Becoming Unhinged: Chaotic Thoughts on Modern Dating

It’s been a while since I’ve published on here because

For two months, I couldn’t write.

Well I did, but in broken drips and drabs and goofy scraps that I metaphorically kept scrunching up and tossing into the dustbin (deleting from my laptop).

I had plans to write about sober psychedelic crying and the meaning of life and how strange it is to finally hang up my vagabond shoes and try out this odd little thing called employment and non-nomadacy. But I hated the music of my words, how it was vulnerable in a way that wasn’t funny at all and how I was reaching for the right letters to describe these ideas but what was left in my palms remained an ache with no name.

Then I went for a walk in the woods with my friend and she said I should stop trying to write about what I think I should write about and just write about exactly what’s on my heart instead. I smiled at how right she was and then I cringed in vague alarm because I knew what was on my heart and let me tell you, it was scarier than a midnight Delhi alleyway, lonelier than a desolate Laoisan highway and more sickening than a crowded bus that twirls on the cliff faces of Nepalese mountain roads.

Hinge.

I needed to write about Hinge.

Becoming Unhinged

“Actually, you won’t believe it, we met on Hinge” I laugh, shyly. My boyfriend- a 6 foot 7 man with messy brown hair, a taste for classic literature, a twinkle in his eye and a talent in the kitchen who bares an affection for my exact music taste joins me in explaining “We knew it within the first five minutes of our first date, that we would be together”. The recipients of our modern day love story smile and say “awww, that’s so sweet”. The sun begins to set behind us and dolphins jump, with merriment, on the distant horizon.

Of course this only happened in my head, on the fateful evening I downloaded everybody’s favourite dating app.

The reality of course, had a lot less dolphins and a lot more mutual ghostings, awkward silences, avoidant attachment styles, half-arsed song exchanges and the taste of disappointment at the bottom of the whiskey glass.

I blame the men in question, modern society, and my own self in equal measure.

The problem with Hinge is that it reflects a modern dating culture that is grounded in nonchalant behaviour, detached attitudes, fickle hearts and endless shiny options. The problem with me is that I am potentially the least nonchalant person to ever exist. The problem with the men is that the ones I seem to like tend to like me more when I’m pretending to be nonchalant. The problem with pretending is that you can only do it for so long. And it doesn’t feel good to pretend. It doesn’t feel good in the chest.

Maybe it’s an issue that I’m creating: that I feel like I have to be this watered-down, digestible, easy-breezy version of myself in order to be loved by a viable Hinge suitor. I feel like I have to extract, with horror-story dental tools, the ladylike giggle from my genuine cackle. I feel like I have to shave off some trauma from my childhood stories and toss the marrow right out of my secrets and straighten the personality (tangles) clean out of my hair. I feel like I have to slip on shoes and cool-down my hot takes and pretend that I didn’t just make you a (life-changing) playlist because the rules of Hinge dictate that I am most desirable when I don’t care about you and that, of course, a low maintenance, diluted personality is the gleaming casual token to a true love that we’ll name “a situationship”.

Here’s a hot take that I won’t ruin with a euphemism: Whether the game of nonchalance is in my head or genuinely on the app, I don’t want to play it anymore.

What I want is to unleash my ugly cackle into the wind, write an 18th Century-style love letter after a first date and to lay down beside somebody in a field with our most honest secrets spilt around us, our fingers intertwined with the confession of our flaws whilst a shared silence of complete understanding descends upon us like a fine dust.

Is there an app for that?

The more I think about it, I don’t want somebody to love me for the diluted version of myself anyway. If somebody is going to love me anytime soon, I want them to run towards the depth of feeling that I bring to the table. I want someone to find beauty in the truth of my ugliness and respite in the honesty of my laugh. I want to someone to be real with, to be distinctly uncool with, to be messily authentic with. I don’t want to hold back and I no longer want to pick and choose which parts of myself I think are the most palatable, only for the selected pieces to be carelessly tossed like confetti by a bare minimum man on a random Wednesday afternoon anyway.

In the meantime, even if the meantime turns into a lifetime, I have grown to like the idea of being alonewith the truth of myself as opposed to having company for my contrived persona.

There’s this vision I can’t get out of my head lately of me ending up alone and it’s not the nightmare I once thought it would be. There I am, in a wild garden, wrinkled by life, scorched by the sun, Thyme, Rosemary and twigs unintentionally tangled into my hair as I’m laughing into the wind. Really laughing.

Not a giggle.

A cackle.

Anyways, all my favourite love stories are the ones that aren’t nonchalant. Like this one:

Thailand, 2024, Beneath the Tamarind Trees

I met my Australian ex boyfriend on the back of a Toyota Hilux in the searing heat of Northern Thailand. We had both signed up to work on a small, rugged farm in the middle of nowhere and we were the first of eight volunteers to arrive.

It’s funny how one seemingly mundane sentence can change the trajectory of your entire life. “Hi”, I said, as the Hilux swerved to doge the chickens of a narrow village street, “my name is Emily”.

Later, we sat on a precarious bamboo structure betwixt the crickets, snakes and the dull light of a candle. I was so sick of the solo travel script by then, of having to state my country, my age, my drug of choice (nicotine) and my career path- always in that particular order. But Anthony and I spoke about none of those things. We spoke about music. About god. About neuropsychology. My holy trio, and his. I liked how his gentle, intentional cadence met my incongruent flow of chaotic words. I liked his accent, very much. And I liked how he agreed that you don’t have to pick between science and god, on the contrary, you can’t have one without the other.

For a long time I had been drifting around Thailand, scared and alone, devoid of the blanket of familiarity that grounds a person. But in that dull light which roared with the chorus of various insects, I found a home in our commonality of mind and spirit.

We fell in love on that farm. Beneath the jagged tamarind trees. On our morning bicycle rides through the village. Between silent glances that gleamed through the elaborate corridors of Buddhist temples. With our hands in the dirt, digging for tomatoes. In the thick drizzle of summer Thailand storms. In the quiet 4am hour- the moonlight sauntering through the bamboo cracks and onto our dusty sheets- revealing intertwined hands and whispers of obscure philosophy.

When we said goodbye two weeks later, I remember sitting on a dishevelled bus taking me across the Laotian border, thinking to myself “I may never see him again but I’m just so happy to know he exists in this world”.

Many weeks later, what I let go came bounding back to me in Vietnam. Him and I had realised, in our time apart, that we were in love, and that life is far too short and far too strange to not run wildly towards where love exists. For us, that meant reuniting in the Hanoi rain, on the eve of my 24th birthday.

There, in Vietnam, our love expanded over cobbled avenues, coffee shops, remote beaches and steaming bowls of pho. It grew quietly in the shared silences of our reading sessions and spilt onto the floor of clunky busses where we sat, side by side, sharing a single pair of broken wired headphones. As Jeff Buckley infiltrated our ears simultaneously, I leant onto his shoulder, gazed out of the window which revealed a tranquil mirage of rice fields flashing past and thought to myself“I don’t think I’ve ever been this happy with anyone in my life”.

Many months later, Anthony and I would breakup in the small and cosy confines of our shared seaside apartment in my hometown. It was the type of heartbreak that rips you asunder. That changes you irrevocably from the moment it pierces. That shatters you so entirely that, months later, when the pieces are put back together, you are are almost an unrecognisable entity to who you were before. It’s the heartbreak that makes you hike. Makes you write. Makes you pack up all you own and throw it in your car- hurtling the open roads for months, just for a shot at tasting respite. It’s the type of heartbreak that is so severe and so stark that eventually, you’re grateful for it.

As time went on, as I shed him in the sunsets, the pain of it all fell from my shoulders like dead leaves.

Sometimes, when the pain eventually leaves, it takes the memories with it. But not this time. I’m left with the stark image of tamarind trees, with the taste of salted Vietnamese coffee, with the sound of midnight crickets, the feeling of his shoulder beneath my head on the rattling bus and that same thought making a tender reappearance in the avenues of my psyche: “I may never see him again but I’m just so happy to know he exists in this world”.

— The last time I was really in love with a man

Anyway, enough about love and more about:

Celibacy

I’ve always claimed that “I’m not really one for one night stands and meaningless sex”.

But, like in the shadows of most bold claims, there were exceptions.

I made exceptions for the plot, for the Italians, for the travel flings, for the man on Hinge that didn’t know my favourite book but claimed that he was falling in love with me.

One day in the throes of a paralysing sadness in my Namibian hotel room my online therapist said something that changed me: “I think the exceptions hurt you”. This came two days after another encounter with the Italian surf instructor who lived down the road. Everything about the night had gone seemingly well. Afterwards, like usual, we had driven to the petrol station and consumed chocolate mint ice cream. Our exchanges had been gentle, respectful, intentional and dressed in encouraging whispers and spilt childhood secrets. Nothing had gone awry. So why do I feel so sad?

I still can’t tell you the exact reason why sex without the rootedness of commitment and fondness leaves me feeling drained and empty. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I form spiritual attachments to my bus drivers, feel solidarity with the person stuck behind me in traffic and feel as though the cashier who works down the road at my local grocer is a warm, extended family member. Maybe it has something to do with the best friend I had at 3 years old. When she moved cities, the nursery school teacher had said to my mom “don’t worry, Emily is young enough to forget her in a couple of weeks”. But it’s been 23 years and I’ve never once forgotten her or the way we laughed together on that swing-set.

We may live in a world that celebrates non-attachment now more than ever, but inconveniently, that is simply not who I am. And as inconvenient as it is, I’ve learnt that it’s my duty to treasure and nurture this part of myself.

With this in mind, I began to pause and retort back to the messy, colourful drawing-room that is my life. It was time to change something about this, not for a particular expected result or earth-shattering transformation, but simply, with curiosity, to see how it would feel. I really believe that making big shifts in our lives should simply begin with a curious question. In this case, it was: “I wonder what it would feel like to spend some time intentionally celibate?”

(Spoiler alert: like an utter cliche, it ended up having a lot to do with the rock climbing gym).

My celibate era, sure, has been fringed with a dull thrum of loneliness that beats like a distant drum in the background of my days. It has been decorated with a craving for physical touch, the gentle etching of fingers on the shoulders, that only a lover knows how to paint. But, more deeply, these days have also been filled with a distinct euphoria that can only come from dancing in the kitchen at night alone. It has been filled with the rigorous exploration of hobbies. With sacred solitude coffees on the beach at sunrise. With treasured silences in the woods. With falling in love with what once was my biggest fear: sleeping alone, night after night, occasionally consoling myself after my 3am nightmares. I have looked at my naked body in the mirror and smiled the way you can only smile at a tender secret. One night I looked at myself in the glow of a candle and for the first time since I was a kid, I could see constellations in the pattern of my freckles.

Sure, I miss the Italians and the whispers and the forehead kisses of it all, but in the last few months my body feels more mine than it ever has before and crazier than that, a quiet yet revolutionary fact has crept its way towards my heart: it always was, first and foremost, mine. I can stomach the loneliness for the chance to sit with this feeling, this reclamation, this remembering, this honouring of the sensitive side of myself that withers in the bed of a stranger.

And there’s something special about the windows rolled down on a forested road on a Tuesday morning. How the leaf-filtered sunlight spills onto the empty passenger seat. How The Dire Straits are played at my favourite volume: ear-splitting. How the coffee tastes different when it is just mine to savour. How my fingers in the outside air can feel it now more than ever: the everything of it all.

Ah, sweet solitude.

Quote Of The Day

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good” - John Steinbeck