Not even a Cat Lady

I wrote this essay for a class on the Personal Essay in college. I thought I would write something cheeky because my life seemed quite normal and uneventful to me at the time. But as I began to write, I discovered some pain I didn't know was there and some deep-seeded reasons I had become the person that I am. 

This girl, who is usually awkward when it comes to romance, goes out on a limb and lets her coworker set her up on a blind date.  She puts on her sexiest dress and goes to the bar. The guy is really cute, and she is ready to put herself out there. They have a few drinks, have a great time dancing, and then he looks at her long and lovingly.  She is really excited as he goes in for the kiss, and suddenly he starts gasping for air and going into anaphylactic shock because she ate peanuts earlier in the night. And instead of the night ending in the bedroom, it ends in the hospital.  

This scene was on TV as a comic moment in a woman’s life.  She wants so badly to fall in love, and yet it slips through her fingers in the most awkward way.  It’s great TV, but it’s tragic in reality. This girl, Mindy, suffers from this wretched curse, doomed for life by both awkwardness and allergies.  This girl can never go anywhere without a large purse to hold her EpiPen and her inhaler and her Benadryl just in case.  This girl cannot go on a date at a bakery, at a Thai restaurant, at an Indian restaurant, or even at some burger joints depending on the type of oil they use.  This girl will not have her first kiss until someone stands in front of the whole congregation and says, “I do not eat peanuts.” This girl, who is usually awkward when it comes to romance, cannot go out on a limb and let her coworker set her up on a blind date.

I can’t believe it took me so long to figure out the truth.  Men will come and go, and I will never make a move. I have neither the guts nor the immune system.  I dated just once. It took me a year to figure out if I even liked him, then another three weeks after he asked me out to decide whether or not I was ready to date.  At every date, I wondered whether or not I should run away. At every time he mentioned something about eating nuts, I felt immediately sick to my stomach and angry—as if he were cheating on me with my arch nemesis—but I never spoke up because I had inconvenienced him enough already.  It was the worst kind of jealousy because I literally could not stay with him if he continued to have relations with it. The combination of my fear of commitment and my fear of my premature passing made for a sad end to the relationship.

I am definitely a romantic at my core.  I love to watch romantic movies and read romantic books, but I don’t think that life is for me.  Flowers and chocolate are the epitome of a romantic gesture, right? Wrong. I am also allergic to flowers.  And I have no idea if those chocolates were made in a facility that processes peanuts. Stuffed animals won at a carnival are like your first children!  I am also allergic to dust. Oh, and at our wedding, we can’t serve fruit salad or halibut because I’m allergic to melons and fish. And save your breath on getting a dog because one lick and I’ll have hives for a week.  No sweet kisses by the fireplace unless you can list the last 5 meals you ate and recount how many times you’ve brushed your teeth since then. It’s really nice of you to bring over a bottle of wine, except that after three or four sips, I’ll need to drink about a gallon of water to get my heart rate back down.  I went out for Valentine’s Day this year to a restaurant with a Michelin star, and the waitress wrote out a list of all of my allergies to give to the chef. That’s the perfect romantic dinner, except for the fact that I must have been allergic to something they served that I’d never eaten before because immediately after the dinner, my $80 four-course meal was on the sidewalk.  

No, I am not made for romance.  I am not made for dates. I am not made to be whisked away on a whirlwind adventure.  I am not made to have a life partner. I am not made to have a wedding and five kids (what would they pick up from some kid at school and bring home to mommy?).

Everything I do must be calculated.  Maybe God has just made me to be an old spinster cat-lady who never gets married or has kids.  Oh wait, I’m allergic to cats too! Hmm…Fish maybe? Yes! But they’ll have to be guppies, so I can watch them mate and have babies and live vicariously through them and have the tank to catch my tears.