“I’m going back on the dating apps,” Rae announced. It felt very firmly like the only logical next step. “I’ve got under two years to lock in a husband.” She hadn’t thought much about the marriage deal since she and Dustin had ended. It was too impossible to picture going on a single date with someone else, let alone spending her whole life with them. After Dustin, settling down could only mean settling. She’d told herself that she didn’t care about getting married or having kids anymore, that she’d dumped her marriage and motherhood goals into some Brooklyn dumpster, but here it was, her most primal desires—or at least fears—exposed in this drunk speech.
Her window to get her life back on track was closing. She turned thirty in just under seven hundred days. The clock was ticking, counting down to her irrelevance and undesirability as a woman, and she had to act fast.
She downloaded a dating app right there—the app the guys at work talked about as having the highest return on investment—and even paid forty-three dollars for the premium version to get unlimited daily swipes.
“Do you really think this will make you feel better?” Ellen asked softly.
“Yes,” Rae said, hurriedly filtering photos as she built her profile. “I do.”
She began swiping, one profile every 0.75 seconds—double her pace from two years ago. It was a perverse kind of satisfaction, how she’d at least improved at something.
Within six minutes, she already had twenty-two matches, boosting her ego a few percentage points.
Two of her matches messaged her.
Heyy! How’s it goin?
Yo how’s ur week been
“What uncreative openers,” Rae said. She reviewed their profiles again, finding glaring red flags—the peace sign, the backwards hat,the dead fish in hand. These were the same Peter Pans who’d been in the love market back when she’d tried out online dating after her quarter-century crisis.
While there was a doomed-but-amusing feeling to sifting through New York’s weasel-infested dating pool in her midtwenties, in her late twenties it just felt doomed and depressing, a loop that never ended except in the wrong ways.
She deleted the app, resenting how she could’ve bought an entrée with that money instead, or half a massage. She’d have to meet someone in real life instead, linger in the ice cream aisle of the grocery store until a guy without a wedding ring walked by or go to one of those speed-dating events that were synonymous with desperation. The thoughts made her feel like she was about to throw up.
Taking a swig of Ellen’s water, Rae slurred, “I’m sorry I never listened to you. About Dustin.”
“It’s okay,” Ellen said. “Love makes people crazy.”
Rather than resenting this mantra, Rae found it newly inspirational. Leaping up, she rummaged through her work bag and took out the Stall Street Journal, which, after the nonpromotion, she’d decided she would drop down the garbage chute. The chute now felt like a very cheap form of disposal compared to a fire.
Walking the three short steps into the corner kitchen, she lit one of the burners on the gas stove.
“Rae—” Ellen warned.
“I won’t set off the fire alarm.” Holding out the journal’s opening page, she willed the thick paper to catch fire.
Ellen appeared beside her, turning off the burner.
The flame wasn’t big enough to require them to blow it out. It curled up into itself, but not before singeing Dustin’s inscription.
It wasn’t the sensational combustion Rae would’ve liked, but it achieved its symbolic effect. She didn’t have it in her heart to burn the whole journal. Not that she was sure she had much left in her heart anymore.
“Fuck them,” she said, and it was more than just Dustin and her boss now. It was her dad, too, for ghosting her after the long, heartfelt email she’d had the guts to send him a few weeks ago, expressing how she wanted to work on their relationship. And theFuck youwas also for her cheating college boyfriend and those dating app frat bros who’d never texted her back, and all the subway man-sprawlers, and all the pressure to conform to antiquated gender norms, and all the myths or nonmyths that single women over thirty are societal deadweight, and the whole implicitly anti-women world.
Hurling the journal under her bed, she spread out on the armchair, head on Ellen’s lap, feet draped on the armrest. She noticed a fresh run in her tights, or maybe it was an old one.
Ellen stroked her hair, tucking sections behind her ear in even increments.
Rae’s anger deflated, like a balloon popped on a windy rooftop. She was just tired. So tired.
“Ellen?” she mumbled.
“Rae-bae?”
“Do you think it’ll ever happen?”
Theitwas all encompassing—theitof Rae ever falling in love again and getting married, theitof rebuilding something real with her dad, theitof Dustin recovering, theitof having a career that didn’t crush her.
