'I'm a Stereotypical Single Woman Who Wants a Baby Right Now!'

You can have exactly what you want. Live like it’s already yours.

Girl Before a Mirror (1932), Pablo Picasso

Dear Polly,

As soon as I read your reassurance this morning that you like responding to rambling cliché letters from embarrassing stereotype readers, I started composing this letter in my head. Because I am a rambling cliché and an embarrassing stereotype. I am a single 33-year old woman, I have my shit together in pretty much every way, and I desperately want to fall in love.

I have a newish job that I’m good at, that feels meaningful, and I mostly enjoy, without it being my whole life (major progress!). I have deep, meaningful friendships that enrich my life and that I tend to with care. I have a sunny, cheerful apartment filled with treasured things and my beloved black cat. I like my own company. I work out and I sleep 8 hours a night and write in my journal and make pottery on Wednesday evenings. I share all this as evidence that I have CHECKED THE BOXES. I have done the work.

Dating and romance have always been the part that feels hard. I am an only child and my parents divorced when I was a baby, and both remain single today. My dad had a lot of girlfriends that created chaos, and my mom made it very clear that men are only good at making women messy. Growing up I was rewarded for being smart and funny, but I was a chubby kid and didn’t feel attractive. I’m still chubby and still have some body stuff, but I’m also the most confident and the cutest I’ve ever been, and I know intellectually that plenty of men are attracted to me. I’ve had short and longish relationships and situationships and flings and one night stands. It never felt quite right.

I want so badly to be in love. I want to be treasured. I want to wake up next to someone and be glad he’s there. I want commitment, even if it scares me, and most of all, I want kids. I want to have a baby, probably two, and I want them NOW. Or soon, at least. It’s an ache.

I am obsessively aware of the age at which people have met their partner. I have passed my therapist’s reassurance that she met her husband at 31, the friend who made out with someone at a party at 32 and married him at 36. I know that you met your husband at 34 and then had two kids and I can’t tell you how tightly I hold on to the 18-month runway that implies for me. Tick tock!

I am tempted to opt out of the whole thing, to say I’m over dating and to pursue parenthood on my own. I have the resources and community and honestly, the personality, to be a single mom by choice, it’s something I’ve thought about and talked about for years. But deep down, I don’t want to! I want my kids to have a dad as funny and loving and involved as mine was, and I want to be in love with him and raise them together. It feels increasingly like this is too much to ask for.

Last summer, I’d quit my job and planned to take a couple months off, and I sat next to my best friend at the pool on a Sunday afternoon and told her I wanted a summer fling. I had a lot of free time, my life felt a little up in the air, it was hot and sticky, and I wanted to make out with someone. I went home and downloaded an app known for these sorts of matches and there he was, a man who was also not working for the summer and was moving to a different city in the fall and was looking for “nothing serious, unless we click” (ha!).

Obviously, I fell for him. It wasn’t just that the sex was really fun (it was) and he was funny and kind and steady and easy to be around (he was) and that the built-in end date kept me from nitpicking about all the boxes he didn’t check (it did). It was that finally, FINALLY, I had someone I could see in my Real Life. My friends would love this guy. My MOM would love this guy. We had all these weird overlaps that tied us together, so many moments in the past we could have met. The same politics and vision for our lives and sleep schedule. Sure, he didn’t want to talk about his feelings and sure, he didn’t want me to meet his friends or to meet mine, and sure, he probably just liked sleeping with me and having someone to ask how his day was, but isn’t that what a relationship is, really, asking about each other’s days?

Well, no. Because the truth is, this guy was extremely clear he really was just looking for something casual. Even when he talked to me for an hour on the phone at night, even when he was supportive from afar when my mom got sick while she and I were on a trip together, even when he PICKED ME UP AT THE FUCKING AIRPORT, he was going to move away and we were not going to be together.

I wanted to ask him to try dating long distance. I didn’t. I ended things early, a week before he left, telling him how much I’d let myself fall for him and how the experience of being with him made me realize what I really want is something committed and real, leaving PLENTY of room for him to say, “me too,” which he did not. And since then, I’ve gotten a job and figured out what’s going on with my mom and cut back on the booze and started working out and going to bed early again. It has been six months, and I still think about him every day.

I think about running into him at an airport or on the street. I fantasized about him calling on my birthday, then on his birthday (which would make no sense?), then on New Years, then on Valentine’s day. I think about us figuring out how to deal with the distance, how I’d take the train on a Thursday afternoon and let myself into his apartment and have dinner on the stove when he got home from work. I think about how we’d decide which furniture to keep when we move in together. I think about telling him I’m pregnant with our baby, the two of us telling our families.

I know this is fucking nuts. I know it’s not really about him at all, that I’ve scotch taped his face onto the familiar fantasy of the guy who wants to be with me. We’ve texted a couple times and he’s been friendly and a little flirty and has given zero indication he wants to see me again. My brain knows he didn’t want a relationship with me and that once somebody doesn’t love me, who the fuck cares? (a favorite essay of yours).

Apparently I still fucking care!!!!!!!!

I am doing the things I am supposed to do to find my person. I’m refreshing my profile on Hinge, I’m walking around without headphones and smiling at men in coffee shops, I’m telling people I want to be set up. A couple months ago I went to a SPORTS BAR on a Sunday afternoon to casually meet a single guy that my friend’s husband watches football with (insane!), and wouldn’t you know it, he had just gotten back together with his ex that morning. I mean, what the fuck?!!!!

And of course, the mom and dad stuff is at play here. My mom is sick, but they assure us she will get better. I look at her life — alone in a beautiful sunny house with a flourishing garden, driving herself to doctor’s appointments, refusing to rely on anyone (except me) — and I feel sad. She has started to soften, and she asked me the other night on the phone if I’d ever been in love. “I thought you didn’t believe in that!” I wanted to shout. But I asked her back and she said, “only your dad.” My dad, who she suddenly doesn’t hate after three decades of resentment, who offers to go with her to chemo, who crosses state lines in his beat-up old pickup truck to meet up with women he’s matched with on Bumble, ever hopeful.

I have so many paragraphs of your letters screenshotted on my phone, about sharp knives that cut and being a salty anchovy when someone expects something sweet, about rich fucking tapestries. I feel like I’ve mostly metabolized your advice. I think I’m flawed and also pretty great. I really do like my life. I can be honest and intense and vulnerable and risk being unlikeable (can I?). I know that I tend to conflate sex and love, to sleep with people too quickly, and that much of that is rooted in not feeling good in my body or attractive to men for many years. I am aware of my pattern of falling for guys who aren’t actually available because they are literally or metaphorically about to leave.

I just don’t know what to do with all of it. Where do I put all this wanting? How do I let go of the fantasy of this guy? Where do I find the right one? How do I stay hopeful? Why is this part so hard for me?

XOXO

It Is A Truth Universally Acknowledged, That A Single Woman In Possession of Good Fortune, Must Be In Want of a Man (Ugh!!!)

Dear IIATUATASWIPOGFMBIWOAM(U!!!),

The pseudonym you’ve given yourself is very long. I’ve never had to write such a long acronym before. Here are the first words I wrote to you without thinking: “Your name is too long. I’ve decided recently that my columns are too long, too.”

Both of these sentiments are true and accurate. But it’s also accurate to say that some of the best Ask Pollys are extra long, and it takes a very special Ask Polly letter writer to ignore 14 years of short pseudonyms in order to quote the opening line of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.” You also state, “I am a rambling cliché and an embarrassing stereotype.” And let’s not mince words here, quoting Jane Austen amplifies these vibes to the point of BRIDGERTON CLOWNISHNESS.

Honesty is risky. When you dare to show yourself, you run the risk of looking like a cliché. But when you’re honest and daring and cliché out in the open? Ironically, that makes you SPECIAL! After all, there are easily 1,000 published Ask Polly columns out there, and you’re the only person with the nerve to use a very long Jane Austen quote as your pseudonym. The GALL!!! That’s not just clownishness. What you’ve got are haughty queen clown master and commander vibes.

You’re a nice person, that’s obvious. You’re grounded and loyal and thoughtful and productive. You’re a good friend, a good daughter, a good neighbor. But you’re also an imperious aristocrat swathed in coral velvet and polished bright green stones, riding in a glorious wooden sled pulled by ferocious Mongolian attack-rabbits the size of small wolves. These are simply the facts.

You’re ready to compromise on the man front because you’re reasonable. You can shrink to fit, accommodate, get practical for the sake of having a baby. But deep inside, your irrepressible spirit is shouting obscene proclamations (“My god, most poetry is so boring! This town needs more raspberry soft serve! Someone book me a massage therapist for Friday evening after my dance party!”) while gliding effortlessly through the world behind your gargantuan sleigh-pulling rabbits, sipping almond-and-cardamom matcha with mango cream on top, rereading “The Great Gatsby” on the way to your friend’s two-martini dinner party just to savor the freakishly delirious verbiage Fitzgerald dedicates to longing.

Like every great artist and true romantic, you love longing. That’s normal and natural. But you’re also a CPA of longing. You have memorized all of the crucial statistics that will tell you if you’re going to succeed or fail. You are stable and steady and lovable but like all brilliant, unique queen clown master and commanders, you believe that you will either ride to glory or be a humiliating defeated failure forever and ever and ever. The numbers you memorize form a paint-by-numbers picture that’s half “Cinderella,” half “Game of Thrones.” That’s romantic and gothic and deliriously engaging, but it still doesn’t capture everything you are.

I know you feel reasonably confident and cute, but I sense in your letter a tendency to believe that you can’t possibly be loved for exactly who you are, and a fear that you’ll be abandoned if you show your full fucking self to others. So I want to start our JOURNEY (oof, I’m sorry!) together by telling you this: People in general and straight men in particular love women who are exactly like you. I’m not saying ALL MEN. Oh my god, who could ever care about taking an average of the bad taste of all men and navigating based on that absolutely dreary data? What I’m saying is that I can personally guarantee you that a literal fuck ton of men love you already. You say three words and they know they love you, boom, it’s done, no more negotiating, they’re in.

I want you to eat that fact. Swallow it without chewing and let it live inside your body from now on. This is an edible, nutritive knowledge.

You don’t need to persuade anyone of anything, or behave strategically. You can state your desires plainly. This is the most confident move, actually. Good men are soothed by direct talk and confidence.

But also? Many secure men will seem less interesting to you because they are so visible, and so steady, and they see you clearly, too. You might think you’re not attracted to them simply because they might not have your bluster or swagger. Or maybe they aren’t about to disappear, like your summer fling promised he would, and like your dad did. Your dad had girlfriends who “created chaos” possibly because your dad is sweet and romantic but not good at real, sustained intimacy. Your mom seems lonely to you not because she’s actually unhappy (doesn’t sound like it!) possibly because she’s a little rigid and not good at real, sustained intimacy. These are guesses, but this feels like an underlying theme of your letter.

Are you good at intimacy? Being good at it sometimes includes getting to know people whether or not you can guarantee that they “check all the boxes.” Real intimacy requires some leaps of faith. You slowly observe and learn and see how you feel without making declarations. You don’t let people into your bedroom quickly and you don’t write them off quickly, either. You tolerate the discomfort and vulnerability of SEEING and BEING SEEN. You stay present in this moment of intense uncertainty.

That part was very hard for me when I was 34. I loved my husband but I hated being seen. I wanted him to be running away from me, which I equated with true romance. I was bad at intimacy. I was an attack rabbit. He loved what I was, and that felt weird. He was nothing like my parents, both of whom were very, very, very afraid of making themselves vulnerable to anyone or anything.

My guess is that you’re very afraid and you’re hiding in schemes and fantasies instead of allowing some space to be soft and present and sometimes openly hurt. I worry about your choice to not ask for what you wanted this summer when you realized you wanted it. Instead you cut your time together short and hoped that he’d make a grand gesture. I want you to reorient yourself towards asking for exactly what you want in real time, among real people — making yourself vulnerable in the moment — with friends and romantic interests alike. Dare to show exactly who you are.

When anxious attachment meets an enormous imagination, you live inside your head too much and you emboss your obsession with rare gems and precious stones and then you can’t put it down because it gets brighter and more colorful than your actual life. You get tricked into thinking your life is drab and your longing is magnificent.

And when you do that, you reduce the whole vivid, bursting, ebullient universe down to a keyhole. When you imagine your summer fling saying the exact right things to you, your glorious wooden sled turns into a pumpkin and your coral velvet becomes rags and your huge Mongolian attack-rabbits become mice. That’s NOT REALITY. Reality is attack rabbits! Mice are an illusion!

The more you train your body to get turned on by pumpkins and rags and mice, the less possible it is to see that the reality of how irresistible and divine you are right now, at this exact minute.

You’re pragmatic and lovable and loyal, which is amazing. That’s such a gift, for an arrogant, brilliant, imaginative, bizarro queen like yourself. So few royals are also grounded. See, that’s part of why so many men are dying — literally dying — just to snuffle your perfect neck or press their palms into the soles of your bare feet. “IF ONLY!” they are growling to their friends, as we speak. “IF ONLY QUEEN CLOWN MASTER AND COMMANDER WOULD LET ME AN INCH NEARER TO HER SWEET SCENT OF MAGNOLIA AND OAK, I WOULD SNUFFLE IT UP ALL DAY LONG FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER, AMEN!”

Related: Are my columns really too long? Or do I stubbornly insist on giving my ebullient spirit adequate space and time to be EXCESSIVELY EXPANSIVE AND EXTRA EXUBERANT?

I do want to make things very simple and short sometimes. I want to honor that, too, the way you honor your reasonable, steady, numbers-and-measurements-loving self. We have to respect our multitude of selves, don’t we? We have to honor opposing forces within our ridiculous, absurd EXTRA CLOWNISH microbiomes!

When we relish what we are — all of it shifting, changing, unpredictable! — we remember that we are well-nigh irresistible to most. We are lusty and lusted after, because we are BIG, motherfucker. And when we deny that a woman has a right to be so big, you know what happens? We imagine that clocks are ticking down. We equate humility and pragmatism with compromise, smallness, and surrendering to the agony of defeat. We feel prematurely old. We avoid looking like a cliché. We hide.

Notice how you were moved to write to me once I said I LOVE A STEREOTYPE. You blossom when you’re given permission to be everything you are, including the embarrassing things, out in the open.

I’m like that, too. I’ve been subconsciously trying to be more normal lately, and it’s dragging me down. I’ve been trying to think like a regular human being with bills to pay. I’ve been seeing myself as a little bit of an old fuck-up with nothing to add, nothing to share, not much to say. And bitch, THAT IS AN ILLUSION. That’s not me. I mean, I am a little bit of a fuck up and I do have bills to pay and I do have a numerical age. But NORMAL? My god. Have you met me?

I can’t fucking hide, is the bottom line, and neither can you. When you hide, no one can see how uniquely delectable and sublime you are.

So don’t hide. You know you can have a baby on your own. I agree that this is an absolutely solid and smart back-up plan for you. I think knowing that you’ll have a baby one way or another is very soothing. Be soothed by that the way you’re soothed by the simple fact that you’re deliriously attractive to so many men that they are in excruciating pain when they get a tiny bit too close to you.

Armed by these facts, get back into your goddamn wooden sled, sip your goddamn mango cream and almond and cardamom matcha, pull your coral velvet up around your shoulders, and go back to the pages of “The Great Gatsby” yet again, how gorgeous and then sad he makes all of the excesses, all of those impatient and unsettled and desperate partygoers, all wanting so badly to become someone, to matter, to be seen. As your attack rabbits whisk you over the snowy wilderness, read about Daisy’s inability to recognize real soul and sensitivity and earnest devotion when she sees it, because she’s too anxious and too determined to cloak herself in what she views as appropriate and alluring and delectable sights and sounds. Read about Gatsby’s determination to prove himself, but the more effort he exerts, the smaller his keyhole on the world becomes.

Are you a writer, by the way? Should you be writing fiction instead of creating it inside your head? Are you an artist? Should you be living like one? Do you need a little coral velvet in your wardrobe? Should you make some earrings out of bright green stones right now?

You can have what you want. Live like it’s already yours.

Sometimes when you feel afraid, you start to live inside numbers and fantasies instead of deepening your existing connections and daring to show your heart, out in the world. I understand. My fears have dragged me down this past year. But I’m an ATTACK RABBIT, goddamn it, and I want to pull some fucked up queen’s sleigh through the snowy wilderness. I want more exhausting and harrowing adventures and ridiculous experiments that sometimes make no sense at all. That’s reality. I have the energy and I have the verve and I can do anything under the fucking sun. So can you!

So hang up the dull, defeated stories. You’re not desperate. That will never be you, I’m sorry. You felt free when you had a fling because you were pretending to be someone who didn’t want anything. Once you admitted that you did want a partner, you felt 500x worse than before. Right now, you’re still nursing an emotional hangover from pretending to want less than you really want.

Stop trying to disguise the strength of your desires. Wanting a baby doesn’t make you sad, it makes you hot and bright and glorious and ready for LIFE ITSELF. You’re a rambling cliché and gorgeous clown-demon queen who grows more loving and expansive the more honest and direct she is. Have your babies. Have your cake and eat it, too. But don’t fuck guys casually anymore. It’s loyalty and honor or nothing at all. Tell them to bend the goddamn knee or get the fuck out.

Why? Because you’re special. No further explanation or proof required.

Polly

---

Thanks for reading Ask Polly! How do you let your fear of being a stereotype block you from showing your full self to others? What will it take to make your life a tiny bit bigger and more colorful right now? Let’s discuss in the comments. Please feel free to forward this column to a friend who doesn’t know that there’s a team of attack rabbits ready to pull them through the snowy wilderness while they snack on raspberry soft serve.

Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. Stereotypes and clichés, I’m here for you!