoon was supposed to end, before he leaned in and quickly kissed me goodbye.

It wasn’t the kiss I’d expected after four days of swaggering text messages. It was the polite kiss of the man who bought his mother a tea towel, took a year away from work to care for a friend with cancer, worried about women being mistreated in the workplace, defended gross franchise restaurants with alarming conviction, and somehow believed organic baked potato chips counted as entertaining a guest.

A week later, as I was getting ready for my date with the Dungeons & Dragons player, my phone buzzed.

I hadn’t spoken to Houghton since our Sunday together, but I remembered he was in Silicon Valley pitching investors, so I sent him one of our trademark Hobby Lobby quotes for good luck.

“Shoot for the moon. If you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

His reply appeared almost immediately.

“Omg... lol.”

A few seconds later another message popped onto my screen.

“I think I left my portable charger plugged in.”

Then another.

“What if my house burns down?”

When we first matched on Hinge, Houghton had flirted his way through conversations about venture capital, travel, and Hobby Lobby décor with the swagger of someone who already knew how the story was going to end. Now he was boarding a plane while convincing himself a portable charger was about to burn down his apartment.

Lucy was right.

Everybody LARPs. Some people wear Seahawks jerseys. Others wear golf polos. Sometimes it’s crystals. Sometimes it’s confidence that only seems to exist behind a keyboard.

I slipped my phone into my purse and headed out the door. Somewhere across Seattle was a man who might spend his weekends dressed like Link from The Legend of Zelda. Maybe he’d own leather armor. Maybe he’d have a foam sword in the trunk of his car. Maybe Lucy would have to sprint onto the driving range yelling that her cancer had suddenly metastasized so I’d have an excuse to escape.

Or maybe he wouldn’t.

Maybe he’d turn out to be another wonderfully contradictory human being who made absolutely no sense.

For the first time, I found myself hoping he would.

Dedicated to the real Houghton. Never let anyone treat you like glue. You’re glitter glue.

Dr. Bobbi Bobby gave Todd and Mindy homework: stop analyzing the relationship and go have fun. Naturally, they interpreted this as an opportunity to analyze someone else’s relationship.

Enter Oakley Brad and his wife Jessica: twelve years married, constantly teasing each other, seemingly violating every therapeutic principle Todd and Mindy just learned…and completely happy.

Maybe therapy has made our favorite knuckleheads healthier. Or maybe it’s just made them judgmental with a better vocabulary. 😂

Should Todd and Mindy:

🧠 Diagnose Brad and Jessica for the next four hours?

🤷‍♀️ Accept that other people’s relationships don’t have to make sense to them and mind their own damn business?

Cast your vote. ❤️

I spent the afternoon at the pool with my family and friends, and somehow the conversation drifted toward the people who exhaust us most.

I’m Gen X. My friend Blanca falls somewhere between the Millennial and Gen Z divide. My sixteen-year-old nephew James belongs to Gen Z. We grew up in different decades with different music, different technology, different dating cultures, and entirely different ways of communicating. Yet by the time we were standing waist-deep in the shallow end of the pool, the three of us had independently described the exact same friendship.

The friendships looked different, but they all shared the same pattern. The friend who calls when life falls apart. The friend who wants your opinion, your encouragement, your emotional labor, and your applause. The friend who somehow knows every detail about their own life while knowing surprisingly little about yours.

Blanca started telling us about her friend Isabella.

Isabella lives two states away, yet somehow manages to make daily phone calls and voice notes feel like a second job. Every relationship deserves a committee meeting. Every text from a man requires analysis. Every disappointment becomes an emergency.

When Blanca’s birthday approached, she planned a weekend that sounded perfect: hiking, a baseball game, the farmers market, and dinner at a new restaurant. Instead, Isabella slept in and they missed the first hour of the baseball game, even though Blanca had splurged on seats behind home plate. Isabella complained about the farmers market because it was too hot and required too much walking. Later that night, they cancelled their dinner reservations because she took so long getting ready that Blanca’s boyfriend ended up cooking dinner. Somehow Blanca’s birthday weekend transformed into... an Isabella weekend.

A few weeks later, Isabella announced an elaborate birthday trip to Miami that would cost Blanca nearly $2,500. Around the same time, Blanca earned a promotion she’d worked incredibly hard for and moved into a beautiful new apartment. Those milestones barely registered. Instead, Blanca woke up to a seven-minute voice note Isabella had sent her first thing that morning.

“Listen to this,” Blanca said as she pressed play.

Isabella’s voice floated across the swimming pool.

“Hey, it’s me. I wanted to let you know that I had the most intense dream last night...”

The dream ended with Isabella explaining that Blanca’s boyfriend wasn’t good for her and that she’d felt compelled to warn her.

“Is she a psychic?” James asked.

“No,” Blanca laughed. “She works as a personal assistant.”

At first glance, the voice note almost sounded caring.

Except Isabella hadn’t called because she was worried about Blanca. She’d recently been rejected by a man she’d asked to become exclusive after a single date and had no prospects in sight. Blanca and her boyfriend had been quietly dating for almost a year with very little drama. Isabella’s dream wasn’t really about Blanca’s relationship. It was another way for the conversation to become about her own heartbreak by creating a problem that didn’t exist.

To Blanca’s credit, she’s still going to Miami because the plane ticket isn’t refundable. She committed to participating in Isabella’s birthday festivities, which include an expensive spa day, nightly dinners, and a snorkeling excursion—even though Blanca is a weak swimmer and probably has no business being in open water.

“Maybe I’ll make the whole trip about me,” Blanca joked. “When we go snorkeling, I’ll pretend to drown and spend the rest of the vacation talking about how I almost died.”

When she gets home, she plans to have the conversation she’s avoided for years. She no longer wants a friendship where emotional support only flows in one direction.

As Blanca talked, we realized we’d all known an Isabella.

My young nephew chimed in first.

“I have one of those,” he said. “Her name is Emma.”

As James described their friendship, I couldn’t help smiling at the irony that a sixteen-year-old had figured out something that takes many adults decades to learn.

Emma became part of his friend group during his first year of high school. They shared several classes, spent time together after school, and regularly hung out with the same circle of friends. Their relationship was entirely platonic. James genuinely enjoyed spending time with her and considered her one of his closest friends.

As the school year went on, he started noticing something he couldn’t unsee. Emma never asked about his life. She never asked how school was going, what he was excited about, or how things were at home. Every conversation eventually found its way back to whichever boy she happened to be dating. James knew the details of every crush, every text message, every misunderstanding, every breakup, and every reconciliation. Emma, on the other hand, knew surprisingly little about him.

When summer arrived, James quietly stopped responding. There wasn’t an argument or a falling out. He simply stopped investing in a friendship that only seemed to have room for one person’s life.

A few weeks later, they ran into each other at a party. Emma skipped right past asking why he’d disappeared and immediately pulled out her phone to show him a picture of her new boyfriend, who was transferring schools. She launched into their plans for making long-distance work without ever asking what James had been up to.

By that point, James had started casually dating his very first girlfriend. Emma never asked about her.

Twenty-four hours later, Emma’s relationship ended. Her next text asked James if he could come cheer her up.

He never answered.

Hearing Blanca and James describe their friendships made me think about my own.

I thought about my friend, Jayne, who almost exclusively reaches out after a breakup and the script I’ve memorized over the years.

“Yes, you’re hot.”

“No, you’re not the problem.”

“Yes, you’re going to be okay.”

“Yes, the right man is out there waiting for you.”

I’ve known Jayne for years, and despite the predictability of those conversations, I have genuine affection for her. Most of our friendship has unfolded through texts, DMs, and occasional phone calls detailing the latest heartbreak. Somewhere along the way, I accepted that this was simply the role I occupied in her life. When my calendar is free, I’m happy to answer the phone and walk on my treadmill while offering encouragement. I remind her of everything she temporarily forgets about herself while getting my steps in.

Maybe that’s radical acceptance.

Maybe it’s because friendships exist on a spectrum. Not every one-sided friendship needs to end. Some simply become relationships we understand well enough to stop expecting more from.

Carol wasn’t one of those friendships.

She grew up across the street from me, and because our families were so close, we were raised more like sisters than cousins. She was beautiful, smart, and effortlessly charismatic. I followed her around like a shadow. I adored her so completely that I never stopped to ask whether she adored me back.

I don’t know why I loved her so much. Maybe when you’ve known someone your entire life, you mistake familiarity for intimacy. Maybe I was so busy trying to earn her approval that I couldn’t see how unequal our friendship had become.

At the time, I didn’t have much of an identity around Carol. I borrowed hers. I listened to the music she liked. I wore the clothes she wore. I adopted her opinions as though they were my own because earning her approval felt safer than discovering who I actually was. Whenever I drifted too far from the version of me she recognized, there always seemed to be the same unspoken question hanging in the air.

What’s wrong with you?

I was her cheerleader. When she dropped out of college during her freshman year, I reminded her that one decision wouldn’t define the rest of her life. When she doubted herself, I reassured her. When she landed a new job, we celebrated over dinner. When her chronically unemployed husband finally found work after years of depending on her financially, I sent a text with five heart emojis followed by, “I’m soooo happy for you!” At one point, we even toasted over margaritas because her STD panel came back negative.

Looking back, the bar for celebration was astonishingly low, but I celebrated anyway because that’s what friends do.

As I built a life of my own, the distance between us made something easier to see. I had always been her cheerleader. She had never really been mine.

When I graduated from college, she didn’t congratulate me. Instead, she said, “Good luck with the job market. I heard your major isn’t very competitive.”

A few years later, she called excited because she’d finally paid off her student loans.

I congratulated her.

“Do you still have yours?” she asked.

“$21,000.”

I never complained about the amount. I’d graduated in four years from a different university with higher tuition, found a good job, and was paying my bills. Most of my classmates carried similar debt, and I considered myself fortunate.

She paused and then asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

That question lingered far longer than the conversation. What was wrong with me? Why was I always the one providing encouragement while somehow becoming the person who needed defending? Why did every difficult season in my life become evidence that I was somehow fundamentally defective?

She never congratulated me for putting myself through college, graduating on time, building a career, or supporting myself. When I told her I was pregnant with my first child, she replied, "I'm never having kids. I love my freedom too much." She wasn't celebrating my milestone or asking what motherhood felt like. The conversation immediately drifted back to her own life. That seemed to be our pattern. She never appeared interested in the ways my life was working. Instead, she looked for the cracks.

Our grandmother favored her over me. I struggled with my weight. My marriage was falling apart. Years later, after my husband was arrested for abusing our family, she told me she couldn’t believe he’d done such a thing. She hadn’t seen the fear, the isolation, or the exhaustion that had existed long before anyone was led away in handcuffs. Different circumstances. The same quiet implication.

What’s wrong with you?

That question became the soundtrack of our friendship.

I stopped talking to Carol after that, not because of any single conversation, but because I finally understood the relationship for what it had always been. Carol had spent years listening without ever really seeing me. I had spent years trying to earn approval from someone who viewed my life through the lens of what was broken instead of what was beautiful.

The hardest realization wasn’t that Carol failed to celebrate me. It was recognizing how long I’d believed her voice was my own. For years, every setback became another opportunity to ask myself the same question she’d taught me to ask.

What was wrong with me?

Nothing.

Something was wrong with our friendship. I’d spent years assuming reciprocity would eventually arrive if I loved her well enough. It never did.

Standing in that swimming pool, something clicked for all three of us.

None of these moments, by themselves, were particularly dramatic. They were microaggressions of friendship. Tiny, almost forgettable moments where the spotlight drifted toward someone else before quietly being pulled back again.

Carol couldn’t let me have my graduation, my pregnancy, or even my grief.

Isabella couldn’t let Blanca have her birthday, her promotion, or her happiness.

Emma couldn’t let James have his new relationship without redirecting the conversation back to her own.

Individually, each interaction seemed harmless.

Collectively, they were exhausting.

That’s when I realized they weren’t actually asking for advice. Carol wanted reassurance that dropping out of college to work at Gap was the right decision, that marrying the boyfriend who couldn’t keep a job would somehow work out, that maybe she wasn’t drinking too much after all. Isabella wanted Blanca to explain, yet again, why the man who only called after midnight probably wasn’t looking for a relationship. Emma wanted James to reassure her that her boyfriend still liked her, that she wasn’t “too much,” that everything was going to be okay.

We'd talk for hours. We'd remind them of their worth, gently point out the patterns they couldn't—or wouldn't—see, and ask the questions they were afraid to ask themselves. They'd thank us for listening, tell us we'd given them so much to think about, and then march directly toward the outcome they'd planned all along.

They weren’t shopping for advice.

They were borrowing our nervous systems until theirs settled down enough to do exactly what they’d intended to do from the beginning.

I’ve started wondering if the opposite of selfishness isn’t generosity at all. Maybe it’s curiosity. Curious people ask questions because they’re genuinely interested in the answers. How are your kids? How did the interview go? How’s your mom? How’s the new relationship? What happened with your promotion? Those questions communicate something deeper than politeness. They say, Your life matters to me even when it has nothing to do with mine.

By the end of our afternoon in the pool, we’d realized something remarkable. A woman in her late forties, a woman in her early thirties, and a teenager had all recognized the same friendship without comparing notes first. Different decades. Different names. The same quiet exhaustion of spending years orbiting someone who never once thought to orbit you back.

James recognized the pattern in a single school year. I spent decades trying to earn Carol’s approval. Age wasn’t the difference. History was.

Some friendships arrive after we’ve figured out who we are.

Others teach us who we think we’re supposed to be.

Those are the hardest ones to leave.

Dedicated to the real Blanca and the real James. I look forward to spilling more tea in the pool.

🎮 Adventure #18: Therapy Speak

Three sessions in, Todd and Mindy have learned words like boundaries, triggers, holding space, and nervous-system regulation.

Naturally, they are now using all of them against each other.

Dr. Bobbi Bobby is exhausted.

Should she:

🛑 Ban therapy jargon for one week and make them speak like normal people?

🧘 Continue holding space while Todd and Mindy explain therapy to their therapist?

Cast your vote. ❤️

#ToddAndMindy #ChooseYourOwnSanityAdventure

🎮 Adventure #17: Dr. Bobbi Bobby Meets the Weirdos

Todd and Mindy arrive for their first couples therapy session feeling pretty good about themselves. Todd believes they’re simply getting ahead of future problems. Mindy agrees...mostly.

After hearing about the hot coworker, the Great Facebook Purge, and Ashley from Arizona, Dr. Bobbi Bobby asks one simple question:

“If neither of you is trying to leave, why do you both keep acting like the relationship is ending every Tuesday?”

Sometimes the therapist only needs one question.

Should Dr. Bobbi Bobby:

❤️ Congratulate Todd and Mindy for being wildly proactive?

☮️ Gently explain they’re manufacturing approximately 83% of their own problems?

Narrator Reminder: Nobody dies from dysentery. But Dr. Bobbi Bobby is definitely updating her therapist group chat.

When my therapist first diagnoses me with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I don’t understand.

“PTSD?” I ask. “Like what military veterans come home with?”

I haven’t survived a war. I’m trying to survive a divorce from a man who refuses to let our marriage end. Every attempt to move forward is met with another motion, another hearing, another legal demand. I’ve discovered he has done things so horrific they result in his arrest and appear on both the morning and evening local news. A temporary restraining order bars him from contacting me or our children. I’ve been through many things, but war isn’t one of them.

“No,” my therapist says. “Complex PTSD. It’s different.”

She leans forward in her chair.

“PTSD is often tied to one overwhelming event. Complex PTSD develops when trauma keeps happening. Imagine every traumatic experience is a pancake. One pancake by itself isn’t very heavy, but when you spend years adding abuse, fear, criticism, unpredictability, loss, and betrayal, you end up carrying a towering stack. Eventually, the weight changes how your brain operates. It learns to expect danger because, for a very long time, danger really was there.”

“I can’t remember anything,” I admit. “I can’t sleep, and when I do, I have nightmares. I’m scared all the time.”

She nods as though I’ve just described exactly what she expects to hear.

“Trauma doesn’t just affect your thoughts,” she says. “It changes the way your brain processes the world. Think of your brain as three parts working together. Your amygdala is the smoke alarm. Yours became so sensitive that it goes off even when there’s no fire. Your hippocampus is the filing cabinet. It struggles to file traumatic memories away, so reminders can make them feel like they’re happening all over again. And your prefrontal cortex—the part that helps you think clearly, make decisions, and calm yourself—keeps getting drowned out by the alarm.”

She smiles.

“The important thing to understand is that your brain isn’t broken. It adapted to help you survive. Therapy isn’t about fixing your brain. It’s about helping those parts learn to work together again now that the danger has passed.”

I nod politely, but I don’t think I believe her.

At least not yet.

I don’t remember exactly when the trauma moved from my mind into my body. Maybe it happened after my mother told me what she had witnessed. Maybe it started after my first meeting with my divorce attorney. Maybe it was after the first court hearing or after reading legal papers accusing me of being a liar, a jealous wife, and a woman of unsound mind.

Whatever the moment was, my stack of trauma pancakes kept getting taller. One by one, each new experience landed on top of the last until I could no longer convince myself I was living through one bad chapter of my life. I was carrying the weight of all of them.

Our separation came at the worst possible time—right in the middle of the holiday season. Every December, we flew to Las Vegas, where we took the boys to admire the elaborate Christmas displays before sitting down to an expensive dinner. I spent most of those meals keeping crystal glasses and heavy silverware out of reach of my toddler.

That year, instead of flying to Sin City, I traded our tickets for a one-way flight to Seattle.

We spent the next three months hiding at my sister-in-law Jodi’s house while chaos waited for us back home. Most days, I lay curled up on her couch rereading emails from my attorney. My ex demanded custody of the children, our family business, alimony, and child support. Every new message tightened something inside my chest until I could feel anxiety pressing against my ribs with nowhere to go.

I don't remember where we ate Christmas dinner. I don't remember whether I bought the boys presents. I'm told my youngest took his first steps during that trip, but I have no memory of seeing them.

What I do remember is Target.

Jodi noticed how detached I had become and started dropping hints.

“You know,” she said one afternoon, “Target is the vacation spot for single moms. I can watch the kids.”

I’d wander the aisles for fifteen minutes before buying a candy bar or a bag of chips I didn’t even want. The shopping wasn’t the point.

The parking lot was.

I’d toss the bag onto the passenger seat, grip the steering wheel until my hands hurt, and then the screaming would begin.

I never planned to scream inside my car. It simply came out of me as naturally as turning the key in the ignition.

The sound rose from somewhere beneath language and clawed its way out of my body, so loud my own eardrums vibrated. I couldn’t scream in front of my children. I couldn’t scream in front of my mother or my attorney. So I screamed alone in the Target parking lot while strangers pushed shopping carts past my car, unaware that a woman was coming apart just a few feet away.

I never realized how much time had passed until my phone buzzed with text messages.

Are you okay?

When are you coming back?

You’ve been gone for a while.

I’d wipe my face, clear my throat, and drive back to Jodi’s house with bloodshot eyes and a throat so raw it hurt to swallow.

No one knew my weekly trip to Target had quietly become the only place where my body felt safe enough to fall apart.

Tina lives inside a small square on my laptop screen. Every week, I open my computer to find her smiling at me before she briefly recaps our last session. Her specialty is EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—a form of therapy designed to help people process traumatic memories that have become stuck.

“Are you going to hypnotize me?” I ask during one of our first appointments. “Or is this more like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Am I going to forget my ex after this?”

By this point, the District Attorney’s Office has gone silent, the detective has stopped returning my calls, and skepticism has become my default setting. If someone claims they can help me, my first instinct is to doubt them.

She smiles, unfazed by my sarcasm.

“Good questions,” she says. “The answer is no. We’re not erasing your memories. We’re helping your brain process them differently.”

She brings up the pancakes again.

“EMDR doesn’t erase them. It helps unstick them.”

I’m paying two hundred dollars an hour, so I decide I might as well commit to the experiment. More than anything, I’m desperate to feel normal again. At this point, if EMDR doesn’t work, I’m halfway convinced my next stop will be a psychic or a shaman.

Following Tina’s instructions, I cross my arms over my chest and alternately tap each shoulder with my fingertips while she guides me through memories I’ve spent years trying to outrun.

“What are you noticing?” she asks.

“My chest.”

“What else?”

“My throat.”

“And what else?”

“My shoulders.”

Until Tina asks the question, I never realize fear has an address. It lives in my chest, settles in my throat, and wraps itself around my shoulders as though it’s trying to keep me from moving.

When we returned to California a few months later, I found myself back inside the home I had once shared with my estranged husband. The place I had proudly called my dream house now felt enormous and cavernous, as though every hallway and doorway hid something waiting to hurt us. My former husband still worked less than half a mile away, a distance permitted by the temporary restraining order.

Because the State of California had not yet given me permission to move, I packed my children and my mother into the car every Wednesday and drove one hundred miles to a resort where we spent four days each week. The hotel became our refuge from the house and from a life that no longer felt safe.

After one particularly brutal day in court, we checked into our room late that evening. I tucked both of my boys beneath oversized white comforters, kissed them goodnight, and climbed into bed. My mother went downstairs to grab something to eat, and after weeks of insomnia, I finally felt exhausted enough to sleep.

A few minutes after closing my eyes, I woke and glanced toward the second bed.

My children were gone.

I searched the bathroom first, then the shower, then the closet. I opened dresser drawers before reaching for my phone to call hotel security. When I looked back toward the bed one last time, I saw them exactly where I had left them, asleep beneath the oversized white comforters.

Instead of feeling relieved, I felt the last thread of my nervous system snap.

I still don’t know why I couldn’t see them. Maybe weeks of sleeplessness had finally caught up with me. Maybe my brain had simply reached its limit. All I know is that, for one terrifying moment, my mind believed catastrophe before it believed my own eyes.

I collapsed onto the hotel room floor expecting to cry.

Instead, a low, guttural sound escaped my throat. I remained on all fours with my head thrown back and my mouth wide open. I wasn’t sobbing. I was howling—loud, raw, and completely beyond language. It wasn’t the first sound my body had made without my permission. The screaming in the Target parking lot had already taught me that trauma didn’t always speak in words. Sometimes it spoke through the body, long before the mind understood what was happening.

One afternoon, Tina asks me to think of a memory that has stayed with me.

“Not the biggest trauma,” she says. “Not the worst day of your life. Just a memory that still has a pulse.”

I think about a wedding my ex-husband and I attended several years earlier. He had been drinking and wanted everyone’s attention. Somewhere between the ceremony and the reception, he decided it would be funny to announce to our friends that I was a terrible dancer. When I quietly asked him to stop, he raised his voice even louder.

“Pay attention to your body,” Tina interrupts.

“My body?”

“Not the story. Your body. What’s happening right now?”

I close my eyes.

“My heart is beating really fast.”

“What else?”

“My shoulders feel tight.”

“What else?”

“I feel... humiliated.”

“Where do you feel that?”

I sit quietly for a moment before answering.

“My shoulders. My shoulders and my heart. My heart feels like it’s going to beat right out of my chest.”

We’re not trying to decide whether my ex-husband was wrong. We already know he was. We’re not trying to convince me that I shouldn’t have been embarrassed. Anyone would have been.

For the first time, I realized memories didn’t just live in our minds.

Mine had taken up residence inside my body.

At some point, my body had decided it could no longer carry what my mouth refused to say. The trauma had invaded it, and it didn’t stop with screaming in Target parking lots, howling on hotel room floors, or children disappearing beneath white comforters.

I don’t remember exactly when the shaking started, but I remember it beginning in my fingertips. I’d hold my hand in front of me, fascinated by the tiny vibrations dancing across my fingers. I spread them apart, pressed my palm flat against a table, and silently willed the tremor to stop, but it never did. Eventually, the shaking spread into my forearm until my entire arm vibrated without my permission.

I kept that hand buried in my coat pocket whenever I was in public, hoping no one would notice. At work, I tucked both hands beneath the conference table so my left hand could steady my shaking right arm during meetings.

“It’s just nerves,” a doctor told me after shining a light into each of my eyes. “There’s nothing I can prescribe for this. Keep going to therapy.”

By then, I had grown accustomed to hearing some version of the same response. The detectives couldn’t do anything until the district attorney reviewed the case. The district attorney couldn’t do anything until the investigation was complete. The doctor couldn’t do anything about the shaking. Everyone seemed to be waiting for someone else while my arm continued to vibrate.

Around the same time, I began losing words. Part of it was practical. My attorney had warned me that anything I said could find its way into court, so I carefully watched what I said out loud and often stayed silent. The rest came from somewhere deeper. My brain simply stopped cooperating.

At first, it was subtle. I’d lose a word in the middle of a sentence or begin stuttering. Nearly every thought started with, “I-I-I mean...” I became so embarrassed that I stopped volunteering ideas altogether. To compensate, I wrote scripts before meetings and rehearsed them before a Teams call. The rehearsals worked until someone asked a question I hadn’t anticipated.

One afternoon, I facilitated a meeting using notes I had carefully prepared the day before. Everything went according to plan until someone asked a perfectly ordinary question. I knew the answer, but I couldn’t find the words. Rather than sit in silence while twenty coworkers waited for me to respond, I clicked “Leave Meeting” on my laptop.

A few moments later, I typed into the Teams chat.

“My call got disconnected.”

It was a lie.

The call hadn’t disconnected.

I had.

The mistakes eventually spilled into my reading. One morning, an email appeared in my inbox.

Hello P. I am the vendor you will be working with. No one is coming to save you.

I blinked and read it again.

Hello P. I am the vendor you will be working with. Nancy will be coming onsite to assist you...

For a moment, I couldn’t tell which version I had actually read. Fear had become such a constant companion that my brain quietly inserted words that had never existed.

In another session, the anger arrives before the memory has fully formed.

“What are you feeling?” Tina asks.

“I’m pissed off.”

“Good,” she says. “Stay there. What are you most angry about?”

My eyes remain closed as I alternately tap each arm with my fingertips.

“He treats me like shit,” I say, the words coming faster now. “He tells me he has erectile dysfunction and that’s why he won’t sleep with me. Meanwhile, he’s been having affairs for years. I see the text messages. I know he lied.”

“Where do you feel that?”

“My neck.”

“What does it feel like?”

“It’s hot.” I swallow hard. “Everything feels hot. My skin is on fire. The heat is moving up my neck into my face. I can feel it behind my eyes.”

I start crying but never stop tapping.

“Stay with it,” Tina says.

I focus on the feeling instead of the story. The heat doesn’t disappear, but it changes. It spreads through my neck, climbs into my face, and slowly begins to loosen its grip. I keep breathing, following it instead of fighting it.

For the first time, I realize the anger isn’t trapped inside the memory. It’s trapped inside me.

“I hate him,” I tell Tina during another session.

We’ve been processing the same memory for nearly forty minutes. She offers to take a break, but I shake my head. I’m not finished.

“Where do you feel that?”

“In my chest.”

The feeling is heavy, like a boulder I’m trying to move with nothing but my bare hands and sheer will.

“Stay with it.”

I close my eyes and see my ex-husband sitting in the courtroom, smug and smiling after telling the judge he has done nothing wrong. He calls me crazy. He says his goal is to keep me in the same town. He wants the children. He wants control.

“I HATE YOU!” I scream. “I loved you so fucking much. I believed you. I believed in you.”

“Where do you feel it now?” Tina asks.

“It’s still in my chest. It’s still there. It won’t go away.” I can barely catch my breath between sobs. “He doesn’t care about anyone but himself. I loved him more than I loved anyone, including myself. I gave him so much of me, and he just used it.”

The words keep coming.

“I don’t want to love you anymore.” At some point, I’m no longer talking to Tina. I’m talking to a memory.

“It’s so much love,” I say. “Years of it.”

Then something shifts.

“I’m taking it back.”

The words surprise me as much as they surprise Tina.

“I’m taking every bit of love I gave you, and I’m giving it back to myself. I am going to love myself more than I ever loved you. I deserve to be loved, and I’m going to start with me. You never deserved me. You don’t deserve my love anymore.”

The scream that comes out of me is louder than the ones in the Target parking lot.

When I finally stop crying, something has changed. The boulder in my chest grows lighter. My breathing slows. The weight I’ve been carrying for years no longer feels immovable.

Tina smiles through the screen.

“You did good, P. You did so, so good.”

For the first time, I believe her.

“Trauma never really goes away, does it?” I once asked Tina.

“I don’t think trauma ever completely disappears,” she said. “That’s just not how we measure healing.”

After countless EMDR sessions and a therapy bill that could have been the down payment on a house, I think she was right.

Somewhere along the way, my arm stopped trembling. I stopped screaming in Target parking lots and howling on hotel room floors. My stutter disappeared, and as long as I’m wearing my reading glasses, I can trust that the words I’m reading are actually the ones written on the page.

The trauma still lives in me, but it no longer runs me.

For years, I thought healing meant convincing my mind that I was safe. EMDR taught me something different. Before my mind could believe it, my body had to.

For years, my body had been trying to tell me something my mind couldn’t yet understand.

Now, when it speaks, I know how to listen.

Dedicated to the woman I used to be— the one who screamed her head off in the Target parking lot. We’ve come a long way.

Look at us now.

Todd has reached Peak Software Developer™.

For their four-month anniversary, he gives Mindy...eight sessions of couples therapy.

His reasoning?

“We’re not broken. I’m just trying to stay ahead of the game.”

Also, his insurance deductible is already met.

Should Mindy:

❤️ Tell Todd this may be the most unexpectedly thoughtful anniversary gift she’s ever received?

💍 Gently explain that while therapy is a wonderful investment...earrings are also considered preventative maintenance.

Cast your vote. ❤️

For the past few months, I’ve been collecting stories for my next book, Nobody’s Girlfriend. I thought I was writing about returning to the dating world at the ripe old age of forty-seven, navigating first dates, ghosting, chemistry, attachment, and all the strange lessons that come with trying to find love in middle age. The premise seemed obvious enough. Despite dozens of dates and a few men who briefly occupied my thoughts, none of them had resulted in me becoming somebody’s girlfriend.

Lucy and I found our way back into each other’s lives around the same time I re-entered the dating world. During one of the darkest periods of my life, I stopped answering her phone calls and text messages. My mental health had collapsed, and I disappeared from almost everyone who cared about me. Five years later, when I finally resurfaced, she didn’t ask me to explain where I’d been or make me earn my way back into her life. She simply welcomed me home.

Since then, our weekends have belonged to each other. I affectionately call them Girl Saturdays.

Every Saturday morning around ten o’clock, I pull into her driveway. Her tiny dog announces my arrival with barks far louder than anything her little body should be capable of producing. Lucy grabs her purse, slides behind the wheel of her car because she’s still the more assertive driver, and we head to our favorite coffee shop where we order the exact same drinks every week.

Sometimes we go for a walk. Sometimes we drive with no destination in mind. Sometimes we wander through Costco or a bookstore. Most of the time, we simply sit across from each other and talk. We dissect bad dates. We celebrate small victories. We complain about work. We discuss books, history, family, and the strange people we encounter in the wild. We share hopes that haven’t happened yet and disappointments we never saw coming. Sometimes one of us has more to say than the other. Sometimes we sit quietly, perfectly content to share the same silence.

We have our own language. We trade pickup lines we’ve collected from questionable men using exaggerated Muppet voices until we’re both laughing too hard to finish them. We duet Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl in the middle of the makeup aisle at Target without a shred of embarrassment. Sometimes I climb into the passenger seat with no idea where we’re going, and Lucy casually drives us into the mountains because she knows there’s a place I haven’t seen yet and she’s already decided I’ll love it.

We stay curious about each other. We trade pieces of our childhood over sushi. We celebrate small victories and mourn disappointments over coffee. I ask her opinion before agreeing to another date, and she immediately begins constructing a case for why any man who seems even slightly suspicious is probably part of the Illuminati. When she goes live on TikTok, I inevitably pop into the comments—not so much to watch the livestream as to publicly confirm our plans.

“Coffee tomorrow at ten?”

By then we both already know the answer.

We’ve had so many Girl Saturdays that they quietly became part of the architecture of my life. On the rare weekend we miss one, my entire week feels different. It took me awhile to understand why. Those Saturday mornings weren’t simply coffee dates. They became the rhythm my nervous system learned to trust. No matter what happened during the week—a disappointing date, a ghosting, a difficult conversation, or an unexpected setback—there would be someone waiting for me on Saturday morning.

Despite all the men who have wandered into and back out of my life, my relationship with Lucy has been the most consistent, dependable, and rewarding one I’ve had.

Over the last decade, Lucy has survived brain surgery, thyroid cancer, and now lives with multiple sclerosis. Despite all of it, she still lives independently and still possesses a mouth sharp enough to make grown men question their life choices. She also has one of the biggest hearts of anyone I’ve ever known.

Just yesterday morning, a woman using crutches accidentally bumped Lucy’s car while trying to make her way to the make up store. Most people would have sighed and checked for a dent. Lucy jumped out of her car and opened the store door for the woman before ever looking at her own car.

That’s Lucy.

Whenever a date doesn’t work out, my phone lights up almost immediately.

“He’s an asshole.”

“Forget that guy.”

“He’s probably Illuminati.”

“Definitely racist.”

“He’s not your person.”

She’ll invent an entire conspiracy before she’ll let me believe that some random man’s rejection has anything to do with my worth. Objectively, she knows not every disappointing man belongs to a secret society. That isn’t the point. The point is that she’d rather accuse a stranger than allow me to accuse myself.

Last Friday, I drove her to what we thought would be a routine colonoscopy. Colonoscopies have never felt particularly dramatic in my family. I’ve had one. My brother has had one. My mom gets screened every five years. My late father underwent them repeatedly because of complicated gastrointestinal disease. I grew up understanding that colonoscopies weren’t something to fear. They were simply something that kept people alive.

Lucy’s appointment almost didn’t happen. The standard bowel prep wasn’t safe because of another medical condition, and for a while it looked like the procedure would be canceled altogether. Eventually, her doctors found a workaround, and we kept the appointment.

I skipped work that morning and drove to her house. Well, technically, I showed up intending to drive until I remembered Lucy could get us to the hospital in twenty-five minutes while it would take me forty-five. I happily handed her the keys.

“I’m scared they’re going to find something,” she admitted as we drove.

“It’s routine,” I told her. “They’ll put you under, stick a camera up your ass, remove anything suspicious, and you’ll wake up wondering why everyone keeps offering you crackers.”

She laughed, but only a little.

“It’s normal to find polyps,” I reassured her. “They remove them all the time.”

I believed every word because I’d lived it myself. During my own colonoscopy, my doctor calmly explained they’d removed a few benign polyps and everything else looked healthy. A few days later, pathology confirmed exactly that.

At the registration desk, Lucy listed me as her primary emergency contact. If something happened during the procedure, the hospital would call me. Her mother, who lives in another state, became the secondary contact. Trying to lighten the mood, I pumped my fist into the air.

“Yes! It’s like being number one on someone’s MySpace Top 8 all over again.”

Lucy looked at the registration nurse.

“Sorry,” she said. “My friend is old.”

The nurse laughed.

When they called her name, Lucy turned toward me and quietly said, “I don’t want to be alone when they prep me.”

“Of course,” I replied.

Unfortunately, the prep nurse had other ideas. No visitors were allowed beyond that point.

For the first time all morning, my fearless, sarcastic friend looked scared. She hugged me before disappearing through the doors.

“You’ll be here when I get out.”

It wasn’t a question.

When I finally saw her in recovery, she was drinking a Diet Coke.

“The doctor removed three polyps,” she said. “Everything looked healthy. We just have to wait for pathology.”

Healthy.

Routine.

We celebrated with cheeseburgers, relieved that the colonoscopy was over. Relieved that the doctor said she looked healthy.

A week later, I was standing in Costco waiting for two hot dogs when my phone buzzed.

“I have colon cancer.”

I read the message once, then again. Just a week earlier we’d laughed about cameras up her ass and celebrated what we believed had been another routine medical appointment. Now my best friend had news there was cancer invading her body

Today, I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know what the next appointment will tell us. I don’t know what she will need in terms of medical intervention or treatment. I don’t know what the next few months will look like. I only know that every time Lucy asks me to take the day off work and drive her to a doctor’s appointment, I’ll be there.

This afternoon we sat together in the Target parking lot for a while without saying much. Eventually she looked out the windshield and quietly said, “I think these things happen for a reason. Maybe I’m supposed to experience more things and live my life.”

I started crying.

“I like our friendship,” I admitted. “You’re the most consistent girlfriend I’ve ever had. I grew up around some really shitty women.”

For the first time since I’ve known her, I watched Lucy cry. She didn’t sob or fall apart. Her eyes simply filled with tears before she looked at me and complained that I’d ruined her makeup. We laughed, and then we cried a little more.

Driving home, I realized I’d been writing the wrong love story. Lucy chose me when she welcomed me back into her life without asking me to justify my absence. She chose me when she became my Saturday morning ritual, when she made me her emergency contact, and when she became my soft place to land after every disappointment.

I chose her every weekend. I chose her on coffee runs, Costco trips, long drives, hospital waiting rooms, and ordinary conversations that quietly became the foundation of my life. It took four separate text messages to schedule a recent date because I refused to give up our Girl Saturday for a man. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’d spent months writing a book called Nobody’s Girlfriend while fiercely protecting the standing date I’d kept every Saturday with the person who had quietly become the most dependable relationship in my adult life.

It was never about waiting for a man to choose me. Lucy and I had already chosen each other. We chose Saturday mornings. We chose coffee. We chose Costco runs, long drives, hospital waiting rooms, karaoke duets, Muppet voices, and ordinary afternoons that slowly became a shared life. We chose to answer the phone. We chose to keep showing up.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot that girlfriend existed long before it became a romantic title. Lucy is my girl friend, and I am hers. We are two women who have chosen to witness each other’s lives, carry each other’s disappointments, celebrate each other’s victories, and keep showing up, week after week.

I thought I was writing a book about the men who never chose me. Instead, I realized I had been somebody’s girlfriend all along.

I was Lucy’s, and she was mine.

Dedicated to the real Lucy - Ya gotta remember, I’m forever your girl.

Following the Hot Coworker Incident, Mindy has come to a terrifying realization.

Todd has existed before her.

Worse.

He appears to have interacted with women.

Some of whom are attractive.

And alarmingly…

Photographed.

The danger has passed.

Or has it?

Excellent question.

One evening, while cuddling on the couch, Mindy innocently asks:

“Who’s Ashley?”

Todd blinks.

Who?

Ashley?

From Facebook?

The picture from 2015?

Excellent question.

Who is Ashley?

Todd zooms in.

Ex-girlfriend.

Eight years ago.

The one who moved to Arizona.

The one he hasn’t spoken to since Obama was president.

Mindy smiles.

“Oh.”

Women everywhere recognize this sentence.

The narrator immediately begins drinking.

Meanwhile, Mindy’s internal dialogue begins.

Why does he still have these pictures?

Does he look at them?

Does Ashley have Global Entry?

Was Ashley thinner?

Did Ashley appreciate spreadsheets?

Did Ashley ruin pistachio gelato?

Todd’s internal dialogue:

“Why am I sweating?”

Mindy insists she isn’t jealous.

She just thinks:

• Old couple pictures are weird.

• His friends look like players.

• Players shouldn’t influence Todd.

• Perhaps Brad from college seems suspicious.

• Why does Kevin from work own so many sunglasses?

• Shouldn’t we all be asking more questions about Kevin?

Meanwhile, Todd discovers that Mindy has somehow formed opinions about his entire friend group based exclusively on profile pictures.

Achievement Unlocked

📸 Digital Archaeology

🧠 Retroactive Jealousy

👮 Facebook Moral Police

🕵️ Investigation Mode

🐈 Lindsay Buckingkat Is Embarrassed For Everyone

Eventually Todd asks:

“Are you upset?”

Mindy replies:

“No.”

Historically speaking, this answer has a success rate comparable to Oregon Trail river crossings.

That night, Todd quietly archives several old photos.

Not because Mindy demanded it.

Not because Ashley matters.

But because he realizes:

“Maybe I don’t need a shrine to 2015.”

Meanwhile, Mindy feels guilty.

Because she doesn’t actually want to control Todd.

She just wants reassurance.

And unfortunately, anxiety often shows up wearing a fake mustache and pretending to be logic.

Should Mindy:

💬 Admit she’s feeling insecure and ask for reassurance like a grown-up?

🔎 Continue investigating Kevin’s sunglasses and Ashley’s Arizona real estate holdings?

Narrator Reminder

Most people are not competing with your ex.

They’re trying to remember their Netflix password.

Nobody dies from dysentery.

But feelings may be hurt.

And somewhere off-panel, Lauren is doing Pilates, Ashley is living happily in Arizona, Kevin is buying another pair of sunglasses, and Lindsay Buckingkat—a three-legged orange tabby missing her front left leg—is asleep in a laundry basket wondering why humans insist on making things so complicated.

😂❤️🐈

I don’t do it because I’m feeling particularly photogenic, nor am I hoping my family compliments my outfit. I send it to the family group chat as a public service announcement. Should I unexpectedly end up on an episode of Dateline, I want everyone to have recent “last seen wearing” evidence. Blue sweater. Black jeans. White sneakers. I also remind them that if Keith Morrison reaches out for an interview, I expect them to mention my sparkling personality, my excellent sense of humor, and that I wore a size 2. Without fail, someone replies, “We cannot lie on national television.” It’s one of our favorite family traditions.

People usually assume this ritual developed because modern dating is terrifying.

They’re not entirely wrong.

Spend five minutes on TikTok and you’ll find another cautionary tale about the seemingly perfect boyfriend who secretly had another family, another identity, or another life. Listen to Dirty John and you’ll begin wondering whether every charming stranger is one rehearsed lie away from becoming a podcast. Then there was Reesa Teesa’s unforgettable Who TF Did I Marry? series, which somehow managed to be hilarious, riveting, heartbreaking, and impossible to stop watching all at once. Her storytelling was phenomenal. Her hair was fabulous. Her experience was devastating.

My best friend, Lucy, and I also recently bought tickets to a serial killer convention, where we intend to stroll leisurely through exhibits devoted to some of history’s most terrible people. This does not appear to be helping my hypervigilance. It does, however, give us something to do on a Saturday.

Stories like these matter because they remind us that manipulation exists. They validate people who have survived extraordinary deception and encourage the rest of us to pay attention.

But TikTok didn’t teach me to be cautious.

My own life did.

Long before I downloaded a dating app, I had already lived through my own version of Who TF Did I Marry? It never went viral. Netflix never called. There wasn’t a podcast. But I know what it feels like to slowly discover that the person you trusted had been living a life you couldn’t see. I know what manipulation feels like from the inside, and I know how unsettling it is to realize that the reality you thought you were living wasn’t reality at all. My past serves as its own cautionary tale, so it would be dishonest to pretend I approach dating with the carefree optimism of someone who has never been betrayed.

Ironically, the experiences that have changed me the most since my divorce haven’t been the extraordinary ones. They’ve been the disappointments that almost no one talks about because they aren’t dramatic enough to become cautionary tales. There was the avoidant who couldn’t move toward commitment. There was the emotionally exhausted man who seemed to be searching for a nervous system to borrow instead of a partner to love. There was the perfectly pleasant first date who simply decided I wasn’t his type twenty-four hours later. None of these men were dangerous. None of them deserved a Netflix documentary or a bestselling true crime book. They simply disappointed me. Individually, those experiences seem almost insignificant. Collectively, they taught my nervous system that uncertainty itself was something to fear.

For a long time, I thought I was practicing discernment. Discernment has been one of the healthiest things I’ve learned after my marriage because it asks me to pay attention to actions instead of promises. It recognizes incompatibility instead of trying to negotiate with it. It notices when words and behavior stop matching. Discernment helped me stop abandoning myself in relationships that were never going to become healthy.

Hypervigilance, however, wears discernment’s clothes.

From the inside, they feel remarkably similar.

Discernment notices evidence.

Hypervigilance notices possibilities.

Discernment asks, “What has this person actually shown me?”

Hypervigilance asks, “How is this eventually going to disappoint me?”

One responds to reality.

The other rehearses disappointment.

The more I paid attention, the more I realized this wasn’t just happening to me. I recently joined a Gen X Singles Support Group on Facebook, and the conversations are surprisingly tender. Most men and women aren’t there because they’re actively dating. They’re there because they’ve quietly concluded they’re probably done. Again and again I read comments saying, “Why bother?” “Everyone lies.” “Everyone ghosts.” “Everyone disappoints you eventually.” Some of those people have found genuine peace being single, and I admire that. Others sound less peaceful and more exhausted. After enough heartbreak, disappointment begins masquerading as wisdom. We tell ourselves we’re simply being realistic when, in truth, our nervous systems have simply grown tired of hoping.

I understand exactly how someone arrives there because I’ve stood in that same place myself. Spend enough time online and you’ll find endless evidence supporting the belief that every green flag eventually turns red. Algorithms reward cautionary tales because caution keeps us watching. Every story teaches us to scan a little harder, question a little sooner, and trust a little less. Somewhere along the way, I began wondering whether we had become so immersed in stories about betrayal that we’d forgotten betrayal isn’t the only possible ending.

The cruel irony is that hypervigilance promises protection it can never actually deliver. It whispers that if we expect disappointment, we won’t be surprised by it. But disappointment still hurts when it arrives. Hypervigilance simply convinces us to begin suffering before reality has decided whether suffering is even necessary.

I don’t want to become naïve again. I earned my discernment the expensive way, and I intend to keep it. If someone shows me red flags, I’ll believe them. If their actions stop matching their words, I’ll leave. What I’m trying to let go of is the belief that every unanswered question is evidence of danger. Healing, I’m beginning to suspect, isn’t about eliminating uncertainty. It’s about recognizing that uncertainty is the admission price for every meaningful relationship we’ll ever have. We don’t know how another person’s story ends when we first meet them.

For years, I believed I needed to predict disappointment in order to protect myself from it. What I’m slowly learning is that prediction was never what kept me safe. Trusting myself did. I don’t need to know how every story ends before I’m willing to turn the page. If someone disappoints me, I’ll survive it. If someone surprises me, I’ll be grateful. The goal was never to become someone who could predict the future. The goal was to become someone who trusted herself enough that she no longer needed to.

I’ll probably still send my family a pre-date selfie before every first date. Some habits die hard. One of these days, I’m going to convince them to tell Keith Morrison that I had a wonderful sense of humor... and wore a size 2.

They’ll still insist they won’t lie on national television.

This essay is dedicated to my favorite nephew, D. Please remember to tell Mr. Morrison that Auntie P had an amazing sense of humor, wore a size 2, and she absolutely loathed Ruffles Potato Chips in Sour Cream and Cheddar flavor and would never be caught eating them mindlessly on the couch while watching Real Housewives. Auntie P is counting on you.

Happy sixteenth birthday, kiddo! Love you to bits and pieces.

Naturally, they continue house hunting.

Because nothing says “stable” like discussing mortgage rates while silently carrying unresolved feelings.

While touring a charming three-bedroom craftsman, Todd hears a voice.

“Todd?!”

He turns.

Lauren.

Former coworker.

Project manager.

Blonde.

Fit.

Still enthusiastic about Agile.

And somehow blessed with hair that appears to have its own retirement plan.

Lauren hugs Todd.

Everyone smiles.

Too much.

Lauren says:

“I haven’t seen you forever! You look amazing!”

Todd introduces Mindy.

Lauren is lovely.

Warm.

Married.

Mother of two.

Golden doodle named Kevin.

Completely harmless.

After a few minutes, Lauren leaves.

The danger has passed.

Or so Todd thinks.

As they walk toward the car, Todd casually says:

“Lauren was always known for being in great shape.”

Silence.

The narrator stops walking.

Because Todd meant:

“She’s really disciplined.”

“People at work admired her dedication.”

“Good for her.”

But Mindy hears:

“Unlike you.”

“This is what I really want.”

“Have you considered Pilates?”

“Perhaps Lindsay Buckingkat should hide the snacks.”

Excellent question.

Did Todd say any of those things?

No.

Does anxiety care?

Another excellent question.

Mindy’s internal dialogue begins.

Why did he mention that?

Does he wish I looked like Lauren?

Would Lauren have argued about pistachio gelato?

Would Lauren have delayed moving in?

Would Lauren already have Global Entry?

Would Lauren appreciate spreadsheets?

Would Lauren have a better spice drawer?

Meanwhile, Todd’s internal dialogue:

“I wonder if Mindy liked her.”

Meanwhile, Lauren’s internal dialogue:

“Did I leave my Stanley Cup at the open house?”

Achievement Unlocked

👱‍♀️ Hot Former Coworker

🧠 Catastrophizing +50

🥗 Lululemon Panic

🏃‍♀️ Peloton Insecurity

🐈 Lindsay Buckingkat Remains Unbothered

That night, Mindy stares into the bathroom mirror.

Not because she wants to be Lauren.

But because she’s beginning to realize something uncomfortable.

Maybe she doesn’t really know Todd.

But perhaps...

She doesn’t entirely believe Todd could choose her.

The narrator would like to remind everyone that comparison is a thief.

Unfortunately, insecurity has excellent hearing.

Later that evening, Todd says:

“Lauren was really nice, wasn’t she?”

Mindy smiles.

“She seems wonderful.”

Women everywhere recognize this sentence.

The narrator immediately begins drinking.

Should Mindy:

💬 Tell Todd she felt unexpectedly insecure and laugh about how ridiculous anxiety can be?

🙂 Pretend she’s fine while Googling “How to get toned arms after 40” and researching Lauren’s LinkedIn endorsements?

Narrator Reminder

Sometimes the hot coworker is just a coworker.

And sometimes the greatest threat to a relationship isn’t another person.

It’s the story we tell ourselves.

Nobody dies from dysentery.

But feelings may be hurt.

😂❤️

And poor Lauren, happily married to Greg and trying to find her water bottle, has no idea she’s become the unofficial villain in someone else’s nervous system.

Meanwhile, Lindsay Buckingkat, a three-legged orange tabby, is licking whipped cream off the counter and wondering why humans are like this. 🐈

Substack recently introduced an AI Scan feature powered by Pangram. According to the description, it can distinguish between AI-generated writing, AI-assisted writing, and fully human writing. Naturally, I immediately started feeding it my essays because manufacturing unnecessary anxiety has apparently become one of my favorite hobbies.

I’m not entirely convinced.

One of my recent essays featured a man who announced on our date that he’d pooped on the Matterhorn during a high school spring break trip thirty-five years earlier. Pangram confidently informed me this deeply unfortunate story was 100% AI generated. I refuse to let artificial intelligence take credit for the Matterhorn Pooper. Also, eww.

The whole thing made me laugh, but it also made me realize something. I don't particularly enjoy AI judging my writing. The longer I sat with that thought, the less certain I became that I wanted AI judging our relationships either.

Lately, I’ve started asking friends a question I never imagined would become part of everyday conversation.

“Have you ever asked ChatGPT for relationship advice?”

I expected people to laugh. Instead, almost everyone had a story.

One woman told me she’d had an argument with her boyfriend and asked Gemini what she should do. She wasn’t completely satisfied with the answer, so she copied the exact same conversation into ChatGPT. ChatGPT offered a different perspective, but she still wanted another opinion, so she asked Claude. Three AI models later, she finally made her decision.

They’re no longer together, although I don’t think AI ended the relationship. I think she was searching for certainty, which isn’t all that different from calling another friend and hoping someone will finally tell us what we secretly want to hear.

Back in our day, we thought we were technologically advanced because Netflix stopped sending DVDs in those little red envelopes and somehow the entire internet fit inside our phones. We were convinced we’d reached the future.

I can’t believe I just started a paragraph with, “Back in our day.” Apparently I’ve reached the age where every story begins with a nostalgic sigh. While we’re at it, I should probably mention that I grew up in a household with a Clapper. We thought turning the lights on and off by clapping was the height of modern innovation. We had no idea we’d eventually be asking a chatbot whether Greg’s delayed text meant he had commitment issues.

When relationships got complicated, we called a girlfriend. We met for coffee. We dissected text messages over nachos. We asked our moms. We vented to our sisters. We interrupted someone’s Tuesday evening because the man we’d been dating for three weeks replied with “K” instead of “Sounds good,” and clearly this required immediate analysis.

The problem is that our friends eventually hit their limit.

After the fifth conversation, they’ll patiently reassure us that everything is probably fine. Somewhere around conversation number eight, they’ll remind us that he could simply be at work. By conversation twelve, they're no longer analyzing the relationship. They're wondering whether it's time to stage an intervention.

“If you ask me one more question about why he hasn’t texted you back, I’m taking your phone away.”

AI never reaches that point.

It never gets tired. It never glances at the clock. It never reminds us that we've already analyzed the thumbs-up emoji from every conceivable angle. It certainly never says, "Respectfully, I think we've exhausted the available interpretations of this man's use of punctuation."

It simply waits for the next prompt.

I don’t think AI is creating relationship anxiety. Uncertainty has always been part of being human. Before ChatGPT, uncertainty lived in journals, therapy offices, long walks, late-night phone calls, and conversations with the people who loved us enough to gently say, “I think you’re catastrophizing.”

Now uncertainty has another place to go.

Sometimes that’s a wonderful thing. Sometimes AI slows us down long enough to ask better questions. Sometimes it helps us organize our thoughts before we dump them onto another person. Those all seem like healthy uses of technology.

These days, my friend Jayne usually calls me after she’s already talked to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. By the time my phone rings, I’m usually thinking, “Oh great, the gang’s all here.”

At this rate, we may need to start making brunch reservations for six.

"Jayne, your table is ready. ChatGPT, you're next to the mimosas. Gemini, could you scoot down a seat? Claude, we're so glad you could make it."

The funny part is that none of them were intentionally invited. They just quietly became regulars at our girl talk.

The story that has stayed with me the longest involved a couple who unknowingly invited the same third party into the exact same argument.

She opened ChatGPT because she was convinced he was pulling away. His texting had changed. He seemed more distant. She described the relationship, the conversations they’d been having, and the childhood wounds she’d spent years unpacking in therapy. Based on everything she’d shared, ChatGPT suggested that her concerns were understandable and encouraged her to consider whether he might also be carrying unresolved wounds of his own. She closed the app wanting to work harder on the relationship.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in the house, he was talking to ChatGPT about his version of events.

He described feeling overwhelmed by the constant texting and the need for reassurance. Every delayed response became another difficult conversation. Every request for space became evidence that he didn’t care enough. Based on everything he shared, ChatGPT acknowledged that his feelings made sense and suggested the pace of the relationship might not be compatible with what he wanted long term.

He ended the relationship.

I’ve thought about that couple far more than I’d probably admit in public, not because I think ChatGPT broke them up (it didn’t) but because it highlighted something fascinating. She wasn’t asking the same question he was asking. She wanted to understand why he seemed distant. He wanted to know whether feeling overwhelmed made him a bad partner. ChatGPT answered each of them based on the only thing it had available: one person's version of the story.

That observation became even more interesting after talking with one of my guy friends.

“I use ChatGPT like a journal,” he told me.

I loved that answer because it never occurred to me that AI could function like a conversation with yourself instead of a substitute for a conversation with someone else. Before ChatGPT, he’d fill notebooks or go for long drives to untangle whatever was bouncing around in his head. Now he types it into an app that occasionally asks thoughtful questions back. It challenges assumptions. It asks whether there’s another explanation. It reminds him that he might be filling in missing information with fear instead of facts.

That feels like a remarkably healthy use of AI.

A few weeks later, another friend posted a job opening and received four cover letters that were almost identical. The applicants hadn’t copied one another. They’d all copied the same invisible co-author.

That made me wonder whether something similar is quietly happening throughout the rest of our lives. AI helps us write cover letters, emails, apologies, dating profiles, texts, and interpretations.

At what point does it stop being an editor and start becoming a ghostwriter?

What I’m still wrestling with is the role we’re asking AI to play. I love the idea of AI as an editor. Editors ask questions. They challenge assumptions. They point out missing context. They make us better writers without becoming the author.

Ghostwriters become the author.

That’s the role that gives me pause.

I ended up turning Pangram’s AI detector off. Not because I have anything to hide. I turned it off because my essays have never been about passing an algorithm’s test. They’ve always been about messy humans trying to make sense of messy lives. Some survive trauma. Some navigate heartbreak. Some become lifelong friends. Some proudly announce they've pooped on the Matterhorn (again, eww).

I’d rather readers spend their time wondering why people do the things they do than wondering whether AI helped me write about them.

Ironically, I think that’s exactly how I feel about AI in relationships. I don’t mind if it helps us organize our thoughts, challenges our assumptions, or even asks better questions than a blank journal. I just hope we don’t become so busy asking AI to explain the people we love that we forget to ask the people themselves.

As for Pangram, it can keep insisting the Matterhorn Pooper was generated by artificial intelligence. I refuse to give AI credit for that story, although I’m fairly certain there’s a former date who’s relieved to let the algorithm take the blame.

I'll continue believing that humans are still capable of producing stories far stranger than any algorithm could ever invent, and honestly, I'd like to keep it that way.

Dedicated to the real Jayne. I love being your human sounding board. Please give the robots a break. Also, do not text him back.