That Is the Whole Scandal

There seems to be a persistent civic interest in the fact that I am single.

I say civic because “personal” no longer feels accurate. Personal questions are usually asked once. This one has survived several birthdays, two apartments, one library renovation and, most impressively, my grandmother’s discovery of text messaging.

I am twenty-eight. I have a job I like, an apartment I can afford, friends I trust and enough books to make moving house a logistical threat. Apparently I am also attractive enough that my continued singleness requires an explanation.

People rarely phrase it quite that way, of course.

They say there is “no obvious reason.”

I never know what to do with that sentence.

Thank you, presumably.

For the sake of completeness, I should acknowledge that I did not choose the sexiest profession available to me. I work in a library. My days involve overdue notices, damaged dust jackets, shelving disputes, students who have confused a reading list with a scavenger hunt, and a printer that periodically decides cooperation is beneath it.

One might reasonably expect this to protect a person from glamour.

It has not.

Somewhere along the way I appear to have become unpaid promotional material for the Sexy Librarian Association of Northern California. I own glasses, sometimes wear my hair up and know where we keep the nineteenth-century poetry. Apparently popular culture has assigned consequences to this combination.

It is amusing until it isn’t.

Men occasionally assume my lack of interest is negotiable. Women, rather more understandably, sometimes assume that because I am interested in women, I must therefore be interested in them.

I have disappointed both camps.

The truth is considerably less interesting than the theories people invent for me. There was no catastrophic first love, no woman who left me standing in the rain, no formative betrayal that sent me retreating permanently behind the circulation desk.

I have dated.

Silverdale does not suffer from a shortage of interesting women. I have met women who were funny, thoughtful, infuriating, unexpectedly gentle or clever in ways that made me want to keep asking questions. There have been dinners I wished would last longer. Once, neither of us noticed that a restaurant had almost emptied until a very patient server began turning off lights around us.

Another evening, both of us understood before the entrées arrived that we would probably make excellent acquaintances.

Neither experience required a villain.

Sometimes two people meet, enjoy each other and simply fail to become important to one another. It is an unsatisfying explanation because nothing is resolved by it. No lesson is learned. Nobody storms out.

Life is very inconsiderate about narrative structure.

There was also, for the sake of honesty, one man.

A friend arranged that experiment years ago with tremendous confidence. He was handsome, funny, easy to talk to and entirely undeserving of being treated as an experiment, although thankfully I had the good manners not to tell him that was what was happening.

We went out twice.

By the second evening I had begun to wonder whether perhaps I had been unnecessarily certain about myself. Attraction seemed such a complicated thing when everyone discussed it that I thought mine might contain some undiscovered flexibility. Maybe I had simply never met the right man. It is one of those theories that sounds perfectly reasonable until reality is kind enough to test it.

We kissed, and eventually things became more intimate.

I liked him. That was never the problem.

What surprised me was how little liking him helped.

I kept expecting another feeling to emerge from underneath the affection and curiosity. Instead, the closer we became, the clearer the distinction grew. Nothing about him disgusted me and nothing went wrong; desire simply remained conspicuously absent. There were small moments when his body felt unfamiliar to me, but not in the exciting way unfamiliarity sometimes can. I was conscious of trying to persuade myself toward something rather than being drawn toward it.

At some point the absurdity became impossible to ignore.

I was attempting to turn liking a man into wanting one.

Once I understood that, everything became remarkably simple.

I stopped things. He was gracious about it, which somehow made me feel worse for a few days, and then considerably better. What remained afterwards was mostly relief. I had spent years leaving a small question mark beside that part of myself because adulthood teaches you to distrust certainty.

The question mark disappeared.

It is possible, I suppose, that all of this would be easier if I had not spent my adolescence reading old romantic novels.

I read Pride and Prejudice far too young.

This was probably irresponsible.

Not because I am waiting for Elizabeth Bennet to walk into the library, although I would certainly waive her late fees. What stayed with me was something much less theatrical: the notion that affection might develop through attention. Two people see each other badly at first, then gradually, reluctantly, more accurately.

Austen made observation romantic.

That may have done permanent damage.

So did Persuasion, although in a different direction. There is something deeply unfair about giving a sixteen-year-old the idea that love can survive years of silence, bad decisions and entirely avoidable misunderstandings, then quietly return with better timing.

At least I escaped Wuthering Heights with my judgment intact.

Mostly.

The trouble with reading is not that you begin to expect fiction from life. Any competent reader understands the distinction. Novels are constructed. Their coincidences have authors. Their silences mean something because someone has decided they should.

Real life contains parking problems.

People work late. Someone gets sick before a third date. A message sent at 11:47 p.m. is answered the next morning with “sorry, fell asleep,” and there is rarely a chapter break to reassure you that this will eventually become significant.

I am not waiting for a plot.

What those books probably did teach me, however, was to value the slow accumulation of knowledge between two people.

That part I have been unable to shake.

Dating apps operate according to almost the opposite principle. I have used them. They are useful, occasionally entertaining and sometimes depressing in ways I doubt their designers intended. Within ten minutes I can learn that twenty-seven women enjoy live music, travel, brunch and adventure, although adventure seems disproportionately likely to involve standing on a hill at sunset.

There is nothing wrong with any of this.

I simply find the compression peculiar.

A whole person becomes six photographs, a profession, a handful of preferences and several sentences polished sufficiently to sound spontaneous. Somewhere in that tiny exhibition of a life, another stranger is expected to decide whether curiosity has occurred.

Perhaps I am too romantic for the machinery.

Not dramatically romantic. Rain is inconvenient. Railway platforms are cold. I would rather nobody hire a string quartet without asking me first.

The romance I imagine is quieter.

It begins, I think, after charm has exhausted itself.

Eventually you stop presenting the best edited version of yourself because maintaining it would be ridiculous. A silence lasts and nobody rushes to repair it. Habits become visible. Stories acquire footnotes. You discover which memories someone keeps returning to and which subjects make her look away before she answers.

Over time, another person develops a map of you.

Not a perfect one. God forbid.

Just an increasingly accurate one.

There is something almost indecently intimate about being known that well. To have someone recognize the difference between your ordinary silence and the silence that means something happened. To be understood without being constantly interpreted. To know another person with the same patience.

That interests me far more than being swept off my feet.

I am aware, incidentally, that “I want something deeper” is exactly the sort of elegant sentence a well-read woman might construct to avoid admitting that she is afraid of getting hurt.

The possibility has occurred to me.

Working in a building full of novels gives you very few excuses for avoiding your own motives.

I am cautious. There have probably been women I dismissed too quickly. On occasion I have treated the absence of immediate curiosity as evidence when perhaps it was merely Tuesday and we were both tired. It would be dishonest to pretend that selectiveness is always wisdom.

But the discovery that I may occasionally be too careful has not convinced me that carelessness is therefore enlightened.

Being alone does not frighten me enough to make almost feel sufficient.

That seems to be the part people struggle with.

I am not enduring singleness until my proper life arrives. There is no empty chair in every room reminding me of an unfinished story. I like my work, including the printer when it behaves. I like quiet Sunday mornings and dinners that require no negotiation. There are people I love, places where I am known and an unread stack beside my bed that has now become less a reading list than a load-bearing structure.

This is a life.

A rather good one, actually.

Would I like to fall in love?

Very much.

I am not embarrassed by that.

I would like to meet a woman whose presence gradually becomes ordinary in the best possible way. Someone I remain curious about after attraction is no longer new. Someone whose flaws eventually become as familiar as her virtues without either of us pretending they are charming when they are not.

I want to know and be known.

Apparently that is the grand answer everyone has been waiting for.

Maybe she turns up next month. Maybe I meet her five years from now. Perhaps she will be completely unlike the person I imagine, which would serve me right after all those novels.

Until then, nothing is wrong.

There is no secret heartbreak, no lost great love and no mysterious vow of celibacy hidden among the reference shelves. I simply have not met the woman for whom giving up a portion of my solitude feels like an improvement.

That is the whole scandal.

Now, with affection, I would like Silverdale to find another mystery.

And Grandma: the physical therapist still sounds lovely.

Please stop giving her my number.