Introducing the ‘A Pleasure to Meet You’ essay collection

An autoethnographic exploration into a 30-something’s quests in love, desire, and wanting

I purposely strayed away from writing about love, dating, and relationships on this platform for a long time. I have written a few pieces like Longing for it and Waiting Anyway, The Weight to Date and Don’t Ask Me on No Damn Coffee Date (which was really just because I wanted to pen a fun piece about a very chaotic, unserious Hinge date) but I intentionally chose for it to never become a style or a pillar of my content.

There’s nothing wrong with writers who do, I just personally didn’t want to become known as someone who created content about men, dating, or dating men. So whenever the topic of love would creep into my drafts, outlines, or idea board, I would instantly delete it and start over. I felt like there were bigger, more important emotions, insights, critiques that I could spend 2,000 words on than something that felt so deeply personal, culturally touchy, and, honestly, a little clickbaity.

Love felt too commonplace.

Too easy of a plot line to write against.

Low hanging fruit.

I also wondered what would happen if my take landed on the wrong side of the social consensus. What if my experience wasn’t as universal as I thought? What if I wrote something and then had new exposures that changed my mind, like the experiences I’ve had with coffee dates (yes, I do them now) or the countercultural sentiments I have towards our fascination with hypergamous relationships? Writing about relationships seemed to require a kind of certainty on the subject that, having not dated someone seriously in almost 5 years, I felt I hadn’t earned the authority to talk about.

But, like almost everyone I know, I do have thoughts about love. I have feelings about relationships and what they mean to me and the world I’m building. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to talk about them.

Enter the idea for ‘A Pleasure to Meet You’.

When I started writing this collection of autoethnographic essays, I instantly wanted to intellectualize it and write more from the angle of connection and desirability politics, the internal pressures of feeling wanted and being seen, the history and motivations behind desire, and what it meant to finally be seen as someone desirable. And while I do still plan to touch on alllll of that, underneath the theories and bell hooks quotes exists a conversation that’s probably a little more plainspoken and honest:

I’m kinda tired of pretending that I don’t care about love, loving, and being loved.

I’ll be the first to say I’ve built a great solo life. One supported, expanded, and made meaningful by family, friends, faith, and community. I take pride in its fullness and it not just being an elaborate waiting room I’ve decorated while hoping someone arrives and “saves me”. But a full life is not a life absent of wants and desires. Loving what I have created doesn’t require me to pretend there is nothing else I would like to build. Love does not have to define my life in order for its presence, or lack there of, to matter.

As I sit down and begin putting my honest and lived dating experiences and run-ins with love, feelings, and emotions to paper, I’m realizing that it’s a lot grayer than I imagined. That the white has a little tint to it, and the black is a little ashier than I first imagined. The rules that appeared obvious against the algorithm become harder to apply once another person, with all of their contradictions, is standing in front of you.

Love, I am learning, is a lot harder to intellectualize up close than it is in the “would you ever date a man who…” conversations I have with my friends in the abstract.

This collection is my attempt to close some of that distance for myself. An attempt at acknowledging that in this phase of my life, it is okay to talk openly about my desires and the feelings that come with prolonged singleness or false starts without inviting pity, advice, or judgments about why I am single or why I have been single for as long as I have.

Instead of continuing to live outside of it, I want to feel what it might be like to really be in it.

What really shifted my perspective about sharing these stories is that love has become important enough in my life that avoiding it in my own world, and in my writing, no longer feels honest. It feels like I’m holding back. I don’t think I have ever given myself (or really been afforded) the space to fully express and understand that without feeling like the desire somehow made me male-centered or put a cloud of desperation over everything else I’ve built.

So I am making, taking, and breaking open that space now.

I’ve also chosen the format of an autoethnography because I truly believe that I can only speak from my own experiences within culture and not as a diagnosis of culture itself. I’ve always viewed any perspective I share as a POV from a sample size of one, and with a topic as deeply personal as love it’s the only real perspective I can write from.

A Pleasure to Meet You is less about the person I’m hoping to meet (although how cute would that be yall, to be researching about love and then actually find it?!!?) and more about the meeting of myself within love itself. This isn’t intended to be advice or intentionally hot in its take, it’s more about openly choosing to meet the version of myself who allows herself to yearn, to be seen, to make choices, to change her mind, to take emotional risks, and discover out in the open that love is both more ordinary and more complicated than I believed.

So, no, this isn’t a collection about how to find love as much as it is an exploration into why I’m choosing love, what it’s teaching me, and not being shy about it. It’s about what wanting love has made me confront within myself and how I’m choosing to make room inside an already full life for another person.

So I’d like to introduce A Pleasure to Meet You, an ongoing collection about love, dating, singleness, and the many ways we ask to be met. I’m not sure how many installments there will be, but these essays will appear periodically with no particular cadence alongside the other essays, Insights, and Marginal Thoughts I’ll continue to publish throughout Still Unlearning. They can be read independently, but they will also be collected here.

I hope to meet more of myself in this exploration. And I hope, somewhere within this work, you’ll meet more of yourself too.