Help! I Think I'm Ready To Try Dating?

I am a very late bloomer. I've struggled endlessly with weight and body image issues.

Here’s The Thing is an advice column/newsletter where I mostly beg people to either stop dating someone or to ask their crush out. Or I talk about weird things that came to my mind that no one is paying me to write about. Or I make lists of stuff I want to buy.

You can submit your own question—or yell at me about how I’m wrong—by emailing me at 1followernodad@substack.com

A SWEETIE-CUTIE:

I'm writing to ask your thoughts on what I should do to maybe start dating. For some life context, I graduated college two years ago, and I have since been working full-time as a union organizer. My life is socialist organizing. When I'm not running organizing workshops and supporting union campaigns as part of my job, I'm running workshops, supporting union campaigns, and doing anything else that needs doing as part of my local DSA chapter and other labor groups.

I am aware of and working on my issues with work/life boundaries and overburdening myself. My unstoppable urge to get little treats and beverages with my wonderful comrades and friends means that I do somewhat have a life outside of meetings. I hang out with friends often and treasure them and my family so much. However, dating is another story.

I am a very late bloomer. I've struggled endlessly with weight and body image issues. However, for the past year or so, I've been working out consistently and building the confidence to finally wear clothes that fit me, as well as working on loving myself and my body. To be clear, I still hate my body in a way that only a depressed fat kid can, but I simultaneously also feel like I've reached a certain...respectable threshold of "guy in decent shape that can lift heavy things". Maybe that's the dialectics that Hegel was talking about, who knows.

But being in ok shape for the first time in my life has made me feel like I need to...do something with it, if that makes sense? Even though I consciously know that what I'm about to say isn't how these things work, it feels like now that some people might find me somewhat attractive, I should be dating. Because I really genuinely want to. Despite my amazing friends and family, I crave emotional connection of the kind that you can only get from a loving, romantic relationship, which is something I've never experienced. I've never gone on a date, kissed anyone, or even held hands. It always felt like something I could (and had to) put off because of my aforementioned depression, weight/body image issues, and school.

SOPHIA:

First of all, congratulations on such a full life! It sounds like you have so many outlets for fun and fulfillment and work and joy. That’s wonderful. Astounding! That’s the job of being alive! Woo!

I get a lot of your letter, not like I understand it, which I do because not to brag but I’m literate, but I get it-get it because I spent a lot of my youth overweight and filled on and off with self-loathing, or more accurately, body-loathing. (I usually still liked myself).

Here are some things I think:

(I promise they’re related to your letter not just random things I think about, like “Why hasn’t Joan Cusack ever had a starring role in a movie?”)

You do not have to love your body. Ever. You don’t have to have the goal be “fall madly, desperately in love with this meat prison I was randomly assigned.” That is, in my mind, a very unreasonable, if gorgeous, expectation. Society has convinced you, through such insidious, constant and urgent means that it’s almost the water we fish are swimming in, that fat bodies are bad (and therefore undesirable). They aren’t. They’re bodies. But all that messaging is powerful as hell. It’s not even seen as messaging as much as its treated like truth that being fat is bad (and bad for you, which it’s not inherently). ANYWAY. My point here is that you don’t have to undo all of society’s legacy on your own. You don’t have to beat on, boats against the current about this. You are allowed to simply let your body be. You are allowed to ignore the outside of your body the same way you might ignore your spleen. You are allowed to work out and continue doing things that make your body feel good and still be like, “meh, bodies are bodies, what can you do?” I say this not to discourage you— if you find yourself loving your body for even a millisecond, I urge you to lean into that feeling. I say all of this because there are some things that simply aren’t reasonable standards for a human to achieve. Please, be reasonable with yourself. Please also remember that your body is already and has been datable and fuckable and desirable. There is not a body type that is for dating. That is small thinking that is cruel to anyone (your past self very much included) with a bigger body. Give yourself a break, please! Be easy with yourself! Your body is not your boss or your Helm’s Deep battle opponent or Jessica Chastain or the love of your life. Your body is like a friendly neighbor who shares a duplex with you and needs help and tending to some times. Kind indifference is a fine way to treat your body. Solidarity is a fine way to treat your body. But please, let go of the idea that hot bodies are the ones that are allowed to or meant to have pleasure or sex or love. Put that idea in the garbage disposal, flip that switch and let that thing grind.

Ok, next thing. (Was that a good transition?) Dating and sex and love and all the overlapping things in between and around those topics… they’re messy. They’re a disaster. They’re miraculous. It’s like a Beyonce music video and a localized storm system and the feeling of squishing a little Tide Pod in your fingers all in one. Everyone— everyone!!!!!!— regardless of their amount of experience is flailing around wildly because none of us knows how to behave with each other when we’re horny/in love/attracted to another person. We’re both waves and particles at the same time. We’re screaming and our heads are popping off!!! That is how dating feels to pretty much everyone. I think. Your lack of experience is absolutely real and will make you feel sticky, annoying, scary things from time to time. I’m not trying to ignore that. I’m just saying everyone, regardless of experience, messes up and says something weird and blurts out their feelings to their crush at the wrong time (or never, which might be worse— hard to say!) Please know we’re all doing this—being alive, having this conversation, initiating this kiss— for the first time. In a very High School Musical way, we’re all in this together. Bumbling.

With those two things in mind, here’s my advice: do what you want when you want. I know that sounds disastrously, riotously, perhaps condescendingly simple. (Like, no fucking shit, Sophia, I had planned to do that!!!). But simple things aren’t always easy things. I encourage you to avoid pushing yourself into things simply for the sake of having done that thing. Date someone, kiss someone, fuck someone when the opportunity comes and you want to. You don’t have to have a grand reason, you don’t have to have made sure that the situation was the most perfect moment that won’t cause you any doubt or regret in the future. Mary Oliver, as ever, has said it far more wonderfully and succinctly than I ever could (than anyone ever could): “You only have to let the soft animal of your bodylove what it loves.” That’s it! That’s the whole job!

You cannot, because of how time and the universe and hot people named Rowan work, simply decide to start dating. But you can become open to it. You can allow that possibility into your life. This isn’t a foot race or an episode of Monk. You cannot simply start it on your whistle or with your apple tv remote. When you do open yourself up to romance, you will likely find, as so many of us who aren’t Pete Davidson do, that you don’t just get to date whoever you want when you want to. You will find that the ground is not always thick with bang-partners. You might get sad and angry and frustrated with that. Which is normal and common and we have very few outlets for it that aren’t either secretly seething, complaining to a therapist or becoming an incel. Obviously, don’t do the last one!!! Just know this is a long journey— your whole life in fact— and that it will take a lot of boring, shitty waiting. That waiting isn’t a reflection of how dateable or fuckable you are. You have been datable and fuckable the whole entire time. Please allow yourself wonder and excitement and life lessons in the middle of all the awkwardness and pain and self-recrimination that so often come with starting to date people.

Then again maybe I’m wrong and dating for you is a breeze and a half and you have no idea why I spent the last paragraph acting like it would be so hard!

My most ardent hope for you is that in the process of opening yourself to this, that you do not lose what you already have, which is golden. You have community and purpose and joy and laughter already. You are worthwhile already. If you first date someone tomorrow or first date someone in twenty years. I believe strongly that if you’re open to it, you will find love and sex and romance.

You can submit your own question—or yell at me about how I’m wrong—by emailing me at 1followernodad@substack.com