What is the Point of Dating?

You die alone anyways

When my daughter was 16 and always mad at me.

I wake up with a guardian on my chest. Her wet green eyes watch me come to life. A vibrating sentry to my breath. Occasionally, she reaches out and touches my nose, my chin, an eyelid that wants to stay closed for just a little longer. No wonder in some cultures they think cats will suffocate babies while they sleep. Her claws hitch on my skin, and I tuck it under blankets to hide myself. Just one more minute.

I’m still in bed when my daughter emerges from the bathroom with a perfectly winged line and announces that she ordered tubing mascara. Tubing really changes the game—obviously not the kind of tubing where you float down the river drinking White Claws, but the kind where your mascara dries as this gummy substance that wraps around and clings to the hairs on your lids. Makeup fallout can make your face look like it had a bad day, even if you had a regular one.

I want to go on dates and fall in love, but I don’t wanna share my room. My entire childhood was about the way you could fit three kids into small spaces. We had a bunkbed with a trundle—all about cramming, stacking and shoving our freckled arms and legs into place. We couldn’t figure out if the top bunk was the worst or the best.

Not long after the cramming and stuffing came my own motherhood and not the kind where you place a baby in her room and watch her from your screen, but the kind where she is glued to you until she is 10. Where mother and daughter sleep and wake, side-by-side. Her toys stuffed in the kitchen cabinets because there’s nowhere else to put them.

And then she is glued to you until she is twenty-four, and now she picks out the best photos for your Hinge profile. You both decide that you have ‘no children’ because you are two adults and the only underage people in the house are cats.

I see mothers of young kids and think about the things the mothers of adults used to say out loud to me. It goes by too fast. It doesn’t last forever. I like it this way though, probably because she is still living at home and comes to my house in the morning with the same unruly hair the toddler version used to have. Her cat trails behind her, and they remind me of a Ghibli house movie. We are now more Velcro than Krazy glue because we can hook into each other and detach with ease.

I remind her that she’s always been a part of me, even when I was a baby, even if it’s just half. Still, I identify with being child-free by choice while my daughter sits on the couch and shares a bowl of chips and salsa with me.

I have these moments lately, probably because I watch too much reality TV, where I get angry at surrogacy—at the idea that one wealthy woman can rent the body of one poor woman and grow her baby in it. At that point, isn’t it less about love and more about wanting to see what your genes can do? But here I speak from a place of biological privilege where I can stare into the brown eyes of my own adult child and already know that she makes excellent salsa.

Imagine being in that role, though. Your baby is in another woman’s womb and you watch her eat a doughnut and say, “That’s not the kind of thing that I’m paying you to eat.”

Maybe I’m just mad because I’ve always been on the poor, young, struggling breeder side of the equation. It shouldn’t be so shameful to be a young mother. Imagine everyone who has babies when they’re young has a robust social safety net. All they have to do is take care of their baby and the community will take care of them. That would be some real pro-life shit. Being a low-income mother is a perpetual state of struggle. There was a period in our lives where we almost got a brand new apartment with subsidised rent. My drive to secure our own rooms had me working two jobs. When the time came to process the application, I made about forty dollars a month too much, trying to be too many people. I could have qualified if I didn’t have to work so hard.

I’m still hooked on the struggle—always looking for a wall to bang my head up against. There is no comfort without discomfort. No peace without drama.

There was this element of dating that was me wanting someone to share the rent. I don’t know exactly how to live my life anymore. What even is romantic love if not mental illness? Doesn’t it just end up being the same as sharing a room with a sibling once all the heat cools off? Maybe that’s why I’m not excited when I think about waking up next to anyone but my cat. There’s just me and my need to be selfish and alone with my books and my words and the cold expanse of bed and time.

Dating apps are full of so much typing, and the men all seem to be different versions of the same fun-loving person. I want to hear a recording of what your voice sounds like the first time we disagree. I want to watch the way you wait in a long line. You know what it is, is that they end up being mean to me. Romance is either going to end with meanness or death. Within a couple of days of swiping, I reach the limit of unanswered messages on Hinge. I bet you have to pay money to leave more people hanging. That’s the new way dating apps work.