Keep up with Garden and Gun. By Vivian Howard. I should note that I never dabbled much in courtship in the first place. I was and still am kind of alarmed at the idea of purposeful datingβmeaning you and I go out together with the purpose of seeing if we like each other.
Perhaps this is because as a young woman growing up in the Howard house, I felt as though my job entailed making sure everyone liked me.
I was quiet when it was time to be seen and not heard, funny when the silence needed to be broken, and provided an open ear when someone needed to vent. The performance prevented me from considering for even a second whether or not I actually liked my dates.
By my mid-twenties, I had therefore all but given up on the enterprise, and the only date I went on during the first two years I lived in New York was with a balding, heavyset man I encountered on the very first dating site, Match. At the time and maybe still , I thought meeting someone on the internet was the silliest thing imaginable. Plus, I never ever would have seriously deemed this man, who was more than a decade my senior, a potential boyfriend, so the venture seemed safe from a rejection standpoint.
He and I met at the wine bar below my apartment. We chatted over a glass. Then he asked if the date was a prank. A few months later, I took a more comfortable path to romance and got involved with a coworker friend. My days of dating were officially over or so I thought , and aging men on Match could scroll with confidence, knowing they would not be trolled by a twentysomething with a strange sense of humor. That is, until I joined the beleaguered ranks of all the other people who filed for divorce in the wake of the pandemic.
