I’m Allowed To Blame The Universe For Why I’m Still Single

My friends like to poke fun at the pathetic state of my love life. Facebook is in on it too, apparently. “See what “X” has shared on his profile!”, the Social Media Satan chirps at me from my sidebar. How Facebook fails to know that I’ve done that about every three hours since I met “X” nearly a week ago is beyond me. Then again it also has also sent me ads lately suggesting that I’m from Yemen. I am very much an Ashkenazi Jew from Canada.

I’m a practical person and take nothing for omens, but I thought by the way my path with “X” crossed so fluidly, something would come out of our meeting.

I was drunk this morning with post-coital fulfillment. Intoxicated to the point where receiving his text saying he “didn’t think this should continue” wasn’t even disappointing, just simply a sobering wake-up call to my reality plagued by singledom. When we slept together I was only two beers in, but I was inebriated on my own satisfaction that I somehow managed to attain intimacy with another human being. “First time in seven months… done”, relished my brain. As if actually enjoying my elusive moment of pleasure was secondary to taking into account the momentous significance of the evening.

Before sleeping with “X” I had been on four other first dates in two months. All of them went well save for one, and I was getting the feeling that the failure of each to materialize into a second date was alarmingly personal. But this guy I happened to succeed in actually sleeping with. So even more concerning was that it managed to fail even after that.

Cosmopolitan and my taken friends tell me that if I follow the prescribed rules, it should lead to sexual gratification and maybe, if I’m lucky, a romantic relationship. I have heeded this advice very seriously and simply stopped looking for love, in the hopes that it will find me. So when I finally, actually least expected it, and “X” walked effortlessly into my life in his handsome, Middle Eastern way, I dared to imagine there was a chance he might just stay around longer than the others. We hooked up, as I was hoping might happen.

When I feel like I maybe had him tied down, I could no longer repress my romantic imagination. Therefore, I took his next-day rejection as the wrath of the Universe for pre-emptively planning our Jewish-Muslim wedding like the giddy, progressive schoolgirl that I am.

In a class I took last semester entitled “Early Modern Atheism”, my professor, with her stylistically dry wit, remarked how a modern-day St. Augustine would be on Tinder for a very, very long time before his conversion. “Swipe… swipe”, she said with an animated, cross-eyed face, eliciting a round of laughter from our seminar. I have to wonder though, is this seemingly cosmic conspiracy to prevent my emotional and physical gratification somehow trying to tell me something? That relationships are just not a good idea for me and I should focus my attention elsewhere? To a higher purpose? A God I don’t believe in?

My most substantial relationship was a two-month long stint two years ago with a guy who exclusively purchased American Apparel underwear and refused to admit his staunch vegetarianism was ethical as opposed to “financial” (no one is a “financial vegetarian” when in today’s era chicken is neoliberal and plentiful). I did not possess the right to call him my boyfriend. He was beyond such labels.