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  “Really?” I said to myself. “I’d say my dating life sucks.”

  Allow me to explain.

  When it comes to dating, I was a late bloomer. I didn’t have my first boyfriend until my sophomore year in college. I’ve always been very goal oriented. I focused on extracurricular activities, dance recitals, or theater practice. Romance seemed like such a gamble.

  Like most kids affected by their parents’ divorce, I was reluctant to chase love. I had just graduated from college when they officially split, after seventeen years of marriage. My mom and dad had been separated for several years, but they would see each other from time to time and still seemed to be friends. Deep down I was holding on to the hope that one day they could get back together, but when I returned home from college my mom came into my room to give me the news that this was not going to happen. Perhaps my graduating was a time marker for them both. They finally had to admit that if a reconciliation hadn’t happened yet, it probably never would.

  “I know that this is upsetting,” my mother said, “but I went through with the divorce from your father.”

  Even though they had been separated for a while, and I was an adult at that point, her words hit me like a punch in the chest. Except this hit would take me more than a decade to resolve.

  Some of my early struggles in dating were remnants of what I believed to be unresolved feelings surrounding my parents’ split.

  Take my first relationship in college, for example. My boyfriend was this big, charismatic guy, member of the football team, and larger than life. Laughing was our second language. We’d crack jokes and binge-watch Martin.

  He had a child from an earlier relationship, a little girl who was around two at the time. While the situation was challenging, we made it work for a year, more or less. At least, I thought we were making it work. One morning, we had met up and I could tell something was up right away. There was no sparkle in his eye, none of the easy laughter.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “You’re an amazing woman, Lauren,” he started.

  Uh-oh, I thought.

  “It’s just that it’s really important to be in my daughter’s life,” he continued. “And in order to do that, I’d like to heal my relationship with her mother. You have so much strength and talent. I know you’re going to be fine. The best thing for me to do is to let you go.”

  I felt that punch to my chest again, and it sent me into a downward spiral for weeks. I couldn’t stop wondering what was wrong with me. What had I done to mess things up? Because I had such a fragile view of relationships, I internalized everything and came away more insecure than when I entered the relationship. The experience also left me with further trust issues. Could he have been seeing the child’s mother the entire time we were dating?

  This set a pattern that I would repeat throughout my twenties. It always came back to trust. Anytime I felt myself getting happy in a relationship, I would pull back emotionally because I knew it was only a matter of time before the letdown. Not gonna lie, every time I experienced a failed romance, thoughts of my parents’ divorce tapped me on the shoulder. I had to do whatever it took to protect myself from that disappointment.

  * * *

  I became a consecutive long-distance dater. It was another defense mechanism I had developed. It was a way to avoid being too intimate and too vulnerable. I’ve often wondered if there is any correlation between this and the fact that my dad traveled often for work when I was growing up. In turn, I had to learn to love people from a distance. I’d watch my girlfriends get involved with men and develop instant connections. Mind you, it didn’t always last. But part of me wished that I could learn to be less protective.

  Unfortunately, the men I met in Atlanta were rarely what I was looking for. When the girls and I would step out, there were always guys lurking. We’d hang out around town, sip our sidecars, and comment on the procession of bachelors. Some were okay, but inevitably they’d turn out to be shallow or boring. Tiff and I always had our eye-lock distress signal that meant “Mayday! Send help!” To me, the Atlanta dating scene was difficult to navigate and lackluster. Doing the long-distance thing was a way to keep the Atlanta gents at bay.

  My last relationship before Love Is Blind perfectly represented all this. He and I had gone to college together and then reconnected a few years later online. He was living in Los Angeles at the time, working in entertainment. The relationship started with a few flirty DMs. Within a week we were texting every day.

  We had a lot of similarities—creative, driven, and motivated. As I had grown up witnessing my father being a go-getter, that became a quality I admired and appreciated in men. My ex fit the mold for the type of men I had always found myself drawn to.

  He had a lot of positive qualities and a drive for success. He had a sweet, calm, caring personality, which was different from the brash, arrogant types I had fallen for in the past. We talked about our businesses and life goals but also fun, easygoing stuff, like our latest binge on Netflix or places we wanted to travel.

  This went on for over a year. We’d fly out to see each other every few weeks and communicate by phone, text, or DMs the rest of the time. It felt like a serious relationship. And then, as had happened every time before, the bottom sort of fell out.

  We used to call or text every day, even if it was just a heart emoji. One week, a couple days went by without any communication. So I texted him but no response. The next day, I called. He answered, but the conversation was stale and distant. This happened to be right around the time of his ex’s birthday. With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I went onto her Instagram page, and sure enough, there was my guy sitting next to her at her party.

  The next day, the relationship ended. Would you believe he did it over text? I thought, You couldn’t even call me? Dang! As if the medium of the breakup wasn’t bad enough, the timing couldn’t have been worse—it was the fall of 2017, right around the time my business was failing and I was having to borrow money from my parents to make the rent.

  As I explained earlier, I was able to pull myself up by my bootstraps with my work life. But as 2018 rolled around, the only love I wanted to think about was self-love. I went out on a few dates here and there, in keeping with the whole living my life to the fullest thing. But any thoughts of settling down were on permanent hold.

  I wondered which part of my tired love life the LIB casting agent thought made me a perfect fit for her new dating show. But I wasn’t about to write her back and find out. Me and dating were done for a while. It was time to pack my bags again and go see more of the world.

  chapter four PEER PRESSURES

  Cameron

  The situation with the CEO had shaken me from my complacency and forced me to examine all aspects of my life—including my love life. I realized there were many parallels between my professional and romantic lives. In both worlds, it was becoming clear to me that the end was approaching.

  Before the age of twenty-eight, I had three degrees under my belt, I was making a name for myself in the increasingly in-demand field of AI, and I’d opened two offices for a growing tech company. But, as I’ve described, the appearance did not match my reality: I was miserable going into work every day, I felt like my talents were not being appreciated, and I knew I needed to find the next step in my career, but I was not making moves to change my situation.

  As I took stock of my dating life, I noticed something: in both my career and my personal relationship, I knew I was unhappy in the wrong situation, but I resisted ending the relationship because I didn’t want to be alone and lose what I had worked so hard to maintain. I realized that if I was ever going to find enduring happiness and fulfillment, I needed to take responsibility for my well-being and have enough faith in myself to leap into the unknown and thrive.

  After five years and many breakups, I finally committed to ending the relationship with the woman I had been seeing. In the months after the breakup, I spent most of my time alone, reflecting o
n how I needed to practice more compassion toward myself and how important it was to set my expectations up front for future relationships, personal or professional. I realized that it was necessary to spend that time alone to learn how to be content by myself, though at the same time I longed for intimacy.

  The truth is, I’ve always been a lover. Even as a young kid, when most of the boys were running away from girls and their cooties, I was writing them love notes. I couldn’t wait to have a girlfriend. My hometown of Lee, Maine, has a population of around eight hundred, so it isn’t exactly a teenage dating paradise. But it is unique in that the town is home to Lee Academy, a semi-private boarding and day high school with an international dorm that attracts students from all over the world.

  That’s how it came to pass that in the ninth grade I finally got my first girlfriend—a visiting student from South Korea. Not only was she from a different country; she was a senior at the school, which made her four years older. I was tall for my age, which helped give the impression we were closer in age. Regardless, it was the mixed-race part of the relationship that everyone focused on, often with the negative judgment they were ready to share.

  “Oh, he’s into Asian girls,” one of the guys in the locker room said while imitating a Korean accent. Most of the comments I received were from other guys on the soccer team, as my girlfriend managed the team’s equipment and scorecard. One day, as I was walking to join the others on the field before soccer practice, one of the guys yelled out, “Hey, dude, how’s the yellow fever?” Many in the huddled group laughed. Another time, a junior from the team passed me in the hall and whispered, “You know she’s only dating you for a green card.”

  “That’s not true!” I replied through my clenched jaws, but the upperclassman just chuckled to himself and walked away. I let my balled-up fist relax as he disappeared from view.

  I was angry and frustrated by how people were mocking our relationship. I was ready to fight anyone who had something negative to say about us, and would let them know that type of bigoted talk was wrong. I also didn’t understand why people had such a hard time processing why I wanted to date her. From my perspective, I’d spent my entire life with the same twenty or so girls from town who were in my class. The chance to go out with someone new was exciting. Of course, I was aware of the fact that she was Korean, but that wasn’t my motivation for dating her. I was also aware that it was unusual for a senior girl to date a freshman boy. I didn’t care about her age and she always felt the need to reassure me (or perhaps herself) that I was more mature than the guys in her class.

  Everyone else was clearly not convinced.

  Obviously, it didn’t work out—I was fourteen years old! And she moved back to Korea. But what I took away from the experience was that people are always ready to weigh in on your relationship, whether you ask for their opinion or not. While I ignored the opinions that were clearly based in prejudice, I still allowed others to weigh in on my dating life. In times when my relationship was in turmoil, I found myself seeking friends’ and family’s advice rather than listening to my own intuition. When I asked those closest to me what I should do about my long-distance relationship with my first girlfriend, the unanimous response was that I should let her go. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, so naturally I resisted as long as I could until we both knew it wasn’t going to work. I wanted my support system to tell me everything was going to be all right, but I refused to listen when I didn’t get the feedback I wanted.

  That pattern of allowing others to weigh in would be repeated over the decade of dating that followed. In that time, I went out with women from many different backgrounds and of different ethnicities. One of my girlfriends in college at Bates was a blond volleyball player from California. Another was a pre-med student and a dancer from Vietnam. I also dated a girl from Lebanon whose art I admired. For me, it was exciting to form connections with people who had different backgrounds than me and who could expand my world.

  From an early age, I always looked at the issue of inequality in an empirical way. There is nothing inherently different in one person or one race or ethnicity. People are fundamentally all the same and they should be treated the same way. As I got older, I came to realize that the issue is a little more complicated than that—or a lot more complicated.

  * * *

  My college dating life ended on a strange note. With a month left in my senior year, I met a girl in the philosophy club. We started chatting and hit it off immediately. I’m a romantic at heart, so I’ve always been the type to fall hard and fast. With so little time left at school, we were on an accelerated track, so we ended up being intimate within the first week; I don’t tend to move that quickly, but with the clock ticking on my college days, we both felt like there was no time to waste.

  That’s when she told me she had a boyfriend.

  “Wow… okay,” I said. “You definitely need to end it with him if we’re going to keep seeing each other. I really like you and I want to keep seeing you after I graduate, but you have to break up with him if you want that too.”

  “I will; I promise,” she said.

  I got a call from her the next day: “Hey, guess what? I broke it off with him. He didn’t want to accept it and he got really angry. I’m so done with him.”

  “I’m so happy to hear that. Don’t worry about him. I’ll make sure nothing happens to you.”

  “I’m kind of scared right now. Can I come over?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  Fast-forward a few weeks; we were in her dorm room and things were heating up. All of a sudden, there was a pounding at the door. Her ex-boyfriend had come by to collect his things. The door was locked, so he started slamming his body against it, as he’d heard my voice inside the room.

  She started sobbing and telling him to go away, while I rushed to get dressed. “You’re a slut! You’re a bitch!” he screamed through the door. My heart was racing out of my chest as I swung open the door, ready for a fight.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he snarled, shoving me back into the room. I grabbed him by the neck and we started to brawl. She called campus security as we fought, and within a minute they were on the scene to separate us. It was an ugly situation and it only got worse later when he continued to berate her over text. The whole experience raised a red flag in the back of my mind. I asked myself, “Was I in the wrong for seeing her so close after she said she ended things with her boyfriend?” “Should I have waited?” But I ignored these thoughts and pressed on, trying to convince myself of the romance of our relationship rather than focusing on how problematic it was.

  After graduation, we continued to date long-distance. I flew out to see her on the West Coast once and she came out to Maine. But the distance was taking a toll. After three months of not seeing each other, she called to say that she thought we should break up. I was devastated by the news and tried to figure out what I had done wrong and how I could fix our relationship. I soon realized, however, that there wasn’t anything to fix.

  Fortunately, a fresh start awaited me in Atlanta.

  * * *

  I’d been in Atlanta a couple months, still sulking over my latest breakup. At a certain point, I decided it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself. I was in a new city filled with amazing women. It was time to get back out there.

  I woke up one morning and said to myself, “You are going to talk to five new women today and every day until you find someone you really connect with.” I had come to the conclusion that I needed to let go of my inhibitions and take a chance with the women I found myself attracted to. I wasn’t going to wait and pray for the universe to create those situations for me; I was going to create them myself! I got out of bed with a renewed sense of conviction and went about my day.

  The first woman I talked to had caught my attention on the way to my philosophy of mind class on the downtown campus of Georgia State University. I tried to pretend we were in class together and asked her about an assignment. She ju
st looked at me in confusion, told me she wasn’t in that class, and walked away. Swing and a miss!

  The second woman I met in the health center at school while waiting to get a flu shot. We started up a conversation about photography, but I didn’t feel much chemistry between us. I left without asking for her phone number. It was another miss, but I felt my anxiety starting to reduce to a simmer.

  I was walking back home when I noticed a woman who really caught my eye. She was a Black woman with nice curves and a confident stride. We were crossing the street together, so I quickly racked my brain for something to say. I still needed to talk to three more women, right?

  “Hey, I like your bag,” I said.

  “Oh, thank you,” she replied. “My sister is a designer and she made it.”

  We continued chatting as we walked toward the library together.

  “Where’s your class?” she asked as we reached the library courtyard.

  “It’s actually in the opposite direction,” I said, with a laugh. “But I wanted to get to know you.” As we were about to part ways, she held out her phone for me to enter my number into, right as I was about to do the same thing.

  “Some of my friends and I are getting drinks later tonight at Anatolia’s. You’re welcome to come,” she said after I finished typing in my number. Mission accomplished, I thought.

  I turned up at the bar a few hours later. She was there with some friends. One by one the group filtered away until it was just the two of us. I thought that was an encouraging sign. At the point when I thought this was becoming a date, she said, “You would be great for my sister.”

  “Your sister?” I replied. “What about you?”

  “You’re sweet, Cameron,” she said. “But I have a boyfriend.”

  We talked for a few hours longer before heading our separate ways. I felt a strong, instant connection with her and I knew she felt it too. She spent a significant part of the night talking about all the ways her boyfriend wasn’t making her happy. So why was she still with him? Why did I keep finding myself in these situations where I was attracted to someone on the outs with her partner? I went home feeling both accomplished for my initiative and unsure of what to make of this new connection.