Am I Single? PART III: “Functionally Single”
I’m STILL having the “what are we?” conversation with myself??!
Catch up on “Am I Single?” Part I and Part II.
Being in a loving, fulfilling relationship and also being single at the same time
Is weird
I sent these texts to my best friend from my couch a few weeks ago. I split the thought into two separate messages, creating a pause followed by an obvious and anticlimactic conclusion. I’ve spent the past two installments of this newsletter and thousands of words inside that pause, trying to come up with a better ending to the sentence.
I was emotionally hungover and also regular hungover from a bad first date—the first first date I’d been on in over a year, which I went on mostly just to see if that’s an activity I’ve regained any interest in doing. Or maybe more so in an attempt to convince myself that it is, that I have. Conclusion, the one I reached while telling an incredibly drunk man whose attempt at a kiss was all dry tongue and teeth to “get home safe” as I climbed in an Uber: No, I have not.
SISKO: Is it weird in a way that’s like, being single is less fun? Or I guess maybe just less exciting?
KAYLA: Yes but also not exactly?
Being single—which I mean not so much in the sense of being unpartnered as I do in the “single gal in the city” sense of actively dating, getting wined and dined by a rotating door of men and making out with strangers in the street—had already been getting both less fun and less exciting by the time I met Adam nearly two and a half years ago. Despite being newly unbanned from Tinder after a four-year exile thanks to my then-recently acquired Cosmo cred, I could barely summon the urge to swipe.
Still, I managed to get it up long enough to rematch with Adam—who’d been saved in my phone as “Adam Matched on Like Every App” since my pre-exile days—for the six or seven hundredth time. On a Friday afternoon in January 2023, he became my first (and, to date, last) Tinder date since I was banned in 2019 (for changing my bio to “I’m sorry, but my circumstances have changed and I can no longer afford to date men for free,” for those unfamiliar with the lore).
A few stragglers remained in the mix for a bit—a LinkedIn sugar daddy and an Instagram DM-slider who actually managed to fuck me in the exception, not the rule, to DM-sliding outcomes. But by spring, I’d more or less let the roster dwindle to one.
I’ve sometimes suspected I may be inherently single rather than situationally so. That my singleness is not a matter of lacking a partner but of being a self-contained entity that would be more burdened than bolstered by any full-time addition.
It wasn’t a matter of having fallen in love or found “the one.” I didn’t necessarily want to not be single in the sense of wanting to hang up my heels and settle down. But I also no longer seemed to feel drawn to the main perks of single life as I’d always understood and cleaved to them—the ones to which I was once more committed than I could ever imagine being to any man: the freedom to date, fuck, or fall for whoever you want without having to answer to anyone. The possibility that your next great love affair may be just around the corner. I was still open to it, of course—still willing to turn that corner into a Lower East Side bar and make out with a Handsome Surgeon while my roommate was in the bathroom should the opportunity happen to present itself the way it did late one night that April. But I was no longer actively hanging around those corners, waiting for love to strike.
Whatever nebulous space was left between not wanting a relationship, not wanting to date, and not wanting to be alone, becoming Adam’s ethically non-monogamous mistress happened to fill perfectly. Two years of consistency sans commitment later, it still does.