I saw online the other day that the only boy I’ve ever been close to being in love with is getting married to a blonde girl that isn’t me. This discovery has prompted me to feel a lot of emotions, which is an activity that I generally try to avoid because emotions are messy and raw, and keep me up too late, and sometimes encourage me to eat wayyy too much ice cream. Just generally an all around bummer of a time. But, I finally felt these feelings and I figured I would share some thoughts about them.

I am a late bloomer. Romantically, that is. At this point, I’m worried that I might be one of those terrifying corpse flowers, that maybe blooms once, after 15 years or so, and smells like a rotting body, and then immediately dies. What I’m trying to say is that I don’t have a ton of dating experience. I think this is because I have high standards, but my dad one time told me that I should maybe consider just going out with “some guys you don’t really…think you… like,” so it might be time to consider relaxing those standards.

The older I get and the single-er I grow, the more I start to second guess myself. I don’t want to die alone, and I can’t even have the luxury of becoming a crazy cat lady because of my allergies. This leads to a lot of nights of self-reflection, and self-doubt, and facebook stalking boys who have expressed interest getting better acquainted with my personality and my mind (those are the names of my boobs, for the record). As I start to paw through the lives of these boys, I see the “pros” lists I made of them. I remember how comfortable they feel, their sweet smiles, their genuine interest in me. Sometimes, I see them with their current girlfriends at social events and feel a pang of jealousy. “That could have been me.” “He wanted me first.” “He’s a really good boyfriend.” “He could be smiling at me that way.” I get carried on with this train of thought. I forget about all the cons I painstakingly recorded. The night he cried in my bed while trying to show me his dick. The way he makes riding a motorcycle lame (seriously, how is that even possible?). The fact that he tries too hard to be funny and how it makes me want to punch him in the throat. The thing is, I struggled with all these boys, and their feelings for me. Saying no to each of them broke my heart in its own way, because I loved them all. But I had to say no. Because I didn’t need to say yes. Because “no” was an option. And I don’t want love if it’s only an option. I want love that’s undeniable.

But it’s hard to wait for that. It’s hard to wait for love that moves mountains when all you’re offered is love that texts you when it’s convenient. And all my saying no, and turning boys down, and waiting for something that I can only hope is out there, has worn me down. And I doubt my decisions. I’m starting to wonder if I’m closed off, or afraid of intimacy. I don’t think I am. I’ve never felt that way. I’m just afraid of settling. I’m afraid of saying yes to mediocre when magical is out there and just needed a little while longer to be discovered. Then, when things get really dire, I even begin to wonder if that love is out there, or if it’s just been manufactured by Hollywood to help Taylor Swift sell albums. It’s times like those that I try to put a leash on my cynicism.

I have been in love once…at least I’m pretty sure I have. It’s all rather complicated. I was dating my High School Sweetheart and things were fine. Then, one day, while I was eating a terrible ciabatta sandwich with my best male friend, I realized I was in love (not with the sandwich, with the best friend, duh). We had spent the better part of a year, getting close, until we were practically inseparable. Like weird, old timey freak show conjoined twins inseparable. I was basically living in his apartment, on his couch because we were both loyal to our significant others, but we spent an unhealthy amount of time together. And I loved every minute of it. Seriously, I remember this sandwich, it was chicken parmesan and $11 and I was ready for it to be so good, but it was garbage. And despite my extreme disappointment with my lunch, I thought, there is no where I’d rather be, no one I’d rather be with, and no awful ciabatta sandwich I’d rather complain about than this one right here. That moment was perfect. As were so many others I spent with Best Friend. And I was highly conscious of those moments. It was like time would stop and I would take just a second to acknowledge how happy I was and foreign that felt. To be perfectly and utterly content. I remembered when I was little my mom told me that she had married her best friend, and that’s all I’d ever ever wanted. And I was on that path.

I went to dinner one night with High School Sweetheart and felt like I had bugs under my skin. I went to the bathroom and hid in a stall and I cried. And while I was sobbing in that bathroom stall at Beni-Hana I called Best Friend. He reminded me to breathe and to trust myself. I left that bathroom stall and I broke up with High School Sweetheart. In that moment of weeping on a dark Beni Hana toilet, I knew I didn’t love High School Sweetheart, as much as I hoped that I could, and that I never would. Because being on the phone, crying in that cramped bathroom stall, I realized what being in love felt like. It just took me hyperventilating over a toilet to know-know, like for sure.

I never dated Best Friend. Things got complicated. They got messy and they got painful. Because sometimes love isn’t what you expect it to be. Sometimes things don’t work out. But no matter how shit things got with me and Best Friend, he taught me that I’m right, that there is a spectacular love out there for me, a love that doesn’t let me ask questions. And when my self-doubt and my ex-boyfriends come to watch netflix late at night when I’m alone in my apartment, I just force myself to remember the love I felt that night in a lonely Beni-hana bathroom stall. The love that motivated me to break a sweet boy’s heart. And I can hold onto that glimmer of hope, no matter how fleeting the love was. That’s what I held on to as Best Friend became Ex-Best Friend and then Persona Non Grata and then a Horrible Monster That I Didn’t Recognize. It didn’t matter because I’d eaten the ciabatta sandwich and I’d cried those toilet tears in a Japanese hibachi restaurant. None of it mattered because as elusive as it proves to be, love is out there. The kind of love I need to believe in.

But years have passed and Ex-Best Friend has become Someone Else’s Fiance. And I found out about it on facebook. (And from all the texts I got exclaiming the news, like a terrible team had just beaten me at fantasy football or something.) And then I had a dream about Someone Else’s Fiance. Well, a nightmare I guess. I told my sister about it (and about the dream where I washed Matthew Gray Gubler’s dishes in his Parisian apartment and he asked me for my number, as a dream/nightmare palette cleanser) and she asked me why it was affecting me so much. That was a great question, which I think I’ve finally answered.

First of all, in the last month, I think a switch has flipped in my brain. Or a fuse has blown. I can’t totally tell. The way women in their late twenties hear the deafening ticking of their biological clock pushing them into motherhood, I’m hearing my scary Jewish grandmother’s voice telling me I’m going to die alone and that all the good ones are taken. I’m hearing my dad, helpfully suggesting I relax my standards. I’m hearing the rocking of the chair I will sit in while I yell at neighbor kids for climbing over the fence into my hauntingly overgrown garden when they try to reclaim a baseball from my yard without getting put into an oven like Hansel and Gretel.

It’s affecting me because I feel like so many of my relationships are crumbling. Friends I thought I would count on for life, and have dinner parties with, and invite to my children’s graduations, are just gone. And suddenly I’m the girl that doesn’t get invited to weddings. And that’s totally fine, because who actually wants to go to weddings? But…me…I really do. I want to see friends on the best days of their lives, surrounded with love. But since I told the Bride-to-Be not to date Ex-Best Friend at the beginning of their courtship, I probably won’t be getting a Saves the Date from them. Womp womp.

It’s also hard because Ex Best Friend was the closest I’ve ever been to being in love. And that is hard for a lot of reasons. He’s found love again. He’s happy. And that’s a wonderful thing. But I haven’t found love again yet. And I’m jealous, and sad, and a little scared. And dating is hard and the worst. (If you don’t believe me, just look at any of my screenshots from tinder.) And my mean, horrible, brain half comes out at night and whispers, “What if no one loves you ever again?” And then I start to wonder what is wrong with me. When everyone is single, it’s easy to defiantly answer “nothing,” to that question. But when everyone else gets married and you just get S&M propositions from weird dudes on OKCupid, it’s harder to remind yourself that you are a wonderful person who will find the love they deserve.

I do believe deep down, that at some point, Ex Best Friend really did love me back. And then something happened. And he became A Horrible Monster That I Didn’t Recognize. And this is what broke my heart at 21. No one had ever known me as well as Best Friend, so for him to have loved me and then to just not want me anymore…it felt like he learned all of my secrets and then he discarded me. And I was crushed. I thought that in my opening up to him, he had found something so horrible he couldn’t overlook it. He knew me better than anyone else and that drove him away. My honest self was repulsive to him. That was was heartbreak felt like at 21. Now that I’ve grown up a bit, I know this isn’t true, that it’s just what the stabby, knife-ends of feelings told me was going on.

But heartbreak at 25 feels differently. It jumps out at you from the filtered photos on your facebook newsfeed, and it whispers, “He found someone better than you. To love more than he loved you.” And when that happened to me, my heart closet popped open and a skeleton that my subconscious had tried hard to bury tumbled out. I realized, that all of this time, despite everything, I had always held onto this hope that he would figure it out. That he still really loved me. That I was the best thing that had ever happened to him and that deep down he wouldn’t want anyone else. That he drove me away because at 21 he was afraid of how much he loved me.

And I didn’t know. I didn’t know that tiny hope was flickering inside of me until I saw the photo of him, smiling at the girl, smiling at her ring. And while there may or may not be some truth to my delusion, I realize that heartbreak at 25 is the heartbreak of moving on – of relinquishing that quiet hope that has fluttered its wings all those years in a dark, dusty corner of your chest. It’s the heartbreak of concession. Of wishing well, and letting go, and not getting invited to the wedding.

And I’m doing it.

Ex-Best friend, I’m wishing you well, and I’m letting go, and I’m sure as hell not getting invited to the wedding. So, mazel tov!