Love & Quarantine

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

Last March when quarantine put a screeching halt to normalcy and toilet paper was nowhere to be found, I was months into a relationship with a man 13 years my senior. He lived far enough away to make seeing him a hassle, and less than a month into quarantine, we went our separate ways. Not because I didn’t love him but because he was emotionally dead. It is exhausting to try to be close to someone allergic to closeness. After our anticlimactic dissolution, I decided not to fuck with dating for a bit. I explored some new hobbies, got a new tattoo, read a lot of books, ran a lot of miles, picked up some freelance work, and endured quarantine as well as humanly possible.

I eventually downloaded a dating app under the pretense of “seeing what’s out there,” but I was truthfully just very bored, which is not a good reason to dip a toe into the dating world. It was not difficult for me to find dates, but I soon grew overwhelmed and instituted a one-new-date-per-week-rule that made the entire process more bearable. Some of my favorites include:

The guy who said he was from Montana, but who actually grew up in Huntington Beach. His apartment was full of bows and arrows, guns, cowboy boots, and all the “tough guy” accoutrements that made the dead space behind his eyes make sense.