This story is part of the Healthyish Guide to Your 30s, our best advice for how to cook, shop, date, and generally survive your best (or maybe worst?) decade yet.

I rarely proselytize about books; for the most part, I love what I love, and I don’t really care if anyone else is in it with me or not. But ever since I read Glynnis MacNicol’s memoir No One Tells You This last summer, I’ve been pressing my copy into other women’s hands or writing the title down in the Notes apps on their phones, saying, “No, seriously, you have to read it.”

No One Tells You This chronicles the year following MacNicol’s 40th birthday, in which she tries to get her increasingly dementia-addled mother into a nursing home, help out her recently separated sister, and also sort out how she feels about having hit that big, round number without having obtained—gasp!—a husband or a child of her own.

A decade her junior, I read the book at 31. I was—am—single. I would like to get married eventually, I think, but the older I get, the more I have to wonder: So what if I don’t? I’m not going to just like, perish off the face of the earth, right? Which means that maybe it’s not so crazy for me to turn some of the energy people expect me to spend on hunting for a partner toward making that life something I’m excited to keep living in, whether it ever includes a husband or not.

So for Healthyish’s Guide to Your 30s, I wanted to talk to Glynnis about her book and her love life, and to have a conversation about how to approach dating without making it feel like it’s the most important thing a woman can be doing with her time. This is a conversation between two straight, white women, so there’s tons not covered here, but hopefully it will help you sort through how you think about your own love life in your 30s.

Zan: What was the most recent date you went on, and how did it come about?

Glynnis: When I'm traveling, I get on Tinder or whatever the dating app in Europe is and make dates with people. It’s a fun way to get to know a new city, partly because it's a lot less pressure when you're in another place. My life in New York has such deep grooves to it; if I wanted to change it, it would take so much effort. When you're traveling, you're out of those grooves, so there's much less pressure. It's just more exciting.

But my most recent date was in America, in New York. It was a friend of a friend who I'd met at a dinner—it was one of those things where it's like, are we on a date? It was fine. We went on two dates, and it sort of petered out.

I think in the last few years what I've realized about dating is that it's easy for me to see a date and understand that if I put some energy into it—tried a little harder, made it a little easier—I could turn some of these second and third dates into that. But I just see the big picture, and how much work that would take, and I don't want to take that energy and put it toward this.

Zan: I sometimes have conversations with people where they're like, "If you want to get married, you have to date like it's your job." And like... I have a job! I have a pretty demanding job that I love. Not only that, I have some fairly time-intensive hobbies that I care about, and beyond that, I have kind of a lot of friends, and making those relationships work takes time, too.