Dating As a Niche Internet Micro-Celeb
Illustration by Rob Vargas
I don’t like introducing myself and I don’t ever offer more than “writer and performer” when I’m asked to deliver a bio for myself. I don’t know how to say my name out loud or give a welcoming handshake. These days, I most enjoy meeting people who already know who I am.
Most people don’t. It’s just that I happen to live in Manhattan, and below 14th street, it’s safe to expect on any given day that at least one person will come up to me and say hello. I’m a Niche Internet Micro-Celeb. I read that on Reddit. I search my name on there multiple times a week, even though a new comment about me pops up only about once a month.
I hit on a male model at a Christmas Party last year. I didn’t exactly hit on him, actually—I did something a little more to the point: I walked on up and told him to come home with me. He lowered his voice: “Aren’t you, like, that Carrie Bradshaw girl?” He said it with such malice that I went home alone and banged my head against the wall enough times to forget his existence forevermore.
But he made a fair point. I overshare, publicly and professionally. I get paid to write about my exploits. I used to want everyone in the world to fall in love with me, but now I just want everyone in the world to pay attention to what I have to say.
Most of what I have to say is about sex. I talk about sex and I talk about love and I talk about getting rejected. (Nobody wants to hear about the times when the sex is good, anyway.) Men give my life meaning. I might be the straightest woman on planet earth. I see the world and make sense of my personhood by documenting my romantic endeavors.
The difference between my dating life now, in 2023, from two years ago—before I was getting paid to write—trips me the hell out. I didn’t plan on becoming some sort of botched Bradshaw. My childhood heroes wouldn’t understand me at all. When I feel irreparably tacky, I remind myself that the artists I admire probably weren’t respected by their elders, either. I’m too outspoken and angry to be as edible as Carrie, anyway.
I took a middle-aged father home from a film party and was surprised to learn he already knew who I was (no fathers should know who I am) (if you’re a father, get the hell off my Twitter). We drowned ourselves in a makeout session for awhile, and I thought about calling him Daddy. But it ended when he stopped himself from putting his hand down my pants. He looked at me fearfully. “Please don’t write about me.” He really did look scared.
Worse than men who’re afraid of me are the men who aren’t. A couple months back, when I was really slutting it up (I only know how to look for love through sluttery—and I really do believe I might have loved, if only for a moment, every man I’ve ever slept with) I went to bed with a couple of men who plainly asked if they could be written about. They behaved flamboyantly, in a style obviously inauthentic to who they were but that they clearly felt was worthy of being written about. One of them, a young musician, grabbed my neck in an Uber and said that I was the Kate Moss to his Pete Doherty. He actually kinda does have a Doherty thing going, but the Uber driver was listening, and I look like a chimp compared to Kate, so I grabbed his face hard and told him to look at me, look at me good: “I am no Kate Moss.” I felt like John Proctor, fighting for justice.
My role models have always been men—specifically, men known for their sexual prowess. I’ve always wanted to be a womanizer. Rather than dreaming of a wedding, I used to dream of compiling a long written list of impressive men I had been with. I was driven in my twenties to sleep with as many men as I could. I prided myself on having a romantic roster, a set of numbers I could call at the end of the night. When I’d inevitably get a boyfriend, I found it hard to relate to the world, hard to keep up with my friendships. I didn’t know what to say at a dinner party if I wasn’t telling a story about the guy I had just humiliated myself with. Did I have anything to offer besides stories about sex? I wasn’t so sure.
As my twenties neared a close, I got tired of chasing. I wanted a boyfriend who would make my whole life better. I soon fell in love, cheated on him mercilessly, and ended up breaking up with him a year and a half later. I thought I’d find a better one. I did not. I wound up single for four treacherous years.
Until now. I met him in February. I’m not single anymore.
I have a boyfriend. I finally did it; I got a boyfriend. The four years of singledom make sense to me now: I hurt myself and I begged and I fought and I lost, all so that I could be ready for him. We kissed on the Upper West side, outside the fancy Chase bank on 72nd street, one blustery February night, and I knew I would have to grow up. Cliches have become the only way to explain the reciprocity and trust and danger and adventure that I feel with him.
A girl came up to me on the street early one September morning and congratulated me on getting a boyfriend. I was surprised she knew about him—I hadn’t so much as tweeted a reference to a boyfriend. I’d been careful.
The girl told me she lives on the same block as me—she might have said two doors down—and that she saw us together every morning. “He’s hot,” she said—a vocal high-five. “I feel like if you can do it, so can I.”
It makes sense that someone who recently turned 20 feels comfortable waltzing up to me to express her surprise at my winding up with a desirable boyfriend. A big part of my writing, of my talking, of my relating to other people has consisted of me shitting on myself. Is this manipulative? I don’t know. I think that I am at once shiny and unique as well as a bad person, a bad family member, a bad friend: or worse, a writer with limited capabilities. A broken record. A liar. I don’t give myself many wins, which is why I need compliments so much. (The only thing I’m an expert at is myself.)
I’m not a role model and I’ve never thought of myself as one. I’ve never set out to be an “example.” In June I was walking down the Bowery with a smoothie and barely any clothes on when a stranger popped out of a literal alleyway and thanked me for “helping to destigmatize mental illness.” She had tears in her eyes. She said that my Twitter made her feel like she stood a chance against her BPD (borderline personality disorder) … That’s lovely. I do love that. But honestly, I just thought I was just being funny.
I appreciate and need attention, but I don’t know how I feel about being a person that another person would want to emulate. I’ve been getting complimented a lot, thanks to a script I wrote that’s been getting some attention. I’ve always fed off compliments, but before it was easier to manage, as good ones rarely came. I get a lot of good ones now, and they make everything worse. I’m more cynical than ever. I judge the strangers who give them to me, and yet my day wouldn’t feel right without them.
My schtick is that I’m an underdog. Or maybe it’s not a schtick, maybe that’s just my position in life. Some people root for me because I’m messy and don’t have the good sense to hold back. I’ve learned that the shortcut to connection is to let it all spill out. Maybe not for everyone, but for me. It’s a trick that recently I’ve learned is simply that … a trick.
I’m being vague. I’m trying to be vague. Oversharing and specificity have carried me for years, carried me through doors, through hearts, through making money. I like proclamations. I want to proclaim that I’m done with all that, but I’m not. I eat at Cafe Fiat now. I don’t want to go to the Odeon. Does that make sense? I’m not making sense. I love this man too much to jeopardize our relationship with public proclamations. I love this man too much to turn him into a character, to give away details that should only be for me. I don’t want to throw him under the bus in the way I used to do to men, even if it’s masked with Love.
More than that, I want to look at the world—evaluate the world!—rather than be trapped in myself. I’ve spent 31 years mesmerized by myself and I’ve milked it for all it’s worth. They say that you’re only ready for a relationship once you’ve made peace with yourself. It didn’t work that way for me. Falling in love with someone else is what’s allowed me to fall in love with myself. I want to love myself so much that I don’t need to prove anything by publishing it. I want to love myself enough to be able to leave the compliments on the floor. I want to look at my 20-year-old girl neighbor and thank her and mean it. I want to tell the girl on the Bowery that I’m happy I inspired her in some way, and I want to actually mean it. I want to be trusted. I want people to trust me. I’m tired of performing. I’m not proclaiming anything. I haven’t changed.
I’m going to have to live with being vague.
Originally Appeared on GQ
