I Waited 6 Months For Modern Love To Reject Me

The single experience is still a love story.

Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. The essay below is yours to read free, Happy Holidays.

Since 2016, I’ve sent six submissions to Modern Love in the New York Times. Being published in the world’s most notable discussion of love has been my goal since I started writing for those trying to find it. All six of my submissions have been rejected. Two were submission errors on my part. Three probably weren’t up to their standards. But this last one? Y’all.

This essay mattered to me because it’s a perspective on love that’s almost entirely left out of the narrative: living without it. I thought it aligned well with Modern Love, a column whose most popular installment ever was famously “The 36 Questions That Lead To Love.” Does that not tell them most of their readers are still single and hopeful? Maybe I’m just not a fit. I’ve heard that one plenty.

All the other rejections came in rather quickly. I’m not sure why they let me wring my hands for six months this time, but I do know that making someone wait that long for the same feedback-free, copy-and-paste rejection as always is unkind, at any workload.

Below, I am sharing this essay for free with anyone who wants to read it because it’s really fucking good, and so am I. I’m not entitled to being published in Modern Love. But I’m good enough to be.

You Can Starve My Hope. But You Can’t Kill It.

by Shani Silver

Only love is triumphant. Only the meet-cutes and it’s-such-a-funny stories that end with photos of a ring displayed against a man’s chest—like that’s a normal place to put your hand—only those outcomes hold enough awe and awww to make the cut. You don’t hear someone’s endured solitude described as a win, even though it’s ten times harder to live through singlehood indefinitely than it is to meet a partner. Really? We’re celebrating these two, the ones who split rent and bills now? I think single people who haven’t done that—ever—and can still afford groceries deserve a party. Why doesn’t the absence of love qualify as a love story? It’s still central to the narrative. 

I’m 42, I’ve been single for 17 years, and I haven’t been on a date since 2018, because that’s how long it’s been since someone asked. I’ve been without welcome, consistent physical touch for over a decade, subsisting on occasional hugs from friends and the weight of my own bed linen. But we don’t tell tales like mine, they’re not romantic enough. To desire love and still have hope for it despite its complete absence for 6,205 days and counting…you’re telling me that’s not a love story? You’re telling me I’m not a stronger argument for faith in love than two people who met at the gym? I’m the one who’s lived without the most basic human desire next to the things that physically keep us alive this entire time and I’m still sane. Pop a bottle or two, good lord. 

I’m not hoping for a fairy tale, I’m too grown. Love isn’t a solution or all-encompassing fix to whatever ails you. For me, it’s much more practical than that. It’s the routine simplicity of having company, of another voice in my house and another name on my mail. It’s laughter and conversation and shared meals and a physical presence that tells me I’m not alone for the scary parts, the incredible parts, or the far more frequent middle parts in between. Being alone is still being. It’s still a valid and happy life. My desire for a romantic partnership doesn’t come from feeling incomplete. It comes from being human. And despite not having it for so long, I haven’t doubted for one second that at some point love will be mine. We idolize brides. Can we also spare a little admiration for the faithful single?

Loneliness and longing know exactly how to make themselves at home in a solitary life. But they’re not what’s really difficult about being single—and hopeful—for an extended period of time. The hard part is being so hungry for something for so long that your body and mind hide your desire behind a paywall. It’s easier to feel nothing than it is to want and never receive for more than four presidential terms. My own psychology has tried to protect me and I don’t blame it. It doesn’t want me to feel the sting of being starving. But I wanted to feel it to write it down, because I’m not the only one who’s living this extensively single experience. I’d like them to feel less alone today. 

Throw blame anywhere you want, crop dust the dating industry in it, would you do that for me please? Take the space that dangles love as a carrot and lifts it a little higher each time you jump and burn it to the ground for its cruelty, and for the consequenceless dating culture it bred and then refused to discipline. You can factor in the digital nature of everything moving people further and further from real, rich interactions, even though wasn’t technology supposed to connect us more? Whatever you want to blame for why it’s getting harder for people to meet and fall in love, do me a favor and don’t blame me. I’m one of the last pieces of proof you’ve got to show that hope for love can’t be killed. Would you really risk telling me maybe I should smile more?  

The world will absolutely blame me. Dignity isn’t something afforded to single people (they actually hand it out on keychains when you file your marriage license). Collectively we mostly just fault the single person—sorry, woman—for not being perfect enough to deserve love. As if pictures of imperfection don’t get married every Saturday. If I’m starving, the world expects me to feed myself, and honestly the targeted ads for vibrators get boring pretty quickly. If you’re alone, lonely, and longing—sometimes into a shocking infinity—the world doesn’t care because it doesn’t have to. Love is such an individualized acquisition the only person weighed down by the absence of something I want is me. Longing for love is very private. Finding it gets published in the newspaper. I think the singles of the world could greatly benefit from things being the other way around. 

You can’t make people care about something we’ve been completely trained to judge instead. We grow up learning how pathetic it is to be single, especially as we age. We avoid what we deem humiliating and sad, and we blame the single person for not “doing more” to fix their own fate. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to tell Fate what to do, but apparently she owns shares in Bumble. If my singlehood doesn’t seem embarrassing to you, that’s probably because you’re trying to use it to make money. And if that’s the case you should be embarrassed.

Most people don’t know how to receive the truth about things they’d be ashamed to experience themselves. It’s too uncomfortable—I can’t really tell someone what love starvation feels like. It’s never seen as a need for empathy or support, it’s assumed to be my failure, or just my own ignorance. If I’m “complaining” about a situation, I must not know how to fix it—so I get unfounded ideas on where I might “find someone” as though they’ll make me smarter. They belittle single people into silence with their gut reaction suggestions, dusting off their hands and praising the good deed they did for the day. That should be enough for someone as desperate as a single person, right? I know they can’t look directly at me. I know how much shame they feel on my behalf. But compared to the pain of wanting and never having what everyone else seems to find? Shame is adorable. 

I never let anyone see me starving. To others I’m happy and social, exercising the gift of humor only a bullied child acquires. That’s because I can’t handle pity on top of everything else I’m feeling. I can’t take how devalued and quite frankly ugly I feel when they suggest I go out with [insert someone they’d never date themselves]. I can’t take the smug superiority on their faces when they give me dating advice, then I tell them I already know it doesn’t work, then they assume I’m single because I’m too “jaded” to take their dating advice. It’s my fault all over again. I’m the starving one, and their reactions make it all my fault. “Oh, you’re hungry? I guess you should eat these scraps laying here on the ground. Oh, you don’t want them? I guess you’re not really hungry then, are you?” Meanwhile they hold their partner’s hand, biting into a juicy Georgia peach. 

I think I deserve to tell my love story—the story of someone love has seemingly forgotten. Someone love has left on hold indefinitely, grating muzak in the background at stadium volume. I think pain and hunger like mine are more valid and more common than they are embarrassing and blame-worthy. I feel triumphant. I feel accomplished for pressing on, for trying to find productive uses for my pain instead of allowing myself to be buried by it. I think we should give celebrating people like me a try, instead of continually upholding the bloated pageantry of wedding culture just because two people got what they wanted. 

I’m starving, but I’m winning too. My hope is as strong as my pain, and after all this time if that isn’t an achievement I don’t know what is. I think faith in love in the absence of love is one of the most romantic stories we can tell. It’s easy for someone who’s found love to believe in it. Talk to the person who hasn’t yet. She’s the one with something interesting to say.

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xo

Shani