You think you want to date a 10, but who you need to watch out for is a 3

The pain of old patterns and a dating Venn diagram for the rest of us

A reminder that I use the paywall as a privacy wall on posts that delve into intimate topics like marriage, divorce, dating, non-monogamy, and/or sex. This is one of those. If you’re a paid subscriber and want to forward this to someone? Always ok! But I’d ask that you please not share screenshots or excerpts from beyond the paywall on social media. Thank you.

You might’ve missed my review of a new book on open marriage in The Washington Post, and the fun books-and-a-tote-bag way we’ll be raising money for abortion care over on Instagram! The first bag will be posted in this week!

---

I’m getting worse at dating. Or maybe dating is getting worse at me, impossible to say.

I tell myself that it’s just because it’s January (or, before that, the holidays or, before that, a month that isn’t May, June, July, August, September, or October). I tell myself that it’s because it’s Vermont and what do I want, things to actually go well? So I’ll be stuck here? I tell myself what other people have told me, that I got lucky, so wildly lucky, right out of the gate. That I had the most incredible luck in partners when I first started to date, that that was not normal, and now, well, here we are. Welcome to it. I tell myself that this is what women have been talking about when they say dating is hard or annoying or there are so few good men.

But maybe that’s not fair. Ideally what we do in life matches up with what we want to do, meaning, if I rent an apartment in Vermont and where I want to rent an apartment is Amsterdam then does Vermont actually suck or is it because what I’m doing isn’t matching up with what I want to do? You know the answer and so do I. When it comes to dating I used to know what I wanted or, more accurately, what I didn’t want. And I put it right in my bio: Not interested in a long term relationship, marriage, or monogamy in general. Been there, done that, have alllll the t-shirts ✌️ ENM, solo.

As you might imagine, this bio worked quite well. And that’s why dating has never seemed all that hard to me. I wanted complete freedom, I didn’t want to meet anyone’s family or help raise anyone else’s kids. I didn’t want anyone regularly infringing on my space and touching my stuff (what am I, 13?) I didn’t even want one partner. I realized that I had turned into a man in his twenties. I finally understood what it felt like to not ever want to discuss where something “was going.”

But life doesn’t always life the way you want it to life. This past week I was reminded of the Venn diagram/meme/joke about work: You can have it Good, Cheap, or Fast: Pick Two.

From “The Big Lie of ‘Good, Fast, Cheap’”

It made me wonder what a dating Venn diagram might look like, so I made one: