On the same day I found out the guy I thought I was dating was actually dating other people, I also lost my FitBit.
I found both of these things highly distressing -- the "dating other people" thing should be self-explanatory, but the FitBit situation was equally annoying. Earlier that week, the Art Department at TIME had started a FitBit challenge and, not to brag, but I was dominating. I was at least 10,000+ steps ahead of everyone else (this is likely due to the fact I live on a sixth floor walk-up and am extremely forgetful) and the loss of my winning walking streak combined with the shattered illusion that I was the only girl this guy had been with did not make for the best beginning of a Saturday morning.
I would like to point out, however, that I have not cried over either situation.
The last time I cried over a boy was my senior year of college. In the middle of formal, my date decided to go home with one of my sorority sisters and, so, I traveled to Dill Street (RIP) where -- through my tears -- I intoxicatedly kissed Zach Groth, his identical twin brother AND the man who made me soup every day at the Atrium within the span of 35 seconds.
It was not my finest moment.
The next morning, I woke up and decided that any situation to get me upset enough to touch mouths with ZG is a cause for concern and chalked it up to the craziest thing I would ever do for a boy. Then, for the remainder of the year, I made Zach go buy my soup for me because I could no longer face the man in the Atrium anymore.
Anyway.
It turns out I was wrong when I thought that severing my ties to soup via Dill Street mistakes ("Dill Street Mistakes" is the working title of my autobiography) was the craziest thing I would ever do because I did the actual most girl-crazy thing a few weeks ago and that was because of the guy I thought I was dating who was actually dating other people.
I don't want to say I was obsessed with Jake since I met him because that word sounds too severe and would be absurd, but I knew I wanted to know him from the moment we locked eyes from across his bar. We'd met the same night of my disastrous date with Hitch, the dating coach who looked waaaaaaay too much like my uncle when he tried to kiss me. I'd escaped the situation by saying my apartment was on fire, then met up with Chelsea at an adorable bar to recount the story. Multiple times during the night, I'd made eye contact with the bartender and, after introducing myself and hearing Jake's ridiculously cute southern accent, I uncharacteristically left my phone number on my receipt, then walked out the door.
A week later, he contacted me and, a few days after that, Jake and I had our first date at a bar in East Village one cold night in October.
I've gone on a lot of dates in Manhattan (obviously), but that first one with Jake just felt better than all the other ones. I was comfortable, I was happy and, when he kissed me at the end of the night, I literally said "Whoa!" because it was THAT good.
And, since that Monday night, I haven't bothered to go out with anyone else.
During the holidays, I went back to Boston for two weeks. Jake and I chatted occasionally, but I'm not a big texter (unless it's a group text involving either ZG, Ashley, Serria or Chelsea), so it was mostly just us sending each other pictures of dogs every so often with little-to-no other context. But, when I was on the Amtrak to NYC on NYE, I let him know I was on my way back to the city and we made vague plans to hang out within the next week.
Ten days later, it was well into the next week and I had not yet heard back from Jake.
Now, one of the most bizarre things to me about modern dating is the concept of ghosting. For those of you who are either in happy relationships or date normal, considerate humans, "ghosting" is where everything is going fine with the person you are casually dating, but for some reason that you will never be able to comprehend, you reach out to them and there's no reply.
Then, with absolutely no explanation, you never hear from them again.
I was not okay with being ghosted by Jake, mostly because I really, really liked him, but also because I do not do well with the ambiguousness of what possibly could have went wrong when the last time I'd heard from him, he'd used not one, but two smiley face emojis in reference to hanging out. Enter now what was likely the worst week of Zach, Serria, Ashley and Chelsea's lives as I textually harassed them constantly as to why he wasn't contacting me. (After five straight days of this, Serria made me stop using the word "ghosting" because she couldn't handle the frequency of how often it was being used and we had to switch to the more bro-y phrase of how I was "being phased out of the roster.")
For my friends, the breaking point of this situation probably came very early-on into my incessant complaining, but for me, it came at 4:40 a.m. on a Friday morning. I'd been peacefully asleep, but when I woke up suddenly, I was wide-awake, running through all the various scenarios of why Jake had ghosted when everything seemed to be going okay. Did he have a real girlfriend? Did he get in an accident? Did he move back to Alabama and accidentally leave his phone in Brooklyn?
It was then, in the dark of my apartment with the reasons in my mind getting more bizarre, that I made the plan of the craziest thing I would ever do for a boy. I realized there was absolutely no way I could not know what happened and why he decided to not contact me ever again. So, armed with the knowledge that he was working that night, I made a plan to walk straight into his bar, sit down in front of him and sweetly order a beer and a reason for why he ghosted. Then, after he told me he got someone pregnant or decided to join the circus or was becoming a priest or whatever his reason was, I would have closure and could move on with my life.
Immediately after coming up with this, I fell back asleep calmly, knowing that the answers I needed -- even if I wasn't necessarily going to like them -- were soon going to be given to me.
If you don't know me, I am a pretty low-key and laid-back person, so I understand that this whole thing was absolutely insane and ridiculously out of character. Thus, in order to actually go through with this plan, I needed courage.
Specifically, I needed liquid courage.
Luckily, Zach pulled through as he always does when it comes to alcohol-related issues and him and I showed up to Serria's apartment that Friday night with three bottles of wine in tow. I'd decided that I didn't want to go to Jake's bar until much later in the night, so after we each finished our bottle of wine, the three of us started heading to the East Village.
I perhaps had gotten too much liquid courage because, as we got in the cab, I realized I was maybe a tiny bit drunk. I say this because our driver had the partition up and was speaking to us through a microphone, but, because of this, I was 110% convinced he was a robot.
"He's done it!," I kept exclaiming loudly as our driver whisked us over to the east side. "Elon Musk has done it! He's finally made driverless cars!"
Via his microphone, the driver kept trying to assure me he was, in fact, a real human being, but I refused to believe him, instead stage-whispering to Zach and Serria that it was amazing the robots were already so self-aware this early-on in the game.
Again, not my finest moment.
Anyway, our potential-robot cab driver dropped us off and we finally got to a bar in the East Village. We stayed for awhile, but when Zach inevitably (and ironically) ghosted, Serria and I decided it was now an appropriate time in the night for me to go verbally assault Jake and get some goddamn answers.
We got in another cab and the driver may have been a robot, but at this point, I was so nervous, I wasn't focusing on anything else except for running through the plan again with Serria. It is a testament to our friendship that, when I told her my ending move -- after he'd told me he'd been in jail, didn't like short girls anymore or any of the other bizarre reasons that had gone through my head that morning at 5 a.m., I was just going to say, "Well, to quote Fall Out Boy... thanks for the memories," then salute him as I left -- she said it was the best idea she'd ever heard.
She also maybe was a little bit drunk, too.
But, as any true friend would do, when we got to the street of Jake's bar and it was clear that despite the sheer amount of liquid courage I had running through my veins, I was about to lose my nerve, Serria yelled at the driver to stop the cab, then literally kicked me out of the car.
That, everyone, is friendship.
I walked into the bar pretending that I had chill when, in reality, I was an actual nervous wreck. Jake saw me immediately and, as I approached, hugged me from across the bar. I did not reciprocate the hug, though I truly don't know if this was because I was angry, confused or still trying to remember the exact phrasing of the Fall Out Boy lyric I was going to eventually quote.
"Ohhhh," he said in his accent that was so cute, it made me even more irrationally upset with him. "You're maaaaaaaad." Then, instead of using any more words, he pulled out his phone -- a brand-new one that was literally still in the process of being set-up and showed me how his old phone had been obliterated on New Years Eve.
It was kind of a lame excuse and I half-heartedly believed him until he came to sit next to me on the other side of the bar and I watched him receive the unanswered text message I'd sent to him earlier that week. To be honest, I was still a little bit mad he hadn't tried to contact me at all in ten days, but I was also happy that I no longer was going to be waking up at 4:00 a.m. wondering what I did wrong, so instead of addressing that issue, the two of us drank a few beers together, then he kissed me in a way that was very reminiscent of our first date.
But, now -- fast-forward to one week later, when Jake is napping and I am laying in his bed, staring at the wall and trying to think of the best word I could use to ask him what he thought about us.
Though we'd been seeing each other since early October, we'd never had the "Are-We-Dating/What-Are-We" talk, mostly because I don't like to label things and also because I do very poorly in awkward situations, as will be referenced in the remainder of this story. But, after the non-contact for ten days and how much that drove me crazy, I decided I needed to know what he thought our relationship was... even though I myself was very unsure what our relationship was or what I wanted it to be.
Because he is a bartender and works not-normal hours, Jake sleeps, like, way more than I do -- last weekend, the day after I had ambushed him at his bar and was considerably less angry, we took a nap and he didn't wake up until 5:30 that evening. Our different sleeping habits don't bother me, but on this particular Saturday as he slept and I stared at the wall, I was very grateful for it because it took me three hours to decide that "perspective" was probably the best word to use in this inevitably awkward conversation that was about to take place.
When Jake finally woke up, I once again verbally attacked him for the second time that week. Still sleepy, he blinked his eyes in confusion as I sat against the wall, asking what his perspective of us actually was. He gave me the exact same answer I probably would have given him if he'd asked me -- "I don't like to overthink things..." -- but, because I had to know, I then asked him if he was seeing other people.
And, he said yes.
To be honest, I wasn't surprised at all he was dating other people, but I wasn't necessarily happy to hear it either. We laid in silence for a few minutes, then I stood up and said I had to go be an adult and do adult things.
And, although I really did have adult things I had to do that day, like laundry and freelancing and grocery shopping, when he asked me why I was leaving, the only thing I could think of was to say: "I have to go do karaoke later."
Like I said, I don't do well in awkward situations.
On the subway ride back to Manhattan, I took out my pen and wrote down all the thoughts I was having furiously fast on the receipts I'd found in my pocket. I clearly had a lot of thoughts because, before I'd even made it out of Brooklyn, I had filled up the entire back side of the receipt with the hardly legible, chicken-scratch scrawl that becomes my handwriting when I am in a hurry to document my feelings.
As I turned the piece of paper over to keep writing, I realized it was the one from his bar I'd shoved in my jacket the night before. Which, really, just brought me back to the night we'd met, when I'd wrote down my number on such a similar receipt, somehow knowing I would know him eventually. I realized then that when I met Jake, it was like "oh, I'm done," not in the crazy sense that I thought he was "The One" or anything like that, but in the sense that, for the first time in my year of living in New York, I no longer had any interest in dating other people.
Unfortunately for me, while I was Team "Oh, I'm Done," it would appear that Jake was more in the "Oh, I'm Not Done Quite Yet" camp.
I was trying to explain all of this to Chelsea via a phone call once I'd finally gotten back to the Upper East Side. When I was leaving Jake's apartment in a speed that must have made him think I am very passionate about being to karaoke on time, I text Chelsea to tell her that he was dating other people. She told me to call her when I got home, which I did -- though, I started the whole phone call out with the tragic loss of my FitBit, which at that point I had realized was missing from my wrist.
"Basically," I told her, after I'd outlined the morning and, also, all the places my FitBit could possibly be, "I think I have three options."
1. KEEP ON KEEPIN' ON.
Not counting my uncomfortable karaoke exit and the silence that punctuated the room after he said he was dating other people, my relationship with Jake was no different than it always had been. It was still pretty undefined, but if I was okay with that, we could keep going about our lives the same way we had since October. I just now knew that I am not the only girl he's sending photos of his dog to and that I could send photos of dogs to other guys, too.
Also, in this scenario, I hang out at the puppy window by Zach's apartment way more often than I currently do, which is a pretty big mark in the plus column.
2. CHILL OUT IN THE FRIEND ZONE.
Jake is a genuine, nice person I get along with and I truly enjoy his company -- obviously, otherwise I would have been dating other people since October. But, as I explained to Chelsea, I think the second weirdest part about my dating life (after ghosting) is that I haven't stayed friends with any of the people I've gone out with in Manhattan. That didn't necessarily bother me before because I've dated some pretty awful people, but I got along so well with Jake that I'd be willing to stop going on dates, but still be friends. It might be slightly awkward at first, but I'm pretty sure it couldn't be worse than any of the other uncomfortable situations I'd put him through in the past ten days.
3. GET SWOLE, YO.
Option number three involves disappearing from Jake's life completely, but joining Equinox and then getting stupid-fit and showing up at his bar (once again) unannounced in anywhere between five and eight months, depending on my consistency and dedication to actually becoming "swole."
Chels was a fan of option number three, although she was confused as to what the end goal in the five-to-eight month mark was and how I would handle the situation when the time came. I was too, so I decided I'd probably either go with options one or two. To be honest, I still have yet to make a choice, though I'm pretty sure once Jake realizes I've been writing about him on the Internet, he'll probably phase me out of the roster for real this time.
Which brings us to now.
"Single Jen is back," I told Serria the night after all this had happened. I was explaining how I'd been walking to the subway to meet her when an attractive man stopped me on the street to chat, compliment my style and ask for my phone number. (I gave it to him, then a few hours later, he asked me for a photo of myself. Instead, I sent him a severely close-up photo of my friend Palmer's face during his formative years and remembered again why I hate dating).
"Well," Serria said over her beer and crayons -- because we're adults who go to bars that let you color -- "Technically, Single Jen was never gone. I mean, she thought she was gone, but turns out she's actually just returned from a confusing and ill-defined break."
And, I am.
So, hello, Manhattan -- I am back...
...if you need me, I'll probably be at Equinox.