All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [51]
But learning to eat properly and appreciate my curves was much more under my control than the prospect of finding a guy, which is kind of left up to the universe. Plus I’m still much more distrustful of men than I was before Samoa. And it’s never been exactly easy to meet men in San Francisco. I’m particularly wary of dating online; there’s no context for the person you’re meeting in cyberspace, no longtime friend to assure you that he’s a nice guy, not a psycho. The process is much more emotionally fraught and time-consuming than it would seem, just browsing a Man Catalogue, clicking on the witty architect who loves skiing and Italo Calvino, and having him delivered right to my door.
I already know from numerous attempts that I’m not very good at meeting strangers on blind dates. It’s even worse than being in a small group and going around in a circle explaining what you want from the experience. You show up for a simple glass of wine, and for the next hour a guy evaluates all the ways in which you don’t measure up to his ideal female. You walk in thinking that your various quirks and attributes—pug nose, edgy humor, smile lines, healthy ass—are all part of a package that makes you irresistibly lovable. You walk out, just one drink later, with a magnified awareness of your many defects. Eventually it all gets to be pretty defensive, not a great forum for showing what a giving, sweet woman you are. You arrive at the appointed time having not bothered to brush your hair, and right off your attitude is, You want to have a drink with me? Well, fuck you.
There has to be a better way to find a partner, but I have no idea what it is. I suspect it’s not going to be a simple numbers game, a matter of sifting through enough online profiles. Somehow I think it’s going to be more internal than external, that it’ll take some kind of psychic shift. I burrow into my pillow and close my eyes; I have a year to figure it out.
A FEW WEEKS later, I drive over the Golden Gate Bridge into the headlands to go on a long hike with a dear friend, Kathy, who is a decade older than I am but who went to the same college and into the same profession and shares the same temperament and astrological sign. We are so much alike that we love each other fiercely as friends and at times get as strongly annoyed. She is not a traveler like I am, flying to different countries, but she is always off on another exploration into herself, whether through spiritual practices or a variety of self-help programs.
Independent, strong-willed, and softhearted, Kathy is in a long-term relationship but struggles because her boyfriend, though smart, doesn’t have her intellectual thirst and sometimes just wants to drink beer and watch football with the boys and have that be okay. Conflicted, she stays, because she likes the coziness of their relationship, even if she refuses to get married and always has one foot partly out the door. She, too, is looking for balance between being a bright, strong, independent woman and making a relationship work.
While we’re walking along a path between ferns and redwood trees, we talk about our relationships. We haven’t seen each other in many months; I may have been avoiding her, because the last time we hiked, when I told her about Samoa, she reacted so strongly it made me feel as if I were permanently damaged, that I’d have to spend years in therapy to deal with the repercussions, when I just wanted to treat the episode like a bad case of food poisoning that I’d recovered from, except that I still shy away from eating scallops. Now that story is present