Over the weekend my co-best threw a birthday party for me; my only request was that we have an Irish Car Bomb every hour, on the hour. Needless to say, I had never noticed how short an hour could feel until it was counting down the time between Irish Car Bombs. It was exactly the sort of party I wanted and a tremendous mistake.
At a certain point I was having a drunken conversation with a friend of mine about the state of our respective lives. She's married and misses being single; I'm single and want to be in a relationship. Being single has quite a bit to recommend it; I can more or less do as I please. But what occurs to me now, and what I didn't then have the vocabulary to express, was that being single is a source of pain when you come to believe that you are stuck in that state because you're unacceptable to others. If I were single because I chose not to date, I doubt I would feel loneliness as I do, but I choose to date, and the longer I date without finding a match, the more it begins to feel that I'm simply not good enough.