Early & Alone #39: Spaghetti and Marshmallows

I spent Tuesday morning with a group of 6 to 8 year-olds, helping oversee a writing workshop at 826Boston, where I volunteer, called Spaghetti and Skyscrapers. The kids were asked to imagine they were architects and could build any kind of building they wanted. They got to work drawing with paper and pencil. One little boy at my table drew a triangle that he wanted to be like a “tall spear that’s trying to break the sky;” another drew a sandwich shop, where people could get lunch. 

Once their buildings had been rendered, we passed out dry spaghetti and lasagna noodles, marshmallows, and scoops of vanilla frosting. The kids’ next task was to actually attempt to make their drawings come to life, given these unconventional building materials. They impressed me with their industriousness. Once the skyscraper boy realized his noodles were too tall and thin to support a marshmallow tower, he set to work making a more stable structure, ballasting the sides with lasagna noodles. The sandwich shop boy lined up his marshmallows along strands of spaghetti and smeared frosting glue all over his lasagna noodles. He got a good start, but kept wailing, “It’s never gonna work!” (It didn’t.) 

The exercise was meant to get kids thinking about form and function, but also to understand that sometimes, when you’re creating something, you have to make compromises in order to make it work. 

Of course, this is a lot like writing. I often know what I want to say when I sit down to write, but somehow, the words come out mangled, as though they’d gone through a lawnmower on the way from my brain to my fingers. It’s also kind of like dating. 

When we’re looking for a relationship, a lot of us construct our dream partner in our heads. They could be a skyscraper or a sandwich shop version of a person, it doesn’t matter: what matters is they check all of our boxes. Your boxes may be different than mine, and mine are probably different than, say, Pilot Pete from The Bachelor (ie my main criteria isn’t that my partner loves me so much they cry all the time, but I digress). For example, if I were constructing my ideal partner on paper, he’d be tall, he’d like to read, he’d have a job he enjoys, he would be affectionate but not overly so, he’d enjoy eating and drinking, and he’d make me laugh. And also he would be Jon Hamm. 

But when it comes to actually taking the idea of our ideal partners into the real world, we can lose sight of that ideal really quickly or cling so hard to the paper partner that we can’t give a real person a fair shot. We give up on our marshmallow towers instead of building a more stable noodle foundation. You’re following me, right? 

I was recently chatting with a friend at a party about online dating, and she told me that in an effort to expand her horizons, she changed her profile settings to “pansexual.” I nodded in recognition. I’d recently done something similar myself, when I’d selected the OkCupid setting which shows you as “open to non-monogamy.” 

At the time, I’d reasoned that I wasn’t necessarily looking for a long-term relationship anyway, and many of the men I was attracted to had “ethical non-monogamist” in their profiles. So why not be open to the idea? 

However, when I found myself actually studying these profiles, my immediate reflex was to swipe left on anyone who was “seeing someone” as opposed to “single.” I tried, but I just couldn’t see myself dating someone who was dating other people. When it comes down to it, as much as I try to convince myself otherwise, I am ultimately looking for a steady relationship, one in which love is a possibility. While I believe that a person can love more than one person, I also know that I want to be someone else’s person. Not one in a group of people. 

I want to be the progressive, go-with-the-flow, cool girl, but I’m just not. And I never will be. My fundamental ideals about love and relationships are not something I should be willing to compromise so that I can get more matches online, and nor should anyone else’s. 

Because when it comes down to it, compromise is something we should be making in all our relationships, but swiping online is NOT a relationship. If we can’t be ourselves at the earliest stages, when we’re laying the foundation for any kind of relationship, it doesn’t bode well for moving forward. To come full circle: our noodle towers will come crashing down faster than we can smear a marshmallow with enough frosting to hold things together, so to speak. 

So don’t beat yourself up about that person who blocked you after making a date but before finalizing plans (as happened to me last week), or if you’re not getting responses back to any of your messages (which happens to me constantly). It’s not a reason to think, “Maybe if I changed my profile settings, I’d get more matches!” It’s the same as when Cady pretty much fails math in Mean Girls so that Aaron Samuels will offer to tutor her. I’m rambling, but you get the gist: we shouldn’t be compromising ourselves in any situation, but most especially in online dating. 

What I’m Reading: Wrapped in Rainbows a biography of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd. Hurston had a fascinating and unconventional life—I had no idea, for instance, that she was an anthropologist! 

What I’m Watching: I finally watched Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse last weekend and it was SO GOOD. If you’re like me, you might be putting it off because you think you know what an animated Spiderman movie will be like, but trust me on this: it’s a DELIGHT. 

What I’m Listening To: Honestly, the Here to Make Friends podcast dissecting this season of The Bachelor which has been bonkers. 

What I’m Wearing: A lot of this hand lotion in the dry winter. 

What I’m Eating: I finally caved and subscribed to the NYT Cooking app based on the charm of Alison Roman and this video. I made the stew and it was worth it.