Thanks for Waiting

by DOREE SHAFRIR

A thing I quickly picked up about living in L.A. is that everyone makes fun of The Secret, the book about the law of attraction, which basically says that you can will things to happen for you by changing your thoughts and “putting things out into the universe.” But even though it’s widely mocked, I started to encounter a lot of people—even other former jaded New Yorkers!—who kind of believe that The Secret is real. Of course, the lessons of The Secret aren’t new. But without even really realizing it, I started picking up on this vocabulary, too.

“I really want to meet someone,” I told my friend Gabrielle over brunch. I had typically shied away from announcing my intentions so baldly—I had previously thought that it meant you were a sad, desperate, lonely person if you actually articulated that you wanted to meet someone. Now, though, I realized that not only was it okay to be all those things, but also that being single didn’t mean that you were sad, desperate, and lonely, and it was also okay to let people know that you wanted to be in a relationship. I added, “I’m just putting it out into the universe.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Have you heard of Tinder? It’s a new dating app my friend told me about.” In my online dating life, I’d mostly used OkCupid, which sometimes seemed overly concerned with making exact matches. It had you take surveys that asked questions ranging from Would you date someone who kept a gun in the house? to What is your opinion of sarcasm? and then based your percentage match with someone on how you’d answered the questions and what you said you were looking for in a partner. The result was that I matched with a lot of guys who were a lot like me: highly educated, often working in media, with the exact same outlook and interests and goals. There was comfort in this, but I was also wary. Was my perfect partner someone I matched with at 99 percent, or was that too similar and I should be looking for a match that was more like, say, 85 percent? It was too easy to become obsessed with these numbers, to think that an algorithm could instantly spit out the perfect partner if you both said you believed that dinosaurs had ever existed (to be fair, I didn’t want to date someone who didn’t believe in evolution, but this also felt like a pretty low bar).

I also felt like OkCupid encouraged people to write long emails, which I found time-consuming and tiring to read and respond to. It’s one thing to be clever and flirty over text with someone you’ve never met, but another to be clever and flirty over a five-hundred-word email with a total stranger. I called these guys pen pals—they weren’t actually interested in going on a date; they just wanted someone to dump all their thoughts and feelings on…

So Tinder intrigued me, because it eliminated all pretense of trying to match people based on preferences or beliefs or desires. I could see how it could be construed as superficial, because so much emphasis was placed on photos. But having been dating online for a while now, I knew that people revealed a lot, intentionally or otherwise, in the photos they chose for their online dating profile. And also, Tinder didn’t solve the fundamental dating app predicament: What if no one liked me?

In keeping with my whole new saying-yes-to-everything philosophy, I went out with a very, shall we say, wide range of people.

I found that I had to keep two competing thoughts in my head before each date. One was: It’s just a date, it probably won’t go anywhere and that’s fine, just relax and have fun. The other was allowing myself to get excited about the dates: picking out my outfit, doing my hair, making sure my lip gloss wasn’t on my teeth, spritzing just a smidge of Chloe Eau de Perfume on my wrists. And then a funny thing started happening as I was going on all these dates: I started worrying less about whether the guy I was on a date with liked me, and more about whether I liked him. As I went on more and more dates, the stakes for each subsequent date didn’t feel quite so high and I was UabSle Eto relax and be myself more. And I was able to recognize when a guy just wasn’t right for me. Maybe The Secret wasn’t anything mystical or magical—maybe it was just the not-so-revolutionary-but- sometimes-impossible concept of knowing yourself well enough to know what you want.

Even though I felt like I was becoming more confident and secure with myself, it still took a lot of mental energy to be on all the time in the way that dating requires. My friend Samantha—one of my only real friends at work—had similarly decided that she was tired of dating apps. “Let’s go on a man cleanse,” she said matter-of-factly, sitting across from me in my office. “Like, it’s not forever, but we just need to detox. Work on ourselves.”

That was exactly it—I needed to detox. I was still trying to be open, to say yes to people I might have passed over previously, but the mechanics of online dating are basically equivalent to having a very busy part-time job and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is straight-up lying or hasn’t done it very much.

During the man cleanse, I started questioning what I was doing all of this for, anyway. What if marriage just wasn’t right for me? I’d gone out with more than thirty people in the year since moving to L.A., not to mention all the people I’d dated in New York. And not one of them was right for me?

I started allowing myself to picture what my life would look like if I was single. I thought about what it would be like to spend holidays with my family and be the only one who wasn’t married with children. Would I be pitied? And was I more concerned about being pitied than I actually was about being single? That is, was I more worried about what other people thought about my being single than actually being single? I wasn’t sure.

Certainly, now, at almost thirty-seven, I felt like my window was starting to close, I hated that I thought about it in terms of a “window.” I was frustrated by how fixated I was on meeting someone, but part of me also wondered why I should feel shame about wanting to be in a relationship. Wanting love and companionship is a basic human need, and I felt that women, in particular, are framed as being “desperate” if we dared articulate that we actually wanted to get married, especially if we were in our late thirties or older. I wanted to reframe my thinking, to simultaneously be okay with the idea of being single while also allowing myself to articulate that I wanted to find a partner. Was it mental gymnastics? Perhaps. But it was the most honest I’d been with myself in a long time.

A COUPLE WEEKS after I had started my man cleanse, I had lunch at Son of a Gun, a trendy restaurant near my apartment, with my friend Heather, who writes the Ask Polly column for The Cut and is just as wise and perceptive in person as she is in her column. “So. Are you dating?” she asked. Heather is one of those long-married people who loves to discuss your dating life, which I normally found voyeuristic and annoying, but not from her—she was genuinely interested in dissecting what was going on.

“Eh,” I said, picking at my lobster roll. I recalled that the last time I’d been to this restaurant I’d been on a date, and I remembered that the conversation had been pleasant but stilted and that when I subsequently told him that I wasn’t interested in seeing him again, he seemed insulted, as though he had wasted his time taking me out. “Not really. I went out with this guy who was the touring bassist for Marc Anthony, who was actually really interesting, and we had a good time anRd Aboth wanted to hang out again, but it was basically impossible to schedule a second date because he was always rehearsing or performing, and he wanted to meet up at, like, eleven at night and I’m usually in bed by then! I can’t be meeting someone for a date at eleven, like maybe we will stay out until eleven or even midnight, but does he think I’m twenty-two? Eleven is way too late to go on a date, I guess un- less you work nights or something, which I don’t.”

I took a sip of water and continued. “So I texted him, ‘Hey, I had a really great time with you and I was looking forward to hanging out again, but it seems like our schedules are just too difficult to sort out right now. Take care!’ And I gotta say, as soon as I sent the text, I felt a weight lift. I feel like the old me would have gone above and beyond to try to hang out with this guy—I would have met up with him at eleven at night, or whenever he was around. I would have rearranged my life to accommodate his.”

Heather smiled. “I think this is a very good thing,” she said. “You do?” I said. She seemed enthusiastic in a way I wasn’t expecting.

“Yes,” she said. “You knew what you needed out of a relationship, and even if you were attracted to this guy, you knew that it wasn’t enough. And so you said goodbye.” She looked at me, as though taking me in. “I’m telling you—this is really great.”

“Well, thanks,” I said. “Yeah, you know, now that you say it, I guess I kind of took control of the situation.” She smiled again. “I have a feeling that this means you’re about to meet someone you really like,” she said. “It just feels that way. Like now you know what you want, and what you need, and that person is going to materialize.”

“So you’re saying The Secret works then”, I said.

“I’m just saying—Secret or not, I think you’re finally ready to meet someone. Maybe you thought you were before, but now you really are.”

From the book Thanks for Waiting by Doree Shafrir. Copyright © 2021 by Doree Shafrir. Published by Ballantine an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

DOREE SHAFRIR

Doree Shafrir is the author of Startup and the forthcoming Thanks for Waiting. She is cohost of the podcasts Forever35 and Matt & Doree’s Eggcellent Adventure. She lives in Los Angeles with her family. To learn more visit doree-shafrir.com.

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