It’s 3:30 am on a Monday. I don’t sleep well on Sunday nights. In fact, I don’t do well with Sundays in general. Often, they give me feeling of heaviness. If I’m lucky, I’ll spend part of my Sunday morning reading or slowly drinking my coffee, but quite often, I get into a mood where I don’t want to do anything (which only seems to perpetuate the mood and the heaviness).
From a diagnostic point of view, the Sunday malaise could be the dread associated with another work week, it could be the come-down from having enjoyed a weekend (which is similar but different to the dread of the work week), it could be the chores list, it could be related to alcohol/sobriety (I go out for drinks on Thursday, Friday, and sometimes Saturday). Chances are, how I feel on Sundays and my terrible sleep patterns, are related to all of those things.
Even though I’m starting this at 3:30 am, I’ve been up for an hour. I’m yawning and will probably want a nap before I even head into work. On Mondays, I’m exhausted by 8 or 9 pm…
At 2:30 I woke up. I checked my phone. I had a long text from a woman I’ve been talking with. It was in response to a long text I had sent which was a response to a FaceTime chat we had. The chat went well. Well enough that were I out where she lived, I’d ask her out – which was what my long text attempted to say. She doesn’t think we’re a romantic fit. I’m not sure I do either… which is the type of thing I’d usually try to figure out on an in-person date. Maybe we’ll connect after I move.
Reading the text was what woke me up. Mulling it over was part of what kept me awake… that and this awful habit I have of re-reading old blog posts that get page-views in the middle of the night. My mind usually tries to connect those two things – rejection (job, romantic, friendship, or other) with something I’ve written from who knows when. I know (or at least I think I know) there’s no connection. The views are probably bots.
But that was only part of what kept me up. What drove me to the computer to write (because those first few paragraphs are bullshit preamble that don’t even do a good job of setting the scene) was this realization of how I’m not sure I would really know what I’m looking for in a romantic partner. Which was less of a realization and more of a sense of confusion and ennui. Even as I’m trying to write this, I’m not quite sure how to put it or what the feeling is.
It has been a really long time (five years) since I tried this dating thing with any sense of purpose or intentionality. I’ve used dating sites on and off these past few years, but mostly as a way of testing my own interest in the prospect of meeting someone, or checking out the options in other cities. In a lot of instances, I’d hop on a dating site knowing that I wasn’t ready to date, but curious about what my options might be should I decide I was ready. As such, I think I’ve lost the basic understanding of how to do any of this. Which is to say – when I did this before, it just felt different.
I’ve been single for seven years. I met and went out with a lot of people in the first few years after getting divorced. At that time, I enjoyed meeting lots of new people, I was amazed by some of the connections, and I wasn’t deterred by the many flops. In some respects, I understood that I needed to meet a lot of people to get an understanding of what I was looking for. I’m not sure I have the patience for it now… which feels like entirely the wrong way to start out. The distinction seems to be that I used to approach dating with a carefree attitude and now I approach it with something closer to an I don’t care attitude.
Determining what’s different, much like trying to figure out why I can’t sleep on Sundays, has become a bit of a diagnostic puzzle for me – one which involves way too much overthinking and way too many variables. The line of demarcation, the line that separates before and after, the line that separates then from now is when I got engaged. As the timeline sits, there was a period of semi-frenzied discovery (two years), there was a brief engagement in which I was sure I was done with dating forever (less than a year), and there has been everything after (four years).
If the two-year discovery phase was about learning how I connect (or don’t) with other people, the four-year after phase was about internal discovery, learning how I connect with myself, and building a life that was a little less dependent on others. This alone seems like it could account for the shift in my attitude towards dating and meeting other people. I still believe that our lives are greatly enhanced when we share them, but I suppose I’ve grown somewhat content with the possibility of not sharing, or sharing here in this space.
If growing more comfortable in my solitude is one potential cause of my lackadaisical attitude towards dating, lack of purpose might be another. The truth is, I don’t feel the need to go through the discovery phase again. Despite it’s flaws, both the person and the relationship I had in the engagement felt like the right fit (with a whole lot of room for growth, nuance, and reinvention). Back in the before times, I can’t say that I was looking to settle down or move in together or any of those things. I was open to the journey and when I met someone where joining forces made sense, it felt like a natural progression. But without that semi-frenetic pace in the discovery phase, I’m not sure what dating looks like or what a natural progression looks like. Here, in this after space, I can’t seem to decide if I’d be as open to living with someone else and the thought of getting to that point seems almost foreign. If I’m not looking to discover what I’m looking for in someone else, then it seems like dating (with a purpose) would fall into one of two categories: casually meeting someone who I enjoy hanging out with and/or finding someone who I want to do more serious things with (travel, solve life’s problems, eventually partner with). Obviously, the one could lead to the other and being laid back about it might be a good thing. What’s hard to know is if I’m laid back or if I’m genuinely gun-shy. Did we move too quickly before? Did we get it wrong? I don’t know how comfortable I am with taking that type of a risk again. Recovery has been slow.
If all of that sounds like unnecessary hand-wringing, it probably is. The only way to find these things out is to try… or at least be open to possibilities. I have been very hesitant to engage with anyone because I know the challenge proximity poses. It’s hard (though not impossible) to have a spark from thousands of miles away. It’s also difficult because in those two years of discovery, the relationships that felt like they had the most promise almost always began with a sense of wonder and inevitability. And because it’s been a while, because I haven’t been open to that type of experience (was intentionally avoiding it), it’s really hard to know if I’m still open to that type of experience. Knowing that quick first meetings before the conversation gets stale are off the table (at least for now) only further complicates this diagnostic process.
Sundays often feel directionless. I have things to do before the work week and I’m not ready to give up my free time. I end up feeling slightly paralyzed. I end up sleeping poorly. I woke to a long text that felt directionless like a sleepless Sunday. It reminded me that I’m ready for something new, but to what degree, I’m not sure. It reminded me that I’m pretty sure of where I’m heading but when, how, and what it’ll look like when I get there is vague. The sun is up and I’m no closer to understanding why I don’t sleep or what it is I might be looking for. The sun is up and that’s good enough.