Gone Girl

lot of powerful, fabulous women who settle for regular guys, Average Joes and Able Andys? No, just kidding, don’t write that.’
    ‘Yes, I am single.’
    ‘Yes, my parents are definitely soul mates.’
    ‘Yes, I would like that for myself one day.’
    ‘Yep, single, motherfucker.’
    Same questions over and over, and me trying to pretend they’re thought-provoking. And them trying to pretend they’re thought-provoking. Thank God for the open bar.
    Then no one else wants to talk to me – that fast – and the PR girl pretends it’s a good thing: Now you can get back to your party! I wriggle back into the (small) crowd, where my parents are in full hosting mode, their faces flushed – Rand with his toothy prehistoric-monster-fish smile, Marybeth with her chickeny, cheerful head bobs, their hands intertwined, making each other laugh, enjoying each other, thrilled with each other – and I think, I am so fucking lonely .
    I go home and cry for a while. I am almost thirty-two. That’s not old, especially not in New York, but fact is, it’s been years since I even really liked someone. So how likely is it I’ll meet someone I love, much less someone I love enough to marry? I’m tired of not knowing who I’ll be with, or if I’ll be with anyone.
    I have many friends who are married – not many who are happily married, but many married friends. The few happy ones are like my parents: They’re baffled by my singleness. A smart, pretty, nice girl like me, a girl with so many interests and enthusiasms , a cool job, a loving family. And let’s say it: money. They knit their eyebrows and pretend to think of men they can set me up with, but we all know there’s no one left, no one good left, and I know that they secretly think there’s something wrong with me, something hidden away that makes me unsatisfiable, unsatisfying.
    The ones who are not soul-mated – the ones who have settled – are even more dismissive of my singleness: It’s not that hard to find someone to marry, they say. No relationship is perfect, they say – they, who make do with dutiful sex and gassy bedtime rituals, who settle for TV as conversation, who believe that husbandly capitulation – yes, honey, okay, honey – is the same as concord. He’s doing what you tell him to do because he doesn’t care enough to argue , I think. Your petty demands simply make him feel superior, or resentful, and someday he will fuck his pretty, young coworker who asks nothing of him, and you will actually be shocked . Give me a man with a little fight in him, a man who calls me on my bullshit. (But who also kind of likes my bullshit.) And yet: Don’t land me in one of those relationships where we’re always pecking at each other, disguising insults as jokes, rolling our eyes and ‘playfully’ scrapping in front of our friends, hoping to lure them to our side of an argument they could not care less about. Those awful if only relationships: This marriage would be great if only … and you sense the if only list is a lot longer than either of them realizes.
    So I know I am right not to settle, but it doesn’t make me feel better as my friends pair off and I stay home on Friday night with a bottle of wine and make myself an extravagant meal and tell myself, This is perfect , as if I’m the one dating me. As I go to endless rounds of parties and bar nights, perfumed and sprayed and hopeful, rotating myself around the room like some dubious dessert. I go on dates with men who are nice and good-looking and smart – perfect-on-paper men who make me feel like I’m in a foreign land, trying to explain myself, trying to make myself known. Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?
    So you suffer through the night with the perfect-on-paper man – the stutter of jokes misunderstood, the witty remarks lobbed and missed. Or maybe he understands that you’ve made a witty remark but, unsure of what to do with it, he holds it in his hand like some bit of conversational phlegm he will wipe away later. You spend another hour trying to find each other, to recognise each other, and you drink a little too much and try a little too hard. And you go home to a cold bed and think, That was fine . And your life is a long line of fine.
    And then you run into Nick Dunne on Seventh Avenue as you’re buying diced cantaloupe, and pow, you are known,