Disappointing Women of New York: Part 3

(This will be the last post in this series. As you can probably tell, these posts (Part 1 & Part 2) are more a reflection of my own insecurities and immaturities than any commentary on women in general or on dating the ones who live in New York City. I have disappointed my fair share of women - maybe I'll do a blog on that some day. Any flaws I’ve highlighted in these ladies and their actions are dwarfed by my own and by the galaxy of terror that men have wreaked upon the other genders on our planet. I was at fault in some way for everything that I'm going to tell you about. I’m sure "Disappointing Shravans of New York" could be a book unto itself. I wish all these women – all women in general – only success and happiness. On this dreary Saturday though, I just wanted to blog, to vent, to make myself feel better. So, without further ado, let’s finish what we’ve started.)

 

20 five-year-olds

Ever since I moved to America’s liberal Northeast in 2015, a dominant cultural narrative has been repeated to me again and again and ingrained in me: Women are queens. Men are trash. Women = good, men = bad. Men are boorish pigs who sometimes surprise you with tact and charm but overwhelmingly, they are the vicious aggressors in an age-old battle whose tide has only recently begun to turn. All my best friends in America are liberal women and these ideas provide the stars by which we navigate dating, workplace dynamics and other touch-points of gender interaction. Women by default are good and right and men are bad and wrong. This is the prism through which I’ve been taught to view the world – first at graduate school and then while working in New York. And largely, I have come to agree. It is a prism that serves me well because it can help me compensate for my many unconscious gender biases. But if you’ll humour me today, I’d just like to challenge the notion this one time. Just this once, and then I’ll go back to assuming the best in women and the worst in men, I promise. Sometimes – sometimes – women can be really, really mean. And for some reason, the ones who’ve been the worst to me have all been 25. So, I’m going to make a sweeping, silly, anecdotal generalization: Women in their mid-20s are children.

 

Ghosts in the System

We had been dating almost three months when I told her I loved her. She didn’t say it back and that was fine. We had talked about this. I think it’s fine to tell someone you love them just because you want to, rather than because you need to hear it back (for it to be real). We met shortly after I moved to New York and we went from 0-100 at a speed that surprised us both. But we stuck with it because it felt right. We would hang out often and have the most wonderful time together. We had met each other’s moms. We hadn’t made any long-term plans but we were really into it. She made life fun. For once, I stopped planning every waking moment and just lived every day. It was a joy.

When I wake up in the morning and I’m excited about the day just because I get to spend it with my partner, I know I’m in love. So I told her. And it felt great. She never said it back to me but she would send me long, drunk text messages late at night telling me how great I was. I felt fine about our dynamic; there was not an imbalance. They were three of the best months of my life.

Then one day she went to Paris on holiday for two weeks and stopped replying to me. 

I had never been ghosted like this before, especially not by someone I loved. She did not reply to me even on her return. I think it was more than a month of radio silence before she dumped me over text. “What a queen. YAS! Slay!”

Perhaps I had come on too strong. Perhaps our three-year age gap was beginning to tear at the spontaneity of the romance. Perhaps she had just realized she was bored of me. It doesn’t matter. You do not ghost someone who has told you they love you, who you’ve introduce to your family, and then dump them over a text message. You act like a grown-up. But alas, 25-year-olds are not grown-ups. 25-year-olds are children.

 

War Correspondence

It started on Hinge, of course. (I do not know how people meet outside of dating apps.) She was a consultant. She had gone to Yale too. She “checked all the boxes”. We talked for a bit and then she said she was traveling for work and would be back in a couple weeks. And of all places, she was in Bombay! It was her first trip to India and she was traveling alone.

This was a couple months after I’d been dumped by aforementioned Ghost Girl and so I think I had come across as a bit desperate to this new lady. In any case, the power dynamic was definitely in Check Box Chica’s favor. But as soon as I realized she was in my hometown and was working on a project that was close to my heart, I offered to help. I genuinely went into “help your friend visiting Bombay” mode. She gave me her email and we emailed each other every day. Aside from restaurant recommendations and site-seeing tips, I also connected her with my industry contacts and friends who would be best placed to advise her on her project. I remember writing honestly, “even if we never meet, I just hope you have a good experience in India” and she replied saying “Oh we will definitely meet when I’m back! This is amazing! Thank you so much. Etc.”

We never met.

We had exchanged 31 emails before she ignored me. An email a day between two strangers for two weeks; each message reaching across 11 time-zones. It was kind of nice to try online dating via 3 lines on an email every night. It felt like writing letters to a soldier on some front-line. Did my soldier die or defect?

Looking back on my emails, I was definitely too eager to impress and too anxious to show my virtues. But. I don’t think you ignore someone who has gone out of their way to help you when you’re traveling alone for work to their country for the first time. I don’t think this is how “YAS Queen Slay me” queens should act. At least tell them you’re not feeling the chemistry or make something up? I wasn’t ready for this kind of behavior. Weren’t women amazing, emotionally intelligent archangels of kindness and virtue? This is what I had been told. I guess she was not. What she was, of course, is 25.

 

5pm Checkout

I knew it wasn’t really “going anywhere” with this girl. She came into my life a month after “we’ll definitely meet” Check Box Chica. This new woman was fun but we were both very different. We texted a lot but would meet only every couple weeks for a few months. She wasn’t my usual type and I was not hers. She had taught English in Southeast Asia for a while and was now working at an education non-profit, but she was still very much finding her mission in life. Alas, she was beautiful and I was lonely and so I gave it a go. On one occasion, she even took the train out to New Jersey, where I was baby-sitting for some family-friends on the weekend, and we went for a lovely hike in the nearby forest. We kissed for the first time over a waterfall. It was nice! There were no “expectations” or ever any conversations about where this was leading. It was two people showing up for each other in a frigid November when the big, scary city had started to ice shut.

Though we did not see each other over Christmas, we texted and shared photos of our vacations. She sent me a photo of her holding her baby cousin and I sent her one of me in a Christmas sweater. It was nice!

We even met once in January. And I was starting to consider whether we could maybe work after all, if we could meet a little more often and invest emotionally in each other. So, we made a plan to grab dinner on a Wednesday. The night before, I’d suggested a place in East Village and she said she was looking forward to it. 6pm tomorrow, we agreed. I had made a reservation. The Italian joint was known for its lasagna and its cheesecake.

I texted her the next day at 5pm to let her know I was leaving work soon. She texted back... saying that she had been seeing someone else all this time and that she wanted to give it a shot with him. So, she said she would not be able to meet me and that she was sorry. I was “a good guy who deserved someone good, etc.”

Have you ever been dumped by text an hour before you’re supposed to meet for cheesecake? It’s a weird feeling. You kind of step back and ask yourself, “What…. What just happened?” How long had she been sitting on this decision and why did she wait until an hour before, to not only cancel the date but to cancel the dating? I could not imagine leading someone on like that and not being honest with them. But then again, I am not 25.

 

I think people in their mid-20s are inconsiderate because they are still looking to maximize their self-interest at any cost – and at anyone else’s expense. I know I was like that. When you’re in your late 20s, I think you’ve been through enough heartbreak to be gentle to people whom you’re breaking things off with. I think you learn decorum, etiquette, etc. Maybe all these women were ghosted and/or dumped by men in similar or worse ways to the ones above and so they saw nothing wrong with it. I feel sorry for them. It makes me sad that people on dating apps are so unkind to one another. There is never a fun way to end a relationship or let someone down easy, but there is a respectful way – a mature way. I’ve found women in their late 20s are generally kinder when they end things.

I think there’s a lot of room for kindness in dating. Who is going to teach us? The apps are great at matching us up but they are absent when it comes to helping us part ways. I don’t know if apps are going to help us get better at the hard bits, the messy bits. Only life teaches you that.