A Night Out On The Town, Part 1
Loneliness & Connection In Our Times of Technology
Hello Wonderful Readers,
I’m struggling to write to you right now. I was on a bender until 3 am this morning, and last night was filled with so many juicy details that it will take me at least a couple of weeks to tell you all about it.
Of course, a new guy has entered my life, and I’m nervous to write about him because he reads my work and is supportive of me. As you know, in the recent months of writing Misseducated, I’ve been burned by my own work much more than I hoped, and it has hurt. Yet, somehow, I have to believe that my work matters enough to keep going. And that leads me to the first part of this story I’ve got for you here. It’s the part of last night that sticks out to me the most.
Last night, I woke up from a power nap at about 8:30 pm. I had plans to meet up with Arturo (yes, the new man) at a Jazz Club later in the evening. He’s kind of a night owl, so I was thrilled when I woke up bursting with energy. I was ready to take on whatever the night had in store.
All you need to know about Arturo is that he’s 35, divorced, and from Los Bosques, an upper-class suburb of Mexico City. He also lives in Polanco and works at Google Mexico City office in Las Lomas. We met on Raya and have had a couple of dates together which have gone quite well. So well that, last night, he invited me to meet him at the Jazz Club, Casa Franca, in Roma Norte after he finished a late dinner with his coworkers.
Yesterday, we had been texting in Spanish:
Arturo, 5:57 pm: See you at Casa Franca? I’ll let you know when to get there.
Tash, 6:01 pm: Sounds good. See you there and enjoy your dinner!
As 9 pm rolled around, I was flailing around my apartment, desperate to make myself look as hot as humanly possible. I know I’m not supposed to get myself glammed up for a night out solely for the pursuit of a man (thank you, Cindy Gallop), but just like any bad feminist, I was embracing the fact that rules exist to be broken. Luckily, I had lined up drinks with a female friend to keep myself distracted from Arturo until the moment we were to meet.
I messaged him on the way to the cocktail bar to meet my female friend,
Tash, 9:48 pm: Hey, Arturo! What time should I meet you at Casa Franca?
And then I emotionally sat on my hands. And I waited.
My female friend and I ran into some other friends at the cocktail bar. Then we went out for pizza. Then we went to yet another bar. While I was sitting there, I admit I was being a terrible friend. I was only half-paying-attention to what they were all saying. It’s early October. It's cuffing season. I am wrestling with myself inside because I know that I need to lock a man down (only metaphorically, of course) before the winter sets in. However shall I make it through these upcoming cold months alone? However shall I procreate and create a plethora of healthy, rosy-cheeked children? My body is barking at me. In this economy? Not even my logical business-school-educated brain can argue with my urge to get knocked the fuck up. This is biology at its best; at its strongest.
I checked my phone at 11:26 pm. Not a word from Arturo. Not a peep. It had been a whole hour and a half. As I sipped on my passion-fruit-laced kombucha with a salt rim, I wondered: Was Arturo going to message me back? He had seemed nice until now. Maybe he got too drunk at dinner? Maybe he’d picked up another hotter girl at Casa Franca already? Maybe he didn’t want me to come after all?
You know, I’ve been single for a while. And that’s because, well, I don’t know. There’s got to be something wrong with me. I shouldn’t have sent him that very forward message asking him when he’d be at Casa Franca. I’m too needy and desperate, and men can smell it.
I started to get upset. I turned to my friends for consolation.
“Treat him like a candidate for a job interview,” one of my friends advised me. “If you were interviewing a candidate for a job, and they showed up super later or didn’t show up at all, would you stand for that? No! You’d never hire them.”
We laughed it off, and something else very exciting happened that I will tell you about next week. But as time went on, I got more and more anxious. Clearly, Arturo didn’t want to see me. Why couldn’t he have just told the truth in the first place instead of pretending? I couldn’t bring myself to check my phone again, just to be trodden down further that Arturo hadn’t messaged me. I would bring all of this up with my therapist in our next session. If this guy wasn’t going to meet my needs, well, then I was ready to give up on us getting to know each other. To numb the pain of it all, I got another round of drinks with my friends.
It was 12:09 am before I checked my phone again.
Arturo, 11:46 pm: We’ve been here a while. Are you coming to Casa Franca?
My hands shook as I read the message. I accidentally dropped my phone smack on the table. The ice in our cocktail glasses wobbled. Arturo had messaged me. And I had been so busy wallowing in my story of him not being interested, or of him finding someone better than me, or not caring about me, that I hadn’t done the damn simple task of checking in with him on my phone.
As soon as I saw his message, I rejoiced with my friends. Arturo wasn’t a complete asshole after all. And maybe, well, I had been being a bit dramatic. I would leave my deep-seated worries about my self-worth for another time because he had requested my presence.
I hurried my friends through the end of their conversation. We quickly got the bill. They walked me over to Casa Franca, and after a couple of trips through the various rooms (which I will also tell you about another time because I ran into one of my exes from On Dating Mexican Men), I finally found Arturo and his coworkers.
It was sometime past 12:30 am when we finally hugged each other hello. Then Arturo turned to me, and he said,
“I’m so glad you came. I was beginning to think it was too late. I was worried you had already gone to sleep and weren’t going to make it. It’s so good to see you. I’m so glad you came.”
His words took me aback. They struck a chord. I puzzled to myself in that moment, again distracted as we caught up with each other about how our day had been.
After all the anxiety and the trips through the realms of self-worth that I had dipped into in my own mind, here was this perfectly nice, if not also imperfect, guy standing in front of me. Somewhere along the way, between the hundreds of hours of Instagram reels I had consumed and the narratives about the opposite sex that I had bombarded myself with, I forgot that on the other end of the phone was also another living human person. And that if I wanted to get to know this person, I would have to meet them where they were. Maybe that meant compromising. Maybe that meant being patient. But without a doubt, it meant that I needed to ground myself in my reality and not fall into old, unhealthy stories of how I was treated in the past. It meant not having silly, made-up expectations of a man or any human and how they should show up for me in any given situation.
And yet, in my experience of entrenched loneliness and questioning my own worthiness of connection, I had accidentally left him hanging. And I had even transferred that instability and potential for disconnection onto him. My limited story of myself had almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Wading through the trash of my information diet and obsessing over my own emotions and ability to connect with others had left me isolated. To the point where I could hardly afford a tiny inch in the corner of my brain to consider the experience of another person, much less a person seeking a deeper connection with me. We had almost passed each other like ships in the night.
It reminds me of a fascinating TED Talk I watched a couple of years ago with psychologist Dr. Guy Winch. In the story, Winch shares that he always calls his twin brother on their birthday. That is, until one year, when his birthday rolled around, his twin brother didn’t call. During his talk, Winch says,
“That night was one of the saddest and longest nights of my life.”
That night, he makes up all kinds of stories about how he doesn’t matter to his brother anymore and how they’ve grown apart irreparably. The next day, Winch wakes up and realizes that he had accidentally kicked the phone off the hook the night before. When he realizes this, he puts it back on the ringer, and his brother calls him immediately. His brother had been calling and calling him the whole time, panicking for over a day.
“It was the longest and saddest night of his life as well.”
Disconnection. That’s what our questioning of our self-worth and loneliness can bring us to. Meeting Arturo at the Jazz Club made it clear to me just how much our own perceptions of lovability and our narratives of ourselves create or deny connection in our lives. In ignoring my phone and trapping myself in my narrative of loneliness of not receiving a message from him, I accidentally recreated that experience for Arturo and left him hanging on the other end of his phone, on the verge of disconnection and loneliness also.
You know, the tech bros in San Francisco promised us that new apps and AI would make our lives easier. But the longer I have a smartphone, the more I’m convinced that by making things easier, these apps can also make our lives more complex. Now, instead of having a face-to-face conversation, there are two phones, data plans, and wifi signals between us. While, in some ways, that makes it easier for us to communicate, it has also made it easier for us to get lost in our own biased narratives about our lives and how unlovable we might think we are at times. These narratives and perceptions are what shape our reality.
I apologized to Arturo. We danced at Casa Franca and had quite a dramatic night for other reasons, which I will tell you about in a couple of weeks. I learned that technology has made communication easier in our lives. But it has made miscommunication easier in our lives also.
Much love to you out there, wherever you are in the ether.
Stay tuned as I’ll be back with a spicier story of who I met at the cocktail bar with my friends next week!
Love,
Tash
💌 ✍️
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