Am I Single?

I’m constantly having the “what are we?” conversation with myself.

“I have a hard time knowing whether you’re single or not,” an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in a while confessed—less, I suspect, because the answer was of any importance to him one way or the other and more because the lack of one was making it difficult to choose the appropriate subgenre of small talk: How’s your dating life? vs. How’s the person who ended it?

“Same,” I found myself admitting with a wry smirk into my watermelon cosmopolitan—the signature drink at the launch party for my now-defunct Cosmo column, ‘Sex at 26.’

It was August 2023 and I was dating two men, one who knew about the other and one who did not—both of whom had offered to attend that night and neither of whom I’d allowed to.

I hadn’t accepted the first man’s offer—the one who knew about the other one—because he had a girlfriend. (This is all starting to sound much worse than it was—which was no less complicated but somewhat less incriminating.) He was a friend with benefits in a long-term open relationship and I, a noted adulteress, was determined to prove that despite my newly published penchant for other-womanhood, even I knew and respected the difference between ethical and unethical non-monogamy. Mostly this looked like flopping over onto my stomach immediately after sex to suggest a lack of interest in post-coital cuddling and dodging any couple-coded activities that could’ve potentially gotten me burned at the stake of I guess you didn’t understand what this was. Which is to say that when he offered to come to my launch party over midday martinis somewhere in the city that summer, I laughed it off and changed the subject.

I hadn’t accepted the second man’s offer—the one who didn’t know about the first one—because I was in love with him. Also because he hadn’t so much offered as I’d called him in an anxious panic after spending more money than I had only to have my hair styled to sit on my skull like a bad wig shortly before I was supposed to show up at my own party and said, “I wish you could be there tonight.” He said, “What time is it? I’ll see if I can make it,” and I laughed it off and changed the subject lest I get burned at the stake of I guess you didn’t understand what this was.

We’ll call the first man Adam because that’s what I’ve always called him in writing and we’ll call the second one Handsome Surgeon—partly because that’s what he was (even though my roommate says, “He wasn’t that handsome” in a way that is meant to make me feel better but just makes me feel stupid) and mostly because I’m still a little afraid his real name will catch in my throat like a sob.

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By the time I arrived dateless to my own party late that August, Handsome Surgeon and I were four months into a summer situationship. About three months in, we’d accidentally stumbled into the “What are we?” conversation we’d both been avoiding and completely botched it.

“Well, I’m not sleeping with anyone else,” he said one morning over post-coital eggs, sitting across from each other at the small wooden table in his spacious yet spartan apartment all the way down in Brighton Beach. I don’t remember how it came up, only that I hadn’t asked and never would have.

This should have been exactly what I wanted to hear—exactly what any woman who’d caught feelings for her summer fling would want to hear. But it scared me.

My ‘Sex at 26’ era

For one thing, it felt like a trap. There’s an episode of Sex and the City where Charlotte goes on a crazed rant about how her entire life has become about her husband’s penis—specifically, not “scaring” it. They’ve recently reconnected after separating over his impotence and, free from the strain of an official relationship, have finally managed to establish some semblance of a sex life. But while the pressure’s off for Trey and his dick, Charlotte finds herself walking on eggshells, afraid that one wrong move will deflate Trey’s boner and any hope of rekindling their marriage right along with it. “Ooooooh, don’t talk about moving in in front of the penis, ’cause it might go soft,” she jeers mid-breakdown.

While impotence has never been among the many issues that have plagued my prolific history of romantic failure, I’ve often felt like my love life has been one long game of “Don’t Scare the Penis.” From a young age, women internalize the idea that the worst way to get a man to fall in love with you is to be in love with him—that wanting him is the fastest way to lose him and asking him for anything other than no-strings sex will land you nothing but the label of “clingy.” Play hard to get. Don’t want too much. Don’t have feelings—and if you must have them, keep them to yourself. Don’t scare him off. Don’t scare the penis.

From what I’d gathered, letting the penis know you’re in love with it—that you’d like it, actually, if the penis were only sleeping with you—was the easiest way to scare it. After years of swallowing feelings like vomit lest they spook a grown man, I wasn’t about to fall on the sword he’d just held out for me. Then again, I was in love with him.