Don’t Tell your Hinge Match You don’t Drink Beer

and other ways to abandon yourself

In Salt & Sour¹,

Yoda Olinyk

’s 2020 memoir, she writes, “When we truly love who we are, we don’t tend to give up huge pieces of ourselves to others without thinking twice.” Yoda’s book is not about sobriety, but about that one time she let a man pressure her into opening a restaurant to fulfill his dream. She does not let herself off the hook, but illustrates the loneliness and exhaustion of deferring her own needs to drive the car from the passenger seat. Perhaps this is not the story I should read before I go on a first date.

This guy on Hinge suggests we meet up for a beer. He has a mustache, looks happy in pictures in the outdoors. There is something about his smile that distracts me from the fact that he has a drink in his hand in three of them. I say okay because the beer is not real. There is no date and time when this will happen. It’s just a thought, and non-alcoholic beers exist. A drinker and non-drinker aren’t Montagues and Capulets. This doesn’t necessarily have to end in tragedy.

But, didn’t he read the part on my profile where I say that I don’t drink? Why didn’t I just say I don’t meet up for a beer? I really don’t. I haven’t met up with anyone for a beer in almost three years. This dating identity crisis just happens to take place on the tail of reading both Yoda’s story and

Carmen Maria Machado

’s memoir, In the Dream House². Both narratives detail relationships in which the authors are being emotionally abused or manipulated by their partners.

I don’t have a fear that my partner will abandon me. It’s the terror/prediction that I will abandon myself. That self-knowledge looms over me. I know I can live without the guy, but that doesn’t stop me from not wanting to create friction. My personality is glass. Let’s get along. Let’s watch you have a beer. I don’t mind.

It’s me that I can’t live without, though. I don’t know if I would recognize safety in a relationship, but maybe I am good at spotting danger. Maybe I can trust myself. Why would I want to leave myself? It’s easy with alcohol to just say, “I’m not going to pick that up again.” It’s not so easy to abstain from men.

After Yoda’s book, through no conscious planning, but because it comes up twice on Booktok, I pick up Carmen Maria Machado’s, In the Dream House. The story explores an emotionally abusive romantic relationship in vignettes. The form illustrates how fragmented it feels to be in something like that. How you have to keep reforming the story to keep yourself in it. That’s the power of an addiction to a person.

She writes, “In the pit of it you fantasize about dying, tripping on a sidewalk and sliding into the path of an oncoming car. A gas leak silently offing you in your sleep. A machete-wielding mad man on public transit. Falling down the stairs but drunk, so you flop limb over limb like a marionette and feel no pain. Anything to make it stop. You have forgotten leaving is an option.”

It never starts with that feeling. If I could look into his mustache and know for certain that I would be crying on the bathroom floor over some new dumb thing in a year’s time, I could say, yessir no thanks. They all start with that feeling of being high, though. How could they not? But then, there are the most painful moments of life that happen on the dark side of romance, the ones where your soul leaves your body. I know they’re secretly happening all around me, to people who look like they’re in love. People keep those dark parts hidden while opening restaurants and writing in MFA programs all while gaslighting themselves that maybe this is what love must be.

Will I do something different? Is it so strange that I see myself living the rest of my life contentedly, without a partner? Is there something wrong with that? Am I only feeling this way because Hinge is showing me the most vanilla men of Newbury Park and Thousand Oaks? And by vanilla I mean that they wanna meet for a beer. I mean that they look like they would look right at home atop a stool at a sports bar and the walls in their houses are bare, and the windows covered by vertical blinds. I’m probably going to get kicked off of Hinge.

There is so much about presenting yourself to the dating market that is confronting, especially those of us that have quit drinking. What if my age, looks, economic status, and new idea of fun aren’t marketable?

What is a fun person, anyway? I probably look at the men with more judgment than they have for me. We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world as we are, and I have a judgment for everyone.

The nondrinkers vs the drinkers, cat people vs dog people, restaurant people vs office people, indoor cat people vs outdoor cat people, cats not allowed on the counter people vs cats allowed everywhere people, vegan vs carnivore, Winco shoppers vs Erehwon braggers. People proclaim who they are with their bumper stickers. I find myself getting just as annoyed at the love is love. “Women are People” yard signs as I do at the flying Trump/Maga flags. Have you declared which team you are on because if you’re on Trump’s team, it means you hate women and if you’re on the other team, which doesn’t even have a leader, then you hate America.

If you let your cat out, then you don’t care if she dies. You deserve to lose her. If you work at a restaurant, you must have let life get away from you. You didn’t hit the target, did ya?

I think people who don’t work on a banker’s schedule still deserve to be loved, but my profession has been a problem in almost every relationship I’ve ever been in.

I wait tables so I can write whatever the hell I want. I wait tables because it gives me the freedom to create. I could lose every reader I’ve gathered because I can still sell a bottle of wine. Perhaps there is still a little of the self-abandonment in the way I make my living, but nothing is perfect. No job, no partner, no cat except Morticia, but I guess even she produces more hairballs than I would like. Sometimes I compromise my values.

This is all just to say, I am afraid, but I’m doing it, anyway. I’m not meeting that guy for a beer, though. Jabroni doesn’t even know how to read.

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2. View on Bookshop.org