Is There Anyone Here For Me?
Rooms full of people have lost their potential.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a newsletter by Shani Silver.
I used to believe in the fantasy of a room full of people. I imagined that’s what adulthood was like, attending parties and dinners and gatherings of all kinds where opportunities to meet handsome strangers were commonplace. People gather, right? We’re social beings, we like to meet up and enjoy ourselves—that totally happens. Of course I’d seen rooms full of people fictionalized, but I was admiring the New Year’s Eve parties on screen in When Harry Met Sally, it’s not like I was walking around believing Twilight was real.
Everything I envisioned for myself when it came to dating used to be painted with a kind of relaxed optimism, because nothing I looked forward to ever sounded impossible, or even improbable. My whole life I wanted something very common and the older I got, the more dating culture robbed me of my ease and replaced my dreams with presumed disappointment and frustration. I wanted to meet a man at a party—that’s not asking too much. That’s not insane. As a result of all the normality in my desire, it never occurred to me that people gathering with an openness to connection was the stuff of pure fantasy. I might as well have wanted a vampire.