Oh. Love.

In the morning I go to my local beauty salon. An armpit wax and bikini? says the voice of a young woman with a singsong like voice. I take off my clothes and lie down in an obnoxiously white and bright room that makes me feel self conscious of my hyperpigmentation. The lady waxing me stops a moment and lays her hand across my stomach – are you pregnant? She asks. I scrunch my face confused and don’t reply quick enough, “oh, it’s because your stomach is very round”. I try and fail to explain but I can feel my face burning. My voice trails off and she apologies profusely. We continue the wax in silence. When she leaves the room for me to get dressed, I feel a deep ache at the base of my stomach, not from the fibroids or the endometriosis, and the already bright lights make me feel both exposed and wholly microscopic. 

In the evening I have a date with a man I’ve been speaking to for the last two weeks, he seems nice, but many men have presented roses but have failed to remove the thorns on the stems. So when it gets to 5pm and I’m pinning my hair up so it frames my face in a way that I love, I think of all the dates before this and I remind myself not to put my eggs in any baskets just yet, and to hold them close to my chest. We meet at a pub in Kentish Town, he hasn’t booked a table and like any Saturday night – it is overbooked and overcrowded, so i suggest a bar I know not too far away. It is quiet enough for two softly spoken strangers to converse over a glass of wine, and so we sit. An hour becomes two and a smiling waitress comes over – “you are so beautiful!” She exclaims to me and then looks to him, he smiles and agrees and I feel both the wine and the compliment flush my face. It feels good to feel beautiful under a gaze that is not my own. He asks why I’m still single after all these years and I explain to him, mildly tipsy “I think… the universe will keep giving you the same lessons in different packages until you recognise the pattern and break it. I thought I wanted a man to protect me, and look after me and fight for me. A man with knuckles hardened by life, when in fact I think my perception of masculinity has changed and it’s fluid, but I think I need a man with a gentle heart and soft hands”. He laughs and holds out his hands, I trace his fingers and say “your hands are very soft” he smiles and closes his hands over mine.

He asks if I’m hungry and I am, so we walk five minutes to a small Ethiopian restaurant that is bustling but there is a small corner with a table and two empty chairs and we’re ushered over. We order misir wot and lamb tibs which comes with injera. It is delicious and in the candlelight I catch myself looking at this gentle man’s mouth wanting to press my lips to his. And then I think, I am tipsy and just want to be held. I want to feel something, anything. I want to feel like I exist. Like I am seen. The bill comes and he shuffles, I interject maybe a little too quickly – “let’s split”.  We embrace and we go our separate ways home.

We meet again at a place I frequented as a teenager in King’s Cross, a bustling place. We order and eat, he mentions his friends are hosting a free show not far from where we are. The conversation is slower today, I feel overdressed and too hot and too perfumed. The food is terrible and smells mildly expired so I pretend to eat after regretting the first forkful, he notices and suggests i take it home. I explain that I don’t have the right bag to take it home in. The waitress puts the food in a plastic container anyway and she sets it down in the middle of the table. He says he’ll put it in his bag for me. The bill comes, the waitress looks to him and then looks to me. “We’ll split the bill” he announces a little too quickly. The waitress looks to him, and then looks to me eyebrows furrowed but she quickly replaces her frown with a toothy smile stretched a little too thin. I notice as she smiles at me that there is lipstick on her teeth. And so £12 on my card and £12 on his card. As I tapped my card on the reader Inwardly I think of the ‘cool girl’ monologue by Amy Dunne in ‘Gone Girl’ and realise that I am not a cool girl. On my way home later that evening, i notice he didn’t offer to give me the container of food back.

A few months later I’m encouraged to remake an online profile and try my hand at dating again. One morning i awake at 5am to play this game of dress up, sip a drink and talk to a man I have met on the internet for an hour or two. I meet a man, a thirty something year old tech – not quite a bro, and we do a morning coffee: an oat flat white in between soft yawns and sleepy conversation. He explains that he is still into his ex and i politely smile making a mental note to never again wake up at the crack of dawn to go on a date. The conversation goes on and I feel like im participating in a therapy session more than anything else. He messages a few days later saying he is wishing me positivity but doesn’t think I’m into him. I consider reminding him that he’s still in love with his ex. Instead I wish him the best and I genuinely mean it. And this is how it goes for  about three months. Conveniently slotting dates into the very busy schedules of the few matches I get. We both are ticking off ‘went on a date at 7:30am’ off of our to do lists this week. Sometimes we do a bottle of wine in a bar, some nibbles on the side. I watch as his eyes start to glaze over, his questions becoming increasingly obscene and I notice his hand making its way across the table. I lean back and looking look for the door. I find myself quietly disengaging.

So this is what looking for love in your thirties looks like if you missed the bus as it were. I can see why everyone is getting back with their exes – the streets are rough and I’ve found myself hovering on the LinkedIn’s of past flames wondering what they’re up to, thinking… ‘what if?’ And then come back to my senses. Conversations with friends and loved one’s always circle back to the inevitable “so… any dates?” And when I shrug my shoulders to change the conversation, – resistance “you should go out more”, “you should wear more form fitting clothing”, “you should go to this networking event” “you should ask your friends to set you up” and i wear the same stretched smile across my face and become unblinking, “i’ll think about it”. And I do think about it, and then I don’t. A part of me feels like I’ve let down eight year old me who believed in Disney love with an obstinate innocence. Sometimes I still smile to myself remembering the sketches of women in wedding dresses lining my notepads as a child. 

Something I noticed, something small, is that after a while, when you’re the only single one left, no one ever asks for your advice or your opinion on things. Your coupled friends will discuss life and all it’s in’s and out’s between themselves, but when you’re all together they pull out a magnifying glass and hold it over you, eyes searching for the problem. Some days you laugh, other days you shrink under their questioning eyes, but mostly you just want someone to ask “so what do you think?” Instead of darting inquisitive looks your way. I wonder, as we grow older – does my being as a solitary person stop me from being perceived fully? As whole? I’m not sure, I suppose i won’t know the answer until I’m on the other side of the fence. “Just invest more into your community”, one says to me after a two hour conversation about the house her partner had bought for them to move into. “Can I lipse my community?” I said, rolling my eyes at her. We all burst out laughing with one of them gesturing to me for a kiss, “Fair enough” she says, “It felt like the correct thing to say to you”. Community is beautiful but community cannot climb into bed with me at 2am and warm the cool side of the bed. There is an intimacy that partnership brings that is vastly different, and the most transformative part of battling with my feelings on this was to actually allow myself to ‘want’ genuine partnership without feeling like I’ve let myself down as a woman. I can be single, I can be independent, I can be self sufficient and still want partnership, and it doesn’t have to be a weakness – just… humanness. I think a lot of us would be happier if we were honest with ourselves regarding this pain point.

One evening in December, i made the decision to stop being the sad single woman. No, it wasn’t as easy as just saying “Sade, no more feeling like you’ve been left on the shelf”. But I began to see what an idol one can make of grief if not careful. Sadness can consume you, eat you up, turn you into someone that you’re not and i grew weary of always waking up with a heavy chest. I started to tackle the source of my feelings of abandonment and decided to climb out of the hole i had inadvertently walked myself into. Learning to let go of timeframes and constantly thinking about my biological clock has been one of the most beautiful freedoms I’ve ever felt. I’ve adjusted to the long stretches of silence during the week: The gentle humming of the fridge, the boiler that needs to be upgraded clanging away at 6am like a secondary alarm. The occasional piercing meow from Fig as she looks for my attention in the form of some kind of play. The faded high pitched shrieks from kids playing in the courtyard. Some silent evenings as i lean over the sink to water the plants tallied along my window sill, i exhale and still long for a pair of arms to wrap themselves around my waist, a voice in my ear to ask how my day was – breaking the quietness of my tiny home, a human softness I can collapse into, and all enveloping embrace. I want to bury my face into another and inhale until their comforting essence fills my lungs and I want to exhale love. My bones ache for a quiet calm intimacy. But I don’t allow myself to drift for too long or too deeply. Just enough to keep the embers of hope burning in my chest. i place a hand on my heart and I remind myself “what is for me will never pass me by” and I smile to myself grateful for this tiny flat, my sweet sweet cat, my job, my family and my friends and I remember that everything will be okay. Whether or not the future holds what I thought would be.