i want a fucking boyfriend

i'll never pretend again i don't want this

I’ve been chewing on a pretty bad black pill for a few days; it tastes like licorice and burnt coal together in my mouth, the humiliating sting of — “you don’t matter, and nothing you’ve ever strived for has ever felt possible, just give up now, please do it.” A few days ago, I found out the guy I’d been seeing was seeing someone else behind my back. The agony that protruded out of my psyche immediately was something like, “she’s going to have the thing from him I wanted so bad” — official commitment, the proper labeling of “relationship.” We hadn’t been committed, in my head, because of circumstances (I was traveling, he was in the middle of a huge work transition that was giving him depression), but I realized that my low self worth had made me conveniently forget to try to leverage my power even earlier on.

“Leverage my power” I scoffingly write, because unfortunately, relationships are all about power. But in this case, the role of “relationship” is idealized to me, as a cross I crucify myself on, helplessly hanging there while the other apostles do their thing. Until someone wants me to be THEIR girlfriend, someone I adore enough to see so often, I don’t think I’ll ever truly understand the power of what it means to be seen, to be known, to be a side character, to not just be an invisible floating head in this world.

My idea of mattering as a woman rides heavily on whether a man looks at me and thinks I’m appropriate enough to ride through life with. Appropriate to fight for, appropriate to stick it through with, appropriate to build something with. Timing always seemed like an unnecessary component to me, simply put. If you cared you would have. Because so many men have gone on to have relationships with others after me, or had them before me, and I feel like a blip in the radar. Always a situationship, one that may have never mattered to you.

Similar to how men ride their worth on their virginity, I ride my worth on whether a man ever wants to be properly with me, be exclusive with me, have me as his companion for tough times without a thought of replacing me. My lady balls feel cut off at the idea that no one wants me to support them, no one wants me to be the one they come home to, no one wants me to build a life together with. It’s not that “no one” wants these things either; it’s just that I am so uninspired to have longing for most men I’ve met, and the few I have, have just fumbled so hard it makes me want to die from distrust of my selecting process.

The idea of this last man I’d been seeing and caring for — even from afar, without sleeping with anyone else —  for 7 months frivolously giving away what I felt I’d “earned” with longer investment, to someone else, made me want to scream and jump off the nearest cliff. All I could do was coldly block him and curse God.

It’s humiliating to have had so many situations (especially with Asian men… god…) throughout my romantic history that always came close to fruition but never all the way. There’s always some convenient circumstance of a crisis of self esteem that keeps men from investing in me all the way; many a time, the guy I am seeing takes a sharp pivot into “focusing on himself” and trying to make a career change, move cities, lift more weights, or do something to suddenly try to gain a sense of self worth I didn’t realize he was missing. Color me naive for hoping every time that something will shift, maybe this time it will be different! It’s never different.

I debated writing this post because, truth be told, I’m sick of being upset about this. I’ve wanted to revive my Substack for some time, and this is the first topic I choose to write about? But the truth is, I haven’t been writing on here because I’ve been torn up about this relationship for months. The day after I wrote my last post in March, he casually mentioned to me the possibility of being laid off and moving to Asia as his work visa expired. My heart broke over dinner as he left me with this before, without eye contact, asking me to split the bill for the first time since I’d met him, and I collapsed into a puddle of tears while we hooked up that night, before whispering quietly how I didn’t want him to go away with my back turned to him. I cried no less later thinking about him for months in the few encounters we had in between traveling after that, to the feeling of distance and him slipping further and further away.

It didn’t help that I thought of him nonstop during my West Coast trip, my Atlanta trip, my ayahuasca trip to Peru where I had visions of him hugging me and telling me he loved me. It didn’t help that I always slyly asked him if he was going to replace me with some other girl, hoping desperately he thought it was special too, because why else would he have said, “we fit,” unless he meant he wanted us to continue fitting together?

By the time I finally did get the reason to cut him off, I’d already accepted he couldn’t prioritize me and stopped talking to him, yet he’d come back into my life with renewed energy, giving that slice of hope I’d been waiting for that solidified the reasons I’d fallen for him in the first place in the early days, before he’d gone back to work, in November when he’d still cook dinners for me, lay a hand on my shoulder when I worked from his place, when we’d walk hand in hand through the streets. It made it that much harder to say goodbye, when I already was aware he had been lying to me and had to restrain myself from giving him a chance to make me even sadder.

I desperately wanted that energy back, the eagerness to connect, the affection that rang between us. For a while, for all the time I’d been in New York, I was having the boyfriend experience. I was having a slice of what it was like to be wanted as a girlfriend, as the person you turn to when you see something you want to share, as the one you wait eagerly for to come over. But as the months have gotten warmer, the feelings have gone colder, to where I’m just grasping at straws these days, clenching my fists as I weep tears down the halls of the subway station at midnight, as I sink into the couch and can’t bring myself to take my contacts out, falling asleep night after night crying for someone that doesn’t care if I came or went.

It’s only been a week, I tell myself. But it’s been the longest week of my life, as I cry that I came back from traveling to nobody waiting for me, nobody wanting to see me again, nobody to text me and miss me anymore in the way that I wanted so badly.

And through it all, the biggest humiliation is that my desire is so simple yet so hard to obtain: I just want a fucking boyfriend. I just want someone that I want so bad, so bad that I burn for them, to want me back. I just want to never again feel like I’m decorating for a party that no one wants to come to.

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In 2021, I dated two guys in a row who had been in several long term relationships, recovering serial monogamists, and were in states of disarray about it. I didn’t get too invested in either, but the notably more noble/more attractive one of the two, R, told me that he had vowed to never be in a relationship ever again. It didn’t suit him, he said. He had watched girls get disappointed by him over and over as he failed to perform the proper boyfriend duties — out of a sheer non-investment in being a boyfriend, he eventually realized. “Some people aren’t really suited to be partners,” he said. “I’m one of them.”

I think about him a lot these days. His ideology made sense to me, and the thing is, he treated me better than most guys had in terms of communicating boundaries, yet showing legitimate care. I have yet to feel as respected by anyone I’ve been involved with as him to this day, because precisely this mindset truly freed him. I hope to be as iconic to anyone as he was to me, because symbolically, I was attracted to him precisely because I related to that sentiment so much. In my darkest hours, I have conversations with him in my head to this day (for I do miss him as a friend at times). His legacy lives on in my memory as what’s possible: What if I just gave up on love? Would it make me a better lover, ironically?

Partially, I waited a long time for this guy to “wake up,” and I eventually did walk away (on good terms) first, but a few years later, I’ve realized I more so wanted him to wake up to represent this idea that love doesn’t have to be dead for everyone! Love just has to be idle for a while! I selfishly needed, on some level, for him to believe in love, so I could stop feeling so tempted by his ideology. But I can’t bring myself to fully buy into it, because it is so painful to live so closed. I lose the ability to fully love my friends, the lovely ones, too. And I hate how I can’t separate any of it.

The plausible deniability of it all is, even if I wanted to, I don’t believe you can ever truly just give up. You can’t not think about love, but you also can’t occupy any sort of coyness about it too from that position. You can’t just wake up and say, “Yeah I’m going to just not care, but wink wink, if someone comes around, I dunno…” I feel myself having this instinct. I feel myself wanting to tell men I’m attracted to, “I’m celibate, but I could be convinced!” I feel myself wanting my last lover to get the message: “I’ve blocked you, but if you came running to me, I’d take you back :(“

After this last relationship ended extremely poorly, I’ve never felt closer to taking the pill and giving up forever. Any notions of cowardice surrendered. I don’t know if I can take being bound anymore to this psychic idea of mattering to men, of wondering if I check the box of being a good enough “wife material” presenting person. I’m sick and tired of it.

I told my friends I’m taking a vow of celibacy for now, because it’s true. I’m so sexually traumatized right now, from how 80% of my sleeping with guys was to get over the other 20%, that it’s honestly involuntary. Every time a man flirts with me, I break down crying and tell him the story, and he tells me that his affection is an indication that I can have love again, because I could have whoever I want, with my charisma, beauty, kindness. Well, if I can have whoever, then why can’t I have that guy? Why was I not enough? Isn’t it worse for people to be surprised that I have a hard time dating, as if I shouldn’t? Isn’t it worse to feel gaslit that all my problems aren’t real?

For my whole life, I’ve felt like so much of who I meet, how I present myself, is a mask for the aching gap inside of the days where I towered over fellow elementary and middle schoolers, as boys ran away from me finding me gross or weird, and how I eternally feel like my affection is something to be thrown away or be repulsed by.

I haven’t talked to R in a while, but I always think back to our chats during quarantine, how he once told me I should have the courage to ask for what I want, on principle. Because it is noble to want something regardless of whether you can have it, or deserve it, he said. I told him upon our parting that I wanted him, but it’d felt inappropriate to ask him for what I want, because it’d put pressure on him to say something to me he didn’t want to, and I also already suspected I knew the answer. He told me he felt cared for for my thinking ahead.

Sadly, I also didn’t ask this last man for what I want. I wanted a commitment, I wanted to be the one he wanted to stay in New York for, the one he could lean on, the one he could spend time with, the one he could think about being there for our kids with. He said he admired me for so many things he couldn’t do, and I’m sad to think one of those things was keeping our relationship a priority. I’m sad to think another was walking away when it was time. Do I regret not asking him to commit to me? To be honest, no. At the end of the day, I was protecting myself because I knew the answer would be no. And I didn’t want to lose him by my own hand. Maybe it’s an act of mercy that he let me go first then. And my principles — to have everything be by choice for others — are still with me.

That leaves me with this, a request for prayers from my Substack friends. I want a fucking boyfriend. Please. I want to believe. I want a reality with no questions. I want a sturdy, noble, kind, and brave Asian-American man who has seen the horrors of reconciling his filial piety with his own sense of self, who has already burnt a bridge or two and wants to never lose a woman again, who knows what it’s like to try to build a sense of self with others without greatly damaging yourself, who is fiercely independent yet kind and soft to those he knows matter, who never stops asking and testing how to have integrity, who I can see through the dark times and the good times, who views me not just as an inspiration but as a teacher and a student. I want that so fucking bad. I want it so bad I’m burning myself from the inside out right now weeping thinking it’ll stay out of sight forever.

Because I’m also grieving. I’m grieving all the miscarriages of relationships I could’ve almost had in an official sense, and I’m grieving how little equipped I feel to properly exalt and honor them with my own fragility, with my shame that they weren’t officially recognized in the eyes of society, that someone could say i’m not going through a “real breakup” because he never consented to it. I carry shame and fear along with the memory of what I lost, the reminder it meant so much less to the other person than it did to me.

This grief just radicalizes me to never again lie to anyone about how I feel. I’m going to be the girl who’s too much in the beginning. “I like you, and I want a boyfriend. If you don’t want to be my boyfriend, I’m too attracted to you to be just your friend, so I’ll need to stop seeing you now.” Who cares if it’s powerful or not. Who cares if it affects them or not. I’m so blinded by trauma that I can’t do anything but be honest like that. I can’t do some “friends to lovers” plausibly deniable shit, I can’t do anything but literally be so hard to string along that it never happens again.

Guys used to say, “I hope someone else can give you what you’re looking for, because I can’t,” and that was the absolute worst part always to hear. How dare you pity me while you’re about to go and give your best to someone else. Thus I want to never hear those words again. I want to be bold and fucking clear and never again let anyone mistake me for someone just doing something casual. I want someone to never question what my priorities are, what my desires are, to never try to get around the reality of who I am as my desires take up space.

I truly believe I’m never going to find anyone, and I’m not in the mood to be convinced about it. But what I do know is, if fate means you to lose, give him a good fight anyhow. Because I’ll just die trying for the idea that I deserve better, and maybe I’ll still end up childless in my 40s and 50s, but I can damn well say that by remembering I deserve the best, I can at least keep making a positive impact on those who deserve it.

I really want a fucking boyfriend. But I guess whether or not it happens, it won’t make me so hard I’ll ever give up on myself.