Dating for the Plot

Dating for the Plot

Written by Anna bacal Peterson

Photographed by Annie Fairlall

My friends always called me the shy one in middle school. It’s a funny thing to be told that you’re shy when you’re far from it. What they really meant was, “Anna doesn’t talk to boys.” They were right about that. I was too scared and too anxious. It was never a rejection thing, the boys I pined after always liked me back, but I was just too afraid to say “hello.” Too afraid to make it real. So crushes came and went, experiences I could have had passed me by, and I stayed stagnant, internalizing the shy facade that was thrust upon me. 

When college came around, I found I was a million miles behind my peers, though I was no longer as sheltered as I once kept myself. I discovered in junior year of high school that I was a million times more confident when drunk, and that all men weren’t immediately deterred by my personality. I downloaded Tinder at 16, hooking me on the drug of male attention at way too early an age. But, that’s as far as I let myself get. Actually meeting up with people seemed like a foreign concept to me, something far in the distance that I didn’t think I would ever be able to achieve. My fear of intimacy ran too deep, eye contact may just have well been second base. How could I go on dates when the thought of having a one-on-one conversation with someone of the opposite sex sent me into full panic mode?

Inevitably, my Tinder messages went something like:

“What are you looking for on here?”

“Compliments!”

*Unmatch*

It was a never-ending cycle of matching, hearing repetitive pick-up lines, and then ghosting until I had successfully fumbled every man in the city of Boston. It wasn’t until I was twenty that I broke the cycle. It wasn’t until him.

They say to never go out with your co-workers, and they would be right. The summer of ’23, I found myself agreeing to go out with the brunette boy with the acoustic guitar at the camp where I worked. It was harder to run away from men who asked me out in person rather than through the phone, and trust me, I tried. After five dates the summer ended, and so did the fling. It would have never worked out in the first place. I don’t do long distance, and he was in love with his ex-girlfriend. But there was one valuable lesson that I learned from this short-lived love affair: I was so incredibly charming. I had nothing to worry about at all.

I came back to school and finally felt ready to take on the world of online dating. I waited for my acne to clear and my confidence to boost, and I was ready to play the field. I was already in my 20s, too old for a sickly-sweet teenage romance. I didn’t want my youth to slip away from me again without truly indulging in it. I found myself swiping right on everyone with one redeeming feature and saying “yes” to everyone who asked me out. It didn’t matter that I had to think really hard about whether I liked their smile or if they said something off-putting as their first message, because all that mattered was testing to see if I could actually get myself to go. Now that I knew I could really do it, all I cared about was seeing how far my comfort zone could stretch. First impressions are never good judgments of character. The real question was, am I?

The guy who made a Nazi joke, the guy with no shoes, the guy who looked like Balloonie from Phineas and Ferb, all three guys named Andrew, the guy who serenaded me with his guitar. No romantic connections, but at least I now had stories to trade. There was no love and hardly ever second dates, just new ways to entertain and horrify my friends. Still, I saw people around me start to settle into their long-term relationships, and again, I found myself far behind. I was dating, sure, but I was still doing it wrong. I was stuck in a harmful cycle of “exposure therapy” disguised as some sort of twisted form of self-discovery. I wasn’t dating for love; I wasn’t even having fun. I was counting the seconds on my fingers until the date was over and consistently made excuses to go home. I thought I owed it to myself, to force years of experience in one sitting. I was unaware then that dating didn’t just have to be challenging; it could also be fun.

I thought I was making myself strong, that I was making myself more confident so that in the future, I would be able to prioritize the real thing without so many nerves. In the process, I got rid of the first-date jitters and forgot the feeling of butterflies altogether. I spent so long trying to force experiences that I wasted time that I could’ve spent falling in love. Any sort of heartbreak would be worth feeling anything at all. Instead, I’m back to where I started, waiting for when I will catch up to everyone else, and wondering if I will ever let myself get that far.