Can I Just Meet Someone Already?
I mean really.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.
Everything’s fine until you’re tired. Until fatigue sets in, single women as a group will endure quite a lot. You’d be impressed by the volume of dating advice, dating services, dating strategies, and dating coaches that single women will seek out before we’re no longer willing to believe those things work. (They don’t, just so we’re clear.) Everything’s fine until you’re tired, and then at some point…maybe a year, maybe five years into an active dating life that hasn’t moved the needle even a centimeter, a new mood takes hold, and there is no more patience. That mood is essentially this:
Enough already. Where the fuck do I meet my husband?
When is it enough? When have you made enough changes, rewritten enough profiles, retaken enough photos, gone on enough first dates — when have we done enough work in the single space to just meet someone already? When you hit this place, this frustration and exhaustion fueled by years of unanswered effort, that’s when you become my people, when you start to hear what I say and let it land. My work isn’t something you can be convinced to listen to, the desire has to come naturally, from inside of you. You can’t fake this. You have to understand for yourself that nobody knows where the fuck you’ll meet your husband. And that’s more than okay—that’s freedom.