'I'm a Stereotypical Single Woman Who Wants a Baby Right Now!'

Dear Polly, As soon as I read your reassurance this morning that you like responding to rambling cliché letters from embarrassing stereotype readers, I started composing this letter in my head. Because I am a rambling cliché and an embarrassing stereotype. I am a single 33-year old woman, I have my shit together in pretty much every way, and I desperately want to fall in love. I have a newish job that I’m good at, that feels meaningful, and I mostly enjoy, without it being my whole life (major progress!). I have deep, meaningful friendships that enrich my life and that I tend to with care. I have a sunny, cheerful apartment filled with treasured things and my beloved black cat. I like my own company. I work out and I sleep 8 hours a night and write in my journal and make pottery on Wednesday evenings. I share all this as evidence that I have CHECKED THE BOXES. I have done the work. Dating and romance have always been the part that feels hard. I am an only child and my parents divorced when I was a baby, and both remain single today. My dad had a lot of girlfriends that created chaos, and my mom made it very clear that men are only good at making women messy. Growing up I was rewarded for being smart and funny, but I was a chubby kid and didn’t feel attractive. I’m still chubby and still have some body stuff, but I’m also the most confident and the cutest I’ve ever been, and I know intellectually that plenty of men are attracted to me. I’ve had short and longish relationships and situationships and flings and one night stands. It never felt quite right. I want so badly to be in love. I want to be treasured. I want to wake up next to someone and be glad he’s there. I want commitment, even if it scares me, and most of all, I want kids. I want to have a baby, probably two, and I want them NOW. Or soon, at least. It’s an ache. I am obsessively aware of the age at which people have met their partner. I have passed my therapist’s reassurance that she met her husband at 31, the friend who made out with someone at a party at 32 and married him at 36. I know that you met your husband at 34 and then had two kids and I can’t tell you how tightly I hold on to the 18-month runway that implies for me. Tick tock! I am tempted to opt out of the whole thing, to say I’m over dating and to pursue parenthood on my own. I have the resources and community and honestly, the personality, to be a single mom by choice, it’s something I’ve thought about and talked about for years. But deep down, I don’t want to! I want my kids to have a dad as funny and loving and involved as mine was, and I want to be in love with him and raise them together. It feels increasingly like this is too much to ask for. Last summer, I’d quit my job and planned to take a couple months off, and I sat next to my best friend at the pool on a Sunday afternoon and told her I wanted a summer fling. I had a lot of free time, my life felt a little up in the air, it was hot and sticky, and I wanted to make out with someone. I went home and downloaded an app known for these sorts of matches and there he was, a man who was also not working for the summer and was moving to a different city in the fall and was looking for “nothing serious, unless we click” (ha!). Obviously, I fell for him. It wasn’t just that the sex was really fun (it was) and he was funny and kind and steady and easy to be around (he was) and that the built-in end date kept me from nitpicking about all the boxes he didn’t check (it did). It was that finally, FINALLY, I had someone I could see in my Real Life. My friends would love this guy. My MOM would love this guy. We had all these weird overlaps that tied us together, so many moments in the past we could have met. The same politics and vision for our lives and sleep schedule. Sure, he didn’t want to talk about his feelings and sure, he didn’t want me to meet his friends or to meet mine, and sure, he probably just liked sleeping with me and having someone to ask how his day was, but isn’t that what a relationship is, really, asking about each other’s days? Well, no. Because the truth is, this guy was extremely clear he really was just looking for something casual. Even when he talked to me for an hour on the phone at night, even when he was supportive from afar when my mom got sick while she and I were on a trip together, even when he PICKED ME UP AT THE FUCKING AIRPORT, he was going to move away and we were not going to be together. I wanted to ask him to try dating long distance. I didn’t. I ended things early, a week before he left, telling him how much I’d let myself fall for him and how the experience of being with him made me realize what I really want is something committed and real, leaving PLENTY of room for him to say, “me too,” which he did not. And since then, I’ve gotten a job and figured out what’s going on with my mom and cut back on the booze and started working out and going to bed early again. It has been six months, and I still think about him every day. I think about running into him at an airport or on the street. I fantasized about him calling on my birthday, then on his birthday (which would make no sense?), then on New Years, then on Valentine’s day. I think about us figuring out how to deal with the distance, how I’d take the train on a Thursday afternoon and let myself into his apartment and have dinner on the stove when he got home from work. I think about how we’d decide which furniture to keep when we move in together. I think about telling him I’m pregnant with our baby, the two of us telling our families. I know this is fucking nuts. I know it’s not really about him at all, that I’ve scotch taped his face onto the familiar fantasy of the guy who wants to be with me. We’ve texted a couple times and he’s been friendly and a little flirty and has given zero indication he wants to see me again. My brain knows he didn’t want a relationship with me and that once somebody doesn’t love me, who the fuck cares? (a favorite essay of yours). Apparently I still fucking care!!!!!!!! I am doing the things I am supposed to do to find my person. I’m refreshing my profile on Hinge, I’m walking around without headphones and smiling at men in coffee shops, I’m telling people I want to be set up. A couple months ago I went to a SPORTS BAR on a Sunday afternoon to casually meet a single guy that my friend’s husband watches football with (insane!), and wouldn’t you know it, he had just gotten back together with his ex that morning. I mean, what the fuck?!!!! And of course, the mom and dad stuff is at play here. My mom is sick, but they assure us she will get better. I look at her life — alone in a beautiful sunny house with a flourishing garden, driving herself to doctor’s appointments, refusing to rely on anyone (except me) — and I feel sad. She has started to soften, and she asked me the other night on the phone if I’d ever been in love. “I thought you didn’t believe in that!” I wanted to shout. But I asked her back and she said, “only your dad.” My dad, who she suddenly doesn’t hate after three decades of resentment, who offers to go with her to chemo, who crosses state lines in his beat-up old pickup truck to meet up with women he’s matched with on Bumble, ever hopeful. I have so many paragraphs of your letters screenshotted on my phone, about sharp knives that cut and being a salty anchovy when someone expects something sweet, about rich fucking tapestries. I feel like I’ve mostly metabolized your advice. I think I’m flawed and also pretty great. I really do like my life. I can be honest and intense and vulnerable and risk being unlikeable (can I?). I know that I tend to conflate sex and love, to sleep with people too quickly, and that much of that is rooted in not feeling good in my body or attractive to men for many years. I am aware of my pattern of falling for guys who aren’t actually available because they are literally or metaphorically about to leave. I just don’t know…