You Can Make Him Like You
There are always other boys. Until there aren’t.
New Year’s Eve, 1994. The first time someone told you he was not attracted to you. You were 17 and as skinny as you’d ever be. The boy had once been attracted to you — you’d dated almost the whole year. But you weren’t always a great girlfriend, and high school relationships end. It didn’t break your heart too much. You knew you were hot as hell, no matter what he said.
When you are young, everything is an infinite resource. Time, energy, youth, life — you will always have all of these things. Flexible joints, a slim waist, unlined skin — sure, they won’t last, you know this, but it seems incomprehensible now to imagine an existence without them.
But most of all, there are the boys. There will never be a time when they don’t notice you. Because from the second they start seeing you, just around when you hit 16, they are always there. Even when you don’t want them. Even when you later shave your head trying to run them off, they will walk past you on the sidewalk in New York and rub your skull, an imposition as unwanted as grabbing your ass.
They’re still there, always there, as you get older. In bars, always there to go home with you. In restaurants, leaving their number with the bill. At parties, at weddings. At the office, although that never works out. At events you cover for your job. They’re young, they’re old. They’re single, married, living with girlfriends, trying to cheat on long-distance girlfriends you find out about later. Always hitting on you, always trying to get you undressed. It doesn’t work most of the time, but it works enough of the time to make it worth their while. Sometimes worth your while. In any case, you take the attention for granted.
You’re not everyone’s taste, you recognize that. You cry over it sometimes. Starve yourself for a week or two, wishing you could look like Kate Moss, halfway hating yourself for your inability to develop an eating disorder. You want to be a petite blonde and size 2, or tall and rail thin. Always with smaller breasts and hips — maybe then the guys who don’t notice you would. The preppy boys in high school, the indie lit mag boys in college, the English grad students who should like you by default because you’re one of them. So many crushes who never like you back.
But mostly, eventually, you’re fine with yourself. Your body works like it’s supposed to. Clothes generally fit, even if you’ll never wear a 2. You can pick up men for a one-night stand, and you can date men for long periods of time. One day you’ll have just one man, presumably, your future husband, but until then, there are so many options.
You date and you date and you date. Sometimes disastrously. Sometimes you think it will work out, but it never does. There’s a song one of your boyfriends likes that says, “There’s always other boys, there’s always other boyfriends/There’s always other boys, you can make him like you.” You relate to it a little too much.
Labor Day weekend, 2007. The second time hurts more. Your boyfriend, the one who likes that song, says he’s bothered by your weight gain. You pick a fight and blow everything up. Fuck him and his stupid face. But you lose the weight over the next year, just in case he’s right.
The husband hasn’t materialized by the time you turn 35 in 2012. You’ve put on weight the past year — medications, quitting smoking, too much wine and bourbon. You went from a 6 to a 10, and by late spring you’ll only fit into a 12. (The weight gain won’t stop here, but the details of it will.)
One night in May you’re in France, and you stop into a random place for a drink. You sit at the bar, and within a few minutes, two American women are sitting next to you. They’re slightly younger, definitely thinner. You all start talking, comparing vacation notes. The cute bartender flirts with them in his mediocre English, teasing them about their accents, pouring them free shots. You’re right there, but he doesn’t see you. It’s okay, you don’t want to pick up a French bartender anyway.
A few months later, a comedian you know comes to town. You’ve gone out for drinks a few times over the past decade, and he’s tried to get you to go home with him every time. (You never have.) Tonight, after the show, he doesn’t ask you to hang out. Whatever, he’s kind of an ass (like most comedians). You wouldn’t have slept with him this time either.
Then one Saturday night you’re out alone at a hip new cocktail lounge. It’s packed, so you sit at the bar instead of a table. Reading alone at a bar is a surefire way for men to talk to you, even though most of the time you just want to read and sip your bourbon in peace. But that night you’re lonely, and you kind of want to talk.
Three men come in and sit next to you. They’re maybe a little younger but not college-aged. They’re in town for work, installing new roofs after a series of storms. They briefly start talking to you, flirting just a little. They decide to move to a table and ask you to join. As you stand up, you see it sink in on their faces — you’re larger than they thought. They suddenly change plans, and you sit back at the bar, alone. (You’ll see this face a lot in the years to come when meeting men off dating apps. You’ll get used to it, but it will never not sting.)
Around this time, a lot of women are writing essays about street harassment, saying it should be taken more seriously. You can’t remember the last time you were catcalled, and it makes you sad. You want to tell these women to be careful what they wish for.
That year is the year you start to become invisible. At 36, you’re fully gone. You create a profile on a popular dating site in April; by August you’ve had exactly zero dates. A lot of men have set their age preferences to end at 34, even if they’re in their 40s. You wonder what exactly happens at 35 to make women so undateable. You write to a friend, “I swapped in a sexy picture of me suggestively sucking on my finger to see, as an experiment, what kind of response I’d get. Nothing.”
Does your drinking get worse because you have no relationship to keep you in line? Or do you become unable to be in a relationship because of your drinking? Yes.
By 40, you might as well be a ghost. It works well for your job — it’s easier to be aggressive and come out of nowhere with hard questions when you aren’t trying to look pretty. You decide to embrace it at this point, because what else can you do? Diet? Exercise? Quit drinking? You look up information on weight-loss surgery, but it’s so much effort. You don’t have any effort to give to anything but your job.
You’re dating someone now, for the first time in a long time, and he doesn’t seem to care about your weight. He also doesn’t seem to care much about you, but beggars can’t be choosers, right? The apps are a nightmare; at least he’s a real person. He treats you like shit, but you look like shit and feel like shit, so you think you probably deserve it.
You wear a lot of shapeless dresses because that’s all that fits. Most stores don’t carry clothes in your size, so you stick to shopping at Target, which has the added benefit of being cheap. Some days you miss the beautiful expensive clothes you wore in your 20s so badly you could cry.
You finally walk away from the bad relationship, but the pandemic hits and you stay home for two years. No one would notice you anyway, but at least you aren’t increasing your risk of dying by attempting to meet people. (Except you are, every day, with every drink you take.)
Independence Day weekend, 2021. This time hurts the most. You hook up with one of your best friends, and it seems like a good idea because you’re both single and the pandemic’s been rough. But the next time he sees you he tells you that he only slept with you because he was drunk, and he’s not attracted to you sober. Objectively, you can’t blame him — you’re a mess at this point, both physically and mentally. Any attempted relationship with any person would be doomed to failure. But also he could have just said literally anything else to end things. You cry a lot for a few days.
A year later, you quit drinking. Some weight falls off without a single workout — the magic of removing all those excess calories from your daily intake. You’re taking it seriously — no dating in early sobriety — but you also feel slightly miffed that not one person tries to 13th-step you. Even after some weight loss, you’re still invisible, even to creeps. No one wants a middle-aged woman.
After a year sober, you gingerly try an app date. You aren’t ready. A few months later, you try again. It’s less awkward now — you don’t wish you had a drink in your hand — but you can’t make yourself keep doing it. You go on a couple of dates with one guy who then tells you he needs time to work on himself. This is fine, you could never have been serious about him. Within a month he’s dating someone younger and skinnier.
You have a few unrequited crushes in early sobriety. It feels like high school, crushing this hard. Some alcoholics like to say your emotional growth stops when you start drinking, so when you get sober your brain is back at whatever young age you first started damaging it. You don’t believe this, because you can see how you have grown emotionally since your youth, despite all the alcohol. But crushes are still crushes — utterly ridiculous. Nothing works out.
You finally give in and start spending a lot of money to lose weight. This is mostly because your doctor is making you, but also because you want to go on dates again.
Almost three years sober, and you’re healthy-ish, back at your 2012 weight. Unlike then, it feels great (at least, until you see yourself in photos). You can buy clothes in a store again. You talk yourself into wearing shorter hemlines.
A lot of people tell you that you look great. The thing about losing a lot of weight is that everybody thinks they can and should comment on it. None of these people are hitting on you, but it feels kind of nice to get compliments. It also feels kind of bad, because if you look great now, you maybe didn’t look so great before.
Still, whatever that magic line on the scale is that takes you from invisible to noticeable, you’ve crossed it. Just barely. Men are noticing you again. You aren’t sure what to do with this information. Do you really want to flirt with someone who wouldn’t flirt with you a year and two sizes ago?
The thing about aging, you’ve discovered, is that you still feel the same as you’ve always felt, even while feeling completely different. Time still feels like an infinite resource, even as it seems ever closer to running out. You’re older than your father now. You’ve outlived him. Yet you feel like a teenager when someone cute and kind and emotionally unavailable tells you you’re pretty.
You wonder what it would be like to not even notice male approval, to not crave it on some level, even when not actively seeking it out. Your therapist talks about core beliefs and attachment styles. You don’t know if you can unlearn your entire existence.
You would like to end this story with a nice bow on it. A happy ending. A relationship. That doesn’t happen. It’s your 48th birthday, and you’re as alone as ever. And maybe that’s ok.
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Beautiful work. Thank you for sharing yourself like this.
Honey, enjoy it now ,cause 60+ is worse. But remember, Wisdom never gets old.