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The Dangers and Heartaches of Dating

Author: Rachel J. Lithgow

Let’s be honest: movies and TV lie, because dating at any age is horrible. For Rachel, it’s insult added to injury. She is recently divorced and recovering from essentially being her depressive husband’s around-the-clock caretaker and his verbally abusive family’s favorite punching bag. She’s broken and finally seeking a relationship that gives instead of only taking. Even worse, the man who was her touchstone after the divorce, her on-again off-again ex-boyfriend Joe, is leaving her to move to another state with another woman, a blonde real-estate agent with a “live-laugh-love” vibe.  But Joe keeps offering slivers of hope. Texting her daily, talking about his true love for her, waffling in his decision. Maybe she can get him back? But in the meantime, as she waits to reunite with the man she thinks is for her, she opens the computer and powers up one dating profile after another.

The world of dating, and online dating specifically, is rarely conducive to heartbreak (or self-esteem) recovery. Indeed, it could be described as the blind leading the blind, everyone bringing their trauma and emotional baggage to the table, and few, if any willing to work through the pain to form lasting bonds.  As Rachel struggles with Joe’s conflicting signals, she goes on one bad date after another, trying to keep it all together and continue smiling despite an overwhelming sense of loss and grief that will finally drive her to the very edge and into the arms of self-love and self-care. Before that, though, she has got some really terrible dates to go on, and she shares the heartbreaking and at times jocular accounts with her sympathetic, equally battle-weary audience.

We have super cheap dates (including a man who uses crates as furniture), we have super rich dates (including a man with his own private jet), we have handsome dates with unfortunate crystal fetishes, far-right conspiracy theorist dates, dates in messy relationships, dates who are hot-and-heavy but endlessly postpone, dates with terminal diseases, short dates who do all the talking, dates who have a specific number of people they plan to have sex with, and so much more. All the time, as potential slides into disaster, Joe keeps texting little “love-yous” in the background, and Rachel’s ex-husband barges into her home unannounced. Talk about a recipe for a mental break.

Image by Hello Cdd20 from Pixabay

The narrative is somewhat chronological, with each chapter ostensibly focused on another bad date. Some chapters talk more about the date – whereas others are more focused on tangential conversations. Along the way, Rachel takes many asides to flash-back on what still haunts her from the past: bad arguments and unfair treatments and, of course, her continual obsession with Joe, that dirt-bag. It makes for a more stream-of-conscience feeling, as though the author started to describe her dating experiences, hitting us up for some comedy and some sympathy, but instead ended up introspecting. This makes it hard to necessarily keep track of the timeline and the story at times (and where the dates come into play between the explanations of Rachel’s ex-husband’s hellish family and her on-again off-again relationship with Joe). It’s understandable at a human level, as we can literarily see Rachel working things out and connecting dots. On a literary level, though, it’s distracting.

The conclusion ends as the memoir itself began, in time. We don’t get the nice, neat bow that ties everything up, or the happily ever after. This is realistic. This is real life. When I was in grad school, a bunch of us got together and penned a book of essays about online dating, with many of the stories focusing on how much it sucks; many of our stories (including mine) also ended in the middle of the misery. What really upsets me though, is that despite Rachel’s growing understanding, she is still holding onto Joe, even describing him in the concluding acknowledgements as a “real mensch” (i.e. a person of integrity and honor) throughout the process. What!! No. NO. Joe is a gas-lighting son-of-a-bitch who is stringing her along as his backup plan. He is the definition of a usurious, unfeeling sociopath, and I want to just beg her to dump him. She deserves better, and I don’t see how she can really move on until she lets Joe (and his ilk) go.

Still . . . personal opinions aside . . . it’s clear that Rachel writes well and makes us truly care. The overarching memoir is true to life: It’s more sad than funny, a testament to modern dating and all the many ways it can go wrong. It brought back a lot of memories. I’ve been happily married to my soulmate, whom I found through Match, of all places, since 2017 . . . but I remember the long, grueling DECADE before meeting him of awful dates that left my self-worth, self-esteem, and faith in humanity utterly shattered. Sure, I got some good stories, which are funny now that I made it out of the other end, but I still have friends who are struggling with this very modern problem. Rachel perfectly captures it: all the feelings, from those that we internalize to the hard “didn’t hurt” veneer we paint on. As such, I think that My Year of Really Bad Dates is a must-read for anyone working their way through the meat market that is dating, just so you realize that you are not alone, and that you have to love yourself and see yourself as having worth long before you can find that special someone.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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