I became a single mother seven years ago. I ended my marriage because I simply wasn’t happy, wasn’t in love and believed I deserved to feel fulfilled. I didn’t want to merely exist in life or in my most important relationship. I wanted to be my authentic self. I wanted more.
My estranged husband and I divided our things and worked out a custody arrangement. I worried about the criticism I’d receive for making what still so often feels like an unpopular choice. I wondered if I’d be able to support myself and my kids. But I didn’t worry about dating, or whether it would be hard or scary. I didn’t worry about never finding someone or being alone for the rest of my life — not once.
As a single person wandering the earth untethered for the first time in a decade, I was excited at the idea that I would get to go on dates and meet interesting people — people I would maybe be interested in and share common ground with, or learn from, or maybe just sometimes sleep with. I looked forward to kindness and connection and feeling seen. I was open to whatever form that showed up in.
I had flings and some relationships, none which lasted very long. But each time I dusted myself off and returned to the apps — the place where most romantic connections begin these days — I started to feel a greater and greater sense of dread. It wasn’t exactly that I had grown tired of meeting people. It was that I started to feel as if I was no longer what a growing number of men were looking for.
Whether they were 28 or 58, they all claimed to want someone who “doesn’t take herself too seriously.” I saw the line again and again, on profile after profile. Bumble, Hinge, Tinder or The Stir (the dating app for single parents), it was all the same: This unserious woman request was everywhere. I couldn’t swipe through five profiles without seeing it. Each time I’d furrow my brow and spit out, “Nope!” Still, after the past few years spent mostly alone, I started to ask myself, am I just too serious?
It’s true that life has been extra serious in recent years. Seven years ago, in the blink of an eye, I became fully financially independent from my ex-husband and took over the house and mortgage. I threw myself into work and landed my first editor job, and then another, and another after that. My kids have gotten older, too. One is now a teenager, and in some ways, both of their struggles feel more urgent than diapers and tumbles on the playground. I exercise daily and harder all the time to feel good in my body. My parents, nearing 70, seem to be plagued by pain and health issues now. My own mental health is complicated, and after almost 40 years in my own brain, I am still learning what it needs.
Life has sped up, it seems. And though I’m happier now in many ways than I have ever been, it’s endlessly demanding. Consequential. Serious.
Still, at perhaps my most driven, my busiest, my most impassioned season of life, there is this quiet whisper in the back of my head now when I go on a first date. “What version of yourself are you going to show up as?” it asks. Because though I feel like I’ve entered a more serious time in my life, the idea that I have to dumb myself down, pretend to be a breezy, uncomplicated woman, makes me roll my eyes so hard I might fall off my barstool.
I can be a lot of things. I can laugh at myself or be lighthearted. I can be quick-witted and sharp-tongued. And though I’m not necessarily looking for anything serious, that doesn’t mean that I want to have to feign some mythical unserious trait now required by an increasing number of men. I take my work, and my role as a parent and my shrunken but solid circle of friends seriously. I want someone who loves that about me.
I got divorced because I didn’t want to be an inauthentic version of myself, so I’m not about to become someone I think men want me to be. I’m going to keep being intense and wordy and sometimes massively stressed and a little unhinged. Every woman I know is similarly complicated. We’re not doing anything wrong by taking ourselves seriously. What a strange and anti-feminist request anyway. It is the nature of life, of growing older and learning yourself, and daily lists piling up and sometimes conspiring against you.
The other night I went on a date with a 30-year-old man. He was a neuroscientist with six pet rats (yes, that he saved from the lab). He kept veering from serious conversation, such as about his family and his last relationship, which ended catastrophically. Instead, he showed me videos of him scratching his pet rats’ bellies. He was trying to be unserious. Truly, I just wanted to hear about neuroscience and his heartache. Maybe we are all a little worried about being too much for someone. If we show up as our real self and someone leaves, it hurts more.
Yet I don’t know that many unserious women. We are free-spirited, funny, intense, passionate and so much more. We have giant hurdles, many of which men don’t have. Life is heartbreaking in its uncertainty, and we are all multifaceted and messy. We deserve to be exactly that.
And as a single woman ― the financial struggles and criticism, motherhood, men — sometimes it feels like no matter how much I do, it is never enough. My life is not uncomplicated nor unserious. Still, I’d rather do it all alone and be all that I am every day than wear a mask or shave off my rough edges. Whoever stays can stay. The rest can keep searching for the myth.