What began as a celebration of two people loving each other, devolved for me into an affront to my own unattached, unloved self. Even if I attended the event with a boyfriend, by the end of the night I would be drunk and angry with him: why weren’t we married, I would demand. If I attended alone, I made up for the lack of a date by making out with any number of single (and sometimes not so single) men, often waking up next to them the morning after, in the throes of a painful hangover. Having be

Once, you rarely left the house without make-up in case you met your soul mate while you ran to the drugstore for tampons. You considered your daily outfits carefully because you never knew when the guy sitting across from you on the subway was going to appreciate the mink-collared vintage jacket you selected that morning. You carefully composed online dating profiles written with just enough lightheartedness (you do not take yourself too seriously), humble bragging (you are accomplished and can

“It’s sort of lounge-y in here,” I remarked to my co-worker as I walked past his office late one April afternoon. The room’s fluorescent lights were off, and jazz floated quietly from his computer. He laughed. “I feel like I should be having a cocktail,” I said, not joking.