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I sat on the wooden stool and tried to get comfy. The sun went down and the sky turned so pink and blue it looked like one of those bubblegum bottle candies and everyone started taking pictures of it. He got his phone out and I thought, lol, but it turned out he was just sending an illustration of a fish skeleton that he was planning to get as a tattoo to his group chat. It wouldn’t have mattered if he was taking a picture of the sunset, but I also liked that he wasn’t the sort of person who would do that. He spoke about pollen for ages and asked me if it was boring and before I could answer he told me that his friend said that when guys are talking about something a girl has no interest in on dates she always hears the Simpsons soundtrack in her head. He asked whether that just happened to me. And he was right, I had zoned out, I was looking at him thinking, You’re a bit weird, but not in a bad way—in the way that makes me like people.
The date was good, because of him and because of me, but also because of other things, like the uncertainty of the encounter, its ease, most of which was due to the fact he doesn’t want something serious and neither do I.
Like, I actually don’t.
I’m only saying this twice because sometimes, as a woman, it can feel like there’s no way you could mean this. To the point where, even though I feel this to be the case, I doubt those feelings and wonder if they’re only happening because I want to seem cool.
But anyway, all I mean is it’s nice not dating for something. It takes the pressure off. When you’re trying to find The One, you end up looking at whoever you’re seeing and constantly asking, Is it him or not?, in a way that makes you violently pendulum-swing between infatuation and repulsion. When I was dating in a serious way I remember this guy saying something about how everyone’s entitled to their own opinions and I thought, Oh no, he definitely believes in some objectionable stuff. But then he’d tell me something cute or funny that would make me go right back the other way, like when he explained to me that he reckons people have three layers and how he’s soft, hard, soft and he reckoned I’d be soft, soft, soft, and I thought, This is the kind of dumb game I’d come up with, maybe he’s for me? I volleyed between those two standpoints until the day we stopped seeing each other.
With this new guy, I don’t see things I don’t like as much. Maybe I just like him more, but I also think it’s because things seem less permanent. It wouldn’t have mattered if he was the sort of person to take a picture of a sunset. I don’t weigh up his characteristics in that way. I don’t consider what they say about me or who I identify myself with or what they mean beyond how they’re making me feel right there in that moment.
When I was in New York my friend Hannah showed me a section from Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You? that she thought I would like.
“At times I think of human relationships as something soft like sand or water,” writes the character Alice in an email to her friend Eileen. “And by pouring them into particular vessels we give them shape. So a mother’s relationship with her daughter is poured into a vessel marked ‘mother and child,’ and the relationship takes the contours of its container and is held inside there, for better or worse. Maybe some unhappy friends would have been perfectly contented as sisters, or married couples as parents and children, who knows. But what would it be like to form a relationship with no preordained shape of any kind? Just to pour the water out and let it fall. I suppose it would take no shape, and run off in all directions.”
Alice is talking about her relationship with another character called Felix. “There is no obvious path forward by which any relation between us can proceed,” she explains. “I don’t believe he would describe me as a friend, because he has friends, and the way he relates to them is different from the way he relates to me.”
Unlike Alice and Felix, I would say mine and this guy’s relationship appears to be quite a textbook one; the contours of it are familiar. But with other people relationships have taken on a more curious shape, one where they walk you home even when you’re going in a different direction; speak on the phone with you for nearly two hours, even though you rarely see each other in real life; turn up at your birthday party early with a letter written to you in the front of a book they thought you’d like—one where they’re definitely not a friend, but not anything else either. Still, with this guy I do feel like I have a lot more freedom than usual. Things that would often seem to matter don’t, like double messaging or not hearing from each other.
I realize I’m a lot more relaxed now than I used to be. I think that’s why I am able to enjoy being single in a way that I didn’t before—I can see where things go. I went to Paris the other week and walked around the rainy streets in my dungarees, looking at those ornate metal balconies and wondering if they were better in grey or black, and I felt pleased just knowing I wasn’t lost, or that I was a bit lost but that it didn’t matter because I’d work out the way. During the day I’d sit on top of my duvet with my laptop hot on my legs and write, something I think I’m really good at. There are so many things that make me feel happy with myself. I don’t need someone else to confirm that, and it means I don’t grip on quite so tightly to people as I once did. I can let things go knowing something else good will come back around, and it often does—like, how I saw someone I used to know at the pub last night and he put a bucket hat on my head as proof that he was coming to find me after his friends had headed off.
It means I can relax and enjoy the chop and change of dating just for fun, those thrilling moments you only experience in the early days of meeting someone, when things may or may not work out. It’s something I think about when my friend Moya sends me a video of a day festival where this girl and this guy who have clearly just met are dancing together. He’s got sunglasses on upside down on the back of his head, she points at him and screams the words of the song back to him, takes the vape out of his mouth and smokes it herself. He leans over and kisses her ear. They both have these adorable goofy looks on their faces. The caption is: “Summer 23 except it’s a different boy at every single event.”
I think about it again when another friend tells me she was at a party the other day and her and this other guy spent ages defining the exact vibe they wanted this summer. It was something along these lines: Imagine you’re out with your friends but you’re getting sleepy so you text this person you’ve been seeing and they say to stay at theirs, so you go and meet them at the BBQ they’re at which you don’t end up leaving. You dance to that new Jorja Smith song, eat some now-cold sausages, get in the paddling pool in your underwear. And when you really do get tired, you go home together and your head is on their lap on the way and you fall asleep and they’re stroking your head and it feels all tingly like what you would imagine it would feel like to swim with fireflies. And then you wake up and have hangover sex and then go off to do whatever it is you were going to do—row boats in a park, rosé on someone’s balcony—and maybe you’ll see them later, and maybe you won’t. That’s the summer I’m ready to have, and it feels so freeing to embrace it.