I would not say hard

I blogged yesterday, not for the first time, about my struggles with dating. I've blogged before about specific terrible dates and about how dating, generally, sucks. To quote Moira Weigel from that article, it “often feels like the worst, most precarious form of contemporary labor: an unpaid internship.” Paradoxically, it may be what sucks most about being single, which makes it tempting to opt out. We date because we hope that there's something worth it on the other side.

So you'd think I'd have wholeheartedly agreed with this piece, and though I hear her, I don't identify with her plight (and some things are objectively incorrect--for example, it's statistically easier to stay fit and eat well when you're single). I don't necessarily agree that being single is harder. There are things about being single that are hard, and there are things about being partnered that are hard. Making a marriage work is hard. Divorce, from what I hear, is really f*ing hard.

As Rebecca Traister and others have expertly pointed out, women are increasingly staying single because it's never been easier. We're good at life. We partner up only for the right reasons, and not because society makes it impossible to stay single. The calculus of being in a less than optimal relationship has shifted dramatically over the decades. For example,

For women, the marriage calculus is pretty simple: you can only reap the full benefits of today’s optimal marriage when your partner is an equal who pitches in and treats you well.

One reason that it's hard for me to date successfully is that I love my life--almost everything about it--and I'm not willing to give those things up (especially for a less than optimal relationship). I'm not willing to move to the suburbs. I'm not willing to commute. I'm not willing to eat meat. Clearly, I value the opposite--living in the city, having an easy commute, eating according to my values--more than having an easier time dating. But even as I fucking hate dating. If anything, I've learned to be pickier in various ways. Because the issue isn't that being single is hard; it's that I have reason to believe that having an optimal relationship is worth the work of finding it. It better be, because the search is a bitch.