After a bad break-up or a series of yucky dates, many of my friends have decided to take hiatuses from dating. And I guess stepping away from the dating scene can have its benefits. It can be a way for a woman to gain agency in her love life and an opportunity to achieve clarity about her romantic needs.
Not for this woman, though.
A self-imposed dating drought just doesn’t seem like a way to improve my love life. After all, practice makes perfect, right? And to be frank, I go through enough involuntary droughts that asking for one would be like a farmer stepping out into his bone dry, shriveled crops, and yelling, “I didn’t want rain anyway!”
I’d never announced an embargo on dating and never thought I would. That is, until I did earlier this year when I went on my quarter-life crisis adventure, a three-and-a-half month backpacking and volunteer trip through Africa.
I was loading my pack with granola bars and sweat wicking t-shirts, when a friend called to say goodbye. “So, do you think you’ll meet anyone over there?” she asked with a wink-wink tone that meant she wasn’t asking about friends; she was asking about manfriends.
“NO!” I yelled into the receiver as I smooshed down my clothes to fit a pair of hiking sandals into my bag. “I’m going to places where the HIV rate is comparable to the obesity rate here,” I said referencing statistics I’d completely fabricated. “Plus, I’m not flying across the globe to be boycrazy. I can do that here. I’m going to get out of my comfort zone, not shower regularly, and find myself.”
“Really? No boys for three months?”
“No,” I responded. “No boys for three and a half months.” As the words came out of my mouth, I realized that for the first time in my life, I was declaring a dating drought. One hundred days of no dating, no flirting, no boys. Could I do it? Of course, I’d been through droughts before. The mullet haircut of 2006 didn’t do my sex life any favors and there was that disordered eating semester sophomore year where I was so focused on the calorie count of Fat Free Cool Whip that I didn’t have time for boys. But were either of those one hundred days long?
