2/10/25

From the houses I slept in, to the trusted adults that picked up from school, growing up yielded options to choose from. The one thing I had no options of whatsoever, was dates to take to dances, romancers to flirt with in class, or people to write home about in general. That was, until dating apps mysteriously appeared on my iPhone - potentially prior to the age restriction of downloading being met. If Romeo and Juliet have taught society in general one thing, it's that lovers aren't true lovers until they're star-crossed, and as a rehabilitated theatre kid myself, I took this well and true to heart. 

Lancaster Pennsylvania was not one for true love. Rather, it was a town full and scorned with those who deemed their significant other "good enough". The experiences of my childhood, if nothing else, taught me what "good enough" looked like long term, and most importantly, that "good enough" was more along the lines of "enough" than anything I would categorize as necessarily "good". Not to say I didn't experience love, in fact, love was one of the most consistent aspects in my coming of age. Love was bestowed upon me in bounds, love from my parents, love from my grandparents, love from my parents friends, and people I barely knew. I was told I was loved every day of my life, and with zero sense of irony, I cannot place words to express how grateful I am to have known love in the way that I did. I knew love. Love was when my sister and I played in each other's rooms after dinner, love was when my Mom let me stay at my friend's house on one of the 6 nights a month I was supposed to stay at hers, love was when my Dad would hurt his back sleeping on the pull-out couch with my because I wanted a father and son sleepover. However, love as experienced outside of what my parents bestowed onto my sister and me, was more prominently a matter of fact or simply word of mouth than an aspect of life I saw on a regular basis. Aside from my grandparents, love was not an aspect of unconditional fondness, but something you said to someone as they stepped out the door in case they never heard it again, or something you added to an apology after a particularly loud argument, just to make sure they remembered. Love was everywhere, but love was not romantic. Love in Lancaster was not something to people in love shared, but a statement of opinion, rather than a reflection of action.

Forgive our parent's discretions, for they know not what could have been. Love in their generation was not something expressed almost at all, let alone as abundantly as it is today. What's more, love itself was not abundant. In most normal cases, you were considered lucky to find yourself in the company of the least worst person in your high school, or even college, and leaving your romantic exploration at that. In others, it would take meeting the friend of a friend, or a particularly kind coworker to encounter such a happily ever after. However, for the rest, it gets increasingly harder. Finding yourself in the misfortune of being classified as any kind of minority only decreases your chances the more niche it becomes, and when you're as doomed as those who begrudgingly awaken one cold December day in 2002 in Lancaster Pennsylvania, loafers pre-lightened and voice an octave higher than expected, you're nothing short of fucked. The invention of dating apps was meant to solve this matter of issue. No longer were you cornered into a high school, college, or office and told "Okay now you have to pick one" as a means to find the person you are meant to spend the rest of your life with. Dating apps presented the opportunity to find that person who had somehow evaded your attempts to meet them by way of a 5-mile distance between the two of you, and allow you to meet someone based on more personal matters such as a shared interest in sushi or long walks on the beach. What's more, your ability to be seen as normal in whatever city, town, or state you ended up in, was much less limiting. Unlike in real life where, if you were, for example, gay, you had your options of 3 different gay men, all of which your friends promise you'll love, none of which can throw a ball more than 10 feet, dating apps opened the door, and closet, for gay men from all over to see and desire you. - Now for the negatives. In theory, the broadening of options, and locations, in which you can now meet people seems like a great alternative to what all of our uncles with a particularly close male friend had to endure, when one is unfortunate enough to find themselves in rural areas, or just Phoenix as a whole, it doesn't take many swipes until you're swiping across state boarders and asking your mom how far away Beaver County is from Lancaster (6 hours and 45 minutes). 

This leads me to where I am today. Despite being nowhere near a position to be picky, given my circumstances, I learned very quickly the kinds of love I wanted, and the kinds of love I would be spending the rest of my life avoiding at all costs. Whether that is a result of the love I was exposed to, or what I thought was love that I experienced earlier than the legal team for Tinder had intended, it has led me down a path that, in 22 years - and counting - I have yet to find myself making any inherently good nor bad decisions since. What I have found are two cities in which everyone outside of it seems much more to my liking than anyone down the street. There is obvious and ample room for analysis as to why or how such a predicament came about, as originally I had considered it a circumstance of the rural and less than fruitful offerings of Pennsylvania, I now question if that can still be the case for the plentiful yet somehow still lacking offerings of a very different, 3000 mile away state I moved to. 

Over this last week, I've been stuck considering such a predicament, largely because of a jovial yet gut-wrenchingly painful conversation I had had not four days ago. I was sat on Katie's bed, our friend Sully sitting across from me, and Katie sitting to my left, she asked me "What do you think my red flag is?" Jokingly, I nodded to the four corners of her room, her figure art painted on the walls, a clown made out of a conch shell on her windowsill, and an additional three clowns painting hanging on the adjacent wall. Nowhere close to a red flag for people like us, who share more common thoughts than uncommon, but to your average Joe from Lancaster, maybe a room to be seen and not sat in. Her mouth still agape with shock at my answer, I asked her what mine was, and she retorted:

 "Your willingness to date long distance; without meeting them first."

I was thinking of something more along the lines of my willingness to pierce myself rather than paying a professional, but I won't act like that isn't the truth. As this blog will provide more than enough evidence, I'm someone who "considers" more than I should. I consider my life thus far, I consider the choices I've made, I consider why I've made the choices I've made and I consider why it is I'm considering doing it again. And as I sat on the corner of her bed, admittedly further away from her than I was before, I considered, not only why that was the case, but also if that was, in fact, my biggest red flag. My first thought was that, given my circumstances, I had more than a right to branch out beyond the confines of one city perplexed by the existence of queer people, and another that has so many a pup mask is seen as vanilla. I've always thought of my unfortunate affinity for cross-border booty calls to be a simple bad luck of the draw, but now I find myself wondering if it is something I actually like. What is it I find attractive about lacking the ability to see someone when I want to? If the ones a simple hop, skip, and a plane ticket away had been a simple hop and skip, would I find them worth my time? Or would they fall down the same shoot as the ones I deem ill-fitting for my expectations of my future?

Do I actually want them more, or do I simply like I can't have them?

The pursuit of love has driven me for longer than I'd like to admit. As a result, I've narrowed down what it is that I want in a way that I feel is rare for many, especially the sum of the many who are actively dating to find out. In my younger adult years, I was one of the some who found it more rare than not to be without a date on a Saturday night, its only been within recent years that I concluded I had had enough, and took an equal amount of time to figure out my own role in a relationship. The biggest error I found was that I simply never clicked in the way I felt I should for someone I wanted to be with long-term. But Katie's off-handed remark has me wondering how true that actually is. Did we not click, or did we simply live in the same area code? If we take after the media we see, then the media has certainly taught us one thing; scorned lovers are real lovers. In with the taboo, and out with high school sweethearts, we see the same story time and time again. Two people meet once, they fall in love but don't realize it yet. Upon their separation, they can't stop thinking of one another, and the more they do, the more they realize it can never become a reality. One of them has more courage than the other, and they both say "fuck it" and ride off into the sunset, overcoming their challenges and differences, and living all the more happily as a result. But typically in these stories, their "challenges" are more like Dads who oppose each other or opposing color pallets, not 3000 miles. My one true defense is that, unlike real-life dating, I don't seek these people out. They're friends who I've recently reconnected with or people who did at one point live down the street and moved further away after the point of our initial contact. But the facts remain the same. 

My quest for love has led me down many wrong roads, but for the most part, it has yet to lead me down any that weren't based in reality.  As much as it may seem like a childlike aspiration to expect the person living on an opposite coast will one day show up at your doorstep, it has happened in the past. Friends I've made across state lines have spent weekends at my house, even ones across country borders. However, these are cases in which our connection was founded on shared interests and similarities aside from physical appearance. So what is separating the friends that have, from the love interests that will never? My first relationship taught me that someone that felt right, could be the complete opposite. My second relationship taught me that someone who was right could feel very differently. My third relationship taught me that I couldn't force someone who I wanted to feel right to ever be right. So on and so forth. And through all the trials and tribulations, I've found pretty concrete evidence of who the right one actually is. The downside is, they simply are not here. Whether it is the people I'm surrounded by, or a result of a mass mindset in the location I currently live at, my cup runneth empty. And that leads me to this week, to these thoughts, and the one in particular that has been stuck in the back, forefront, and center of my mind; "why?"

The love I experienced as a kid was not the love I wanted to experience in my love, and I have spent a large part of the years proceeding it trying to experience love the way I know it should be. At my big age, I felt I knew what that love would look like in my life to make educated and concluding reactions to the lack thereof. I've paid my dues and dated them too, and come to the realization that even if I am the most driven, perfect, hard-working version of myself, the love of my life will not be found here. But that doesn't mean I'm going to stop looking. Granted, it does mean Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, and worst of all, Farmers Only have been put on temporary leave from my iPhone, but if so-and-so from Connecticut likes what he sees on his, I'm not going to ignore such a call to adventure just because I don't currently live in Connecticut. It just means until I live somewhere where offices and bars are populated by so-and-so's in cardigans and Calvins rather than JNCOs and Andrew Christians, I will keep my hopes high and my notifications on. Whether or not that is a red flag is beyond me, I choose to think of it as more of a magenta flag, neither a red nor green flag, but a flag that says "Please help I live in Arizona".