Twenty-Something and Single: The End

By K. C. Morgan

I thought it would be a good idea, for my last column, to write about the worst dating experience I’ve ever had. So, I got to thinking about all those bad dates in my past. Each memory was more horrifying than the next – a virtual visual nightmare of what happens when romance goes bad.
It left me with a conundrum. Should I write about that horrible date with the techno weirdo, the one who took me to a crazy dance club and then proceeded to have an 80s-movie-style dance-off with a gentleman wearing multicolored lights? Should I describe the horror I felt as I watched, helpless, as beat-heavy music without lyrics thrummed around my head?
Or would I write instead about my traumatic experience at the lake? Stranded with a drunk companion and the child-ridden family of a man I barely knew, only to discover after the incredibly long evening was over that I’d actually had money taken right out of my purse?
Perhaps I ought to talk about the night I went to request a song at the bar, only to stumble on my platform shoes as I dismounted? I ended up at the emergency room that night, drunken and in a wheelchair, and at work two days later on crutches – just another dating catastrophe.
This kaleidoscope of bad dates left me with a sour feeling, and I came to long for the end of this experience being single. It’s rough out there, and seemingly normal men can create horrific dating experiences that linger with us long after the few unbearable dating hours are over.
But, does anything really end? Relationships past always come back to haunt us, old lovers appear when we wish they wouldn’t, names get mentioned in casual conversation that make us silently cringe. Some romantic relationships fail, only to evolve into friendships that create new relationships and experiences. Dates end and begin again, and eventually you feel like you’re repeating certain parts of your life endlessly.
Even when you aren’t single anymore, some inner part of you clings to that former independence. Some part of you remembers days when you had to go it alone, when you breathed a sigh of relief just to be back in your own apartment all by yourself. So, in its way, being single is something that sticks.
No matter what else may happen, afterward.
And so I say good-bye – not to dating, not to being single, and not just yet good-bye to my twenties, but at least for now to this column. But perhaps saying good-bye to this column is really saying hello to something new…something unexpected.
In closing, I’d like to quote a line from the movie This is Spinal Tap, not because it’s a fabulous testament to being single, but because it’s a movie that’ll always make you laugh – no matter how bad the date or the relationship. David St. Hubbins: “How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what's stopping it, and what's behind what's stopping it? So, what's the end, you know, is my question to you.”
Indeed.