Frans
(still not his real name) and I broke up on the 25th of July 2014. So
that’s it. A couple of days ago I celebrated the 4th anniversary of my
singleness. You might wonder how I know the exact date, well last year when my
friends were celebrating their 4th anniversary I decided that I
should also celebrate my relationship status. A quick Whatsapp search of
“dumped” and “broke up” brought me to this date. And I have remembered it ever
since.
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| always the third wheel |
Last year I
planned well in advance to celebrate my singleversary with an
“awkward/romantic” date with my friend Mike. He agreed to this but then somehow
backed out of it at the last minute (if you’re reading, I’m obviously still hurt
and devastated by this). When I questioned him on this, he actually danced away
from me. Danced. So that’s my dating life, people will actually dance away from
me.
And I know
being almost 29 and single might sound quite normal to you (well, if you aren’t
from Indonesia) but what does this singledom mean when living in this
marriage-obsessed country?
Firstly,
you’re gonna be answering a lot of questions. Indonesian people love to throw
that “kapan nikah?” (when are you getting married?) question out there. I don’t
really know the answer to that, seeming I have been single for the last four
years, have no romantic prospects and haven’t met a single person in this world
whom I would like to be married to, but “hopefully this year” is a good
vague response (my friend Maltha suggested “besok kalau gak hujan” [“tomorrow
if it’s not raining”] as an excellent alternative that I’ll definitely try at
some point.). In the past “my soulmate is in Palembang and I haven’t been there
yet” used to be enough but after going there and checking this in 2015, I know
the Palembang story doesn’t check out. I guess this question would be even more
soul-destroying if I actually cared about getting married, so I guess I should
be grateful that I don’t.
Next,
people will give you unwanted advice and motivation regularly. They’ll
encourage you by telling you you’re pretty and someone would want you (which is
quite insulting as my self-esteem doesn’t need to be based on who wants me and
also considering someone an option because they see me as “pretty” is kind of
sad). They’ll tell you to just find an Indonesian man and that it doesn’t
matter if there’s a religious difference because you can just follow his (which
is not really the kind of thing you can decide for someone else but okay…).
You might
begin to deal with this by sometimes lying to strangers about your marital
status to avoid unnecessary pity and worry. But then you’ll end up getting
confused about which Gojek driver you told you were married and which you told
the truth to, so I guess if you’re going to go down that road, you have to go
all the way. I realised this recently when a Gojek driver asked me how my
husband was and if he still worked at EF Plaza. I almost said “what the hell?”
but thankfully remembered that 2 months ago I’d told a Gojek driver that I had
a husband and that it’d lead to so many follow-up questions that I just told him
my housemate was my husband. It then turned out he had driven my housemate to
work before and knew who I was talking about, so great.
But, it’s
not so bad being single to be honest.
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| the "wall of love" |
I don’t
really want a boyfriend but when I say that in Indonesia it’s met with “ohhh
mau langsung nikah?” (which is some kind of idea that I’d just marry someone
without dating them, an arranged marriage perhaps? I don’t know how to
translate this well) which is not really the point. It’s not even that I’m
against marriage or anything, I’m just not particularly interested in the idea.
I don’t like the idea that I should do something to check it off some kind of
“TO DO LIST FOR PEOPLE THAT WANT TO LOOK NORMAL” (I also don’t care about
looking normal). There’s no need for me to get married to impress other people.
I know that when the “when are you getting married?” question gets satisfied
“when are you having a baby?” becomes the next annoyance. There’s no end, so
I’ll settle for the familiar “kapan nikah?” and look for more creative ways to
answer this.
But, I
often blame my singledom on this country, firstly because I rarely meet anyone
new outside work and also because I spend most of my time dressed in khaki
trousers and a polo shirt which isn’t exactly going to catch too many eyes even if I did meet someone. But, in reality the main reason probably is the fact that I’m only capable of being
romantically interested in people who pay no attention to me or are completely
unattainable. Seriously if you knew my last few crushes you could equate these
to a list of impossibilities. I also find it somewhat annoying if someone is
romantically interested in me.
But, in
some way unrequited love has become more attractive to me than any other kinds
of love. It feels less selfish, more authentic and serves as a good test of how
you’re willing to treat someone without gaining anything in return. This kind
of love is corrupted by “hope” because imagining that it could lead somewhere makes
it selfish and defeats the purpose of the “love”. It can also make you
disillusioned that you might deserve something as some kind of reward for your
efforts. In any sense, when that hope is quashed you are left with some kind of
emptiness, in any sense love that you regard as hopeless from the beginning comes
with no unpleasantness.
Over the
last four years, I have actually been on a few dates as you might have seen
from my stories here. I’ve experimented with Tinder to no avail, dated a
nazi-symphasizer and met my “soulmate” at a hospital (see previous blog posts
if you don’t remember).
Well I’ll
give you the highlights of my dating life since I stopped blogging about it:
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Once
I was lining up in Melbourne airport and a guy started talking to me. Then I
ran into him again at Bali airport and we friended each other on Facebook.
Turns out we went to the same university. A couple of months after that he was
randomly in Surabaya so we met for coffee. A month after that we had dinner
together in Melbourne. It all felt very international. But I don’t think we’ve
spoken in more than 2 years now.
·
There
was this guy that I spoke to a lot, over a long period of time. I wrote the
poem below and put it up on the “wall of love” in Seoul and then basically
immediately stopped caring about that guy which is a massive contradiction of
the poem itself. But, it’s still there I guess and I’m not going back to Seoul
to take it down, so oh well.
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| my ridiculous poetry |
·
Once
I was so awkward texting a guy that I had to ask two of my friends to help me
write something and then while I was passing my phone to my friend I
accidentally sent him a random picture of a fox and couldn’t really explain it
so I stopped talking to him. I ran into him once when I was drunk and it was
incredibly awkward for everyone involved.
It’s been a
thrilling four years as you can see.
But I’m
happy. Except for occasionally missing conversations like this:
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| not even worth translating... |
But I’ll be
okay without it (really I will, it seems ridiculous and unnecessary even now).
