Misseducated

This post has been updated! You can read the latest version here on tashdoherty.com.

Introduction 📖

So, you’re curious about having a one-night stand. I’m glad you’re here! I’ve had a few in my time; some very successful, some less so. Whether this will be your first one or you’re a regular wondering how to make casual sex work better for you, I’ve compiled everything I know to write this ultimate guide to having the best one-night stands ever.

The main difference in preparation depends on the sexes of the partners involved and whether it’s going to take place at your house or theirs. Because I’m a cis-gendered female who mostly has sex with men, this article is geared towards heterosexual couples. But I hope that no matter the genitals of you or your partner, you’ll find something helpful here. Let’s dig in!

Get ready. Stay ready 😜

Before: How To Prepare for a One-Night Stand 🌃

* Find someone you’re attracted to: If you’re not attracted to this person, don’t even bother going through with the rest of everything else. This night is about you having fun, not pleasing other people.

* Set clear expectations with yourself: Decide what you want to get out of this night and if you have any clear boundaries. Do you want to have penetrative sex (penis in an orifice, either vagina or butt) with them? Where is this one-night stand going to take place? Do you want to stay over, or are you going to take your ass home in an Uber at 4 am?

* Prioritize your needs first: I’m adding this here because I’m terrible at doing this. As soon as I find a guy who I want to have sex with, I lose all sense of my needs and life priorities. So, be realistic for a moment: Do you have anything you need to get done the day after your one-night stand? The point is to make sure you’re caring for your general well-being and not just dropping everything for a random dude you will never see again.

* Plan your sleep: There’s evidence that women need more sleep than men. How well do you sleep in someone else’s bed or having someone in your bed? Can you survive on three hours, or would you be better off with eight? Even if you don’t know exactly because this is your first one-night stand, just take a guess, and then you’ll learn whether you were right or wrong after the experience.

* Set clear expectations with your partner: Communicate with them if you can. Plan where you are going to do this. If it’s at your house, is your partner allowed to sleep over? Do you need them out of the house by 10 am so you can go to your yoga class?

More from Misseducated 💌 ✍️

Hello Wonderful Readers,

I hope you had a lovely holiday. Despite having Covid and then the flu and watching the neighborhood my mother grew up in being razed by a wildfire, I am keeping my promise to you. I’m here to tell you the story of how Todor and I met. Before I do that, I have one very exciting announcement.

Upcoming Topic on Misseducated Podcast: Open Relationships

Next week, I will be interviewing an anonymous girl about the successful open relationship she’s been in with her partner for the last four years. They do all kinds of fun things together, like go to play parties. While open relationships are common, I know very few couples that have done it successfully. She’s graciously agreed to be interviewed by me for the Misseducated podcast. So, if you have a question for her, please feel free to comment below if you are a paid subscriber, or you can respond to this email or text me. My interview with her should be great, but whatever questions you send me will make it even better.

Thank you so much!

I hope you enjoy the romance to come 😉.

Love,

Tash

💌 ✍️

He found me on the internet.

It’s Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024. At about 7:50 pm, I hold my breath as the Uber turns the corner and glides down the dark, vacant, mansion-lined streets of the Juarez neighborhood of Mexico City. I glance at the William Morris postcard in my hands. It has my scribble on it.

“Dear Todor,

Happy Birthday. I have no idea how old you are, but I hope you have a great time in Mexico City and that the peyote experience in Oaxaca serves the purpose you desire. Thank you so much for supporting my work. May this year be filled with exploration, curiosity, and discovery.

Love,

Tash.”

I awkwardly chuckle to myself as I place the card in my red leather purse. I am on my way to meet up with a man who I don’t know. And it’s his birthday.

You see, he, Todor, found me on the internet. He read my article about a peyote ceremony I did and DMed me on Instagram to ask for the shaman’s contact details (and he subscribed to this very blog while in the process. Hi Todor!). I gave him the shaman’s number without much thought. That article gets quite a bit of traffic, so I get contacted about it often. But Todor is different. He is the first one of my random readers on the internet to request my presence in person.

First, he asked me for coffee. I quickly told him I was only free for about half an hour in case I had to make a getaway. Then he asked me to join him for drinks with his friends at Soho House, a very swanky private club. It’s where I’m headed now.

I am wearing my black turtleneck dress, dark purple corduroy blazer, and black platform boots. I usually avoid wearing these boots in Mexico City for fear that I’ll be taller than everyone. But Todor told me that he is from Europe, so I choose to take the risk.

On the way to Soho House, I try not to think of all the men I have dressed up for this year. All the shitty dates, the pot smokers, the nice men who turned out to be cheaters, and the boring ones who were perfectly lovely, but I couldn’t force attraction to. Tonight, I decided to be shamelessly sexy, send it, and hedge my bets. I also am wearing my dark purple-red lipstick and plenty of makeup. I am showing up for these Wednesday night cocktails looking and feeling my best. Plus, I have a reputation to maintain as a writer living my best life in Mexico City. And my goal is to give this guy Todor, whoever he is, the best birthday possible. Still, before my Uber arrives, I text my friend, Sandra. I invite her to meet me later in case I need to abandon ship completely.

The Uber pulls up to a giant beige stone wall with ornate black ironwork on top. The double doors are closed, and a security personnel stands out front. The Uber stops. I gather up my belongings. I sway out of the car onto the street. I feel so tall in my boots. I feign confidence as I smoosh my lips together to make sure my lipstick is spread evenly.

“Bienvenida, señorita,” the kind, bald security guard says to me as he opens the gate. I give him a nod of appreciation that I hope doesn’t seem like entitlement as I slip inside.

Now, as my reader, I need to let you in on a little secret: I’m a member of Soho House. I’m not proud of this because the Soho House in Mexico City is very elitist. I’ve debated with myself. Maybe I should stop being an elitist prick. Maybe it’s all part of my brand. Maybe I just have to accept that I am a vanilla, gentrifying gringa. Still, I do get to take you, my readers, with me behind closed doors. So, that’s why we’re here: for your benefit and for the details of my first meeting with Todor in person.

I scan my Member ID in reception. I pace along the stone walkway. It’s so dark, and the lamplight is so dim. I can hardly see anything. The thumping music is deafening, but at least it’s the groovy beats of A Long Time by Mayer Hawthorne, one of my favorite songs.

I take a lap around the restaurant area and can’t seem to find him, though I have no idea what he looks like. His Instagram profile is private. At last, beside the turquoise brilliance of the swimming pool, I find Todor and his friends. I stride boldly towards the table because the last time I cared what a group of absolute strangers thought about me was…let me check…never.

Todor is sitting next to the pool. His friends are all in Mexico City on their way to a wedding in Queretaro. He stands up to greet me.

“Hey, Todor?” I ask. He seems a bit surprised that I actually showed up. He quickly gets to his feet.

“Yes. Tash, right?” he says. (I am sorry that he is reading this and probably thinks I’m getting this wrong. Yet, as my writing teacher has quoted me many times, a story told twice is fiction. And this is how I remember the sequence of events.)

“Happy Birthday,” I say, gently retrieving the postcard from my purse, “This is for you.”

“That’s very sweet,” he says. His face lights up when he smiles.

I get a good look at him up close. He has brown hair of a reasonable length. His height, his eyes, and his patient listening speak to me. He never interrupts me. He’s wearing a purple metrosexual jumper with pink and yellow flowers on it. Something tells me he bought it at Urban Outfitters or Topshop.

It’s amazing that my human brain does the tiny, silent attractiveness calculation in less than a second. One glance at him, and my brain jumps to sizing him up, churning like clockwork through the angle of this person’s cheekbones and hair and the position of his eyelids relative to his nose and his eyebrows, or whatever it’s doing. I get the answer less than half a second later. The inner clock of my intuition strikes.

“Yes.”

The rest of the night is whatever. I sit between his friends and have polite conversations, as a young lady from London is trained to do. Still, I feel a sense of relief. Todor reminds me how uncomplicated and instantaneous pure attraction can be.

Our conversation moves from the poolside to a dinner table. Todor sits at the head of the table, and I sit next to him. I learn that many of these friends are his coworkers, which was either a good sign because it means that they also like him as a person or it’s a bad sign because he might have very few friends outside work. Still, I like the fact that his friends are Londoners. In many ways, we have lived culturally parallel lives. I wonder if I find Todor a lot more attractive because he has been living in London, the city I grew up in, for over ten years, and is a native English speaker. Even though I love speaking Spanish, it is a relief to date in my mother tongue.

We chat late with his friends until they get too jetlagged and leave. Todor is kind enough to order me my favorite dish on the Soho House menu, a giant half-baked chocolate chip cookie pan, which he says is to celebrate my 1st Author Birthday. I published my first novel exactly a year ago.

As his friends leave, Sandra arrives. As we laugh together over the next round of drinks, I get…

Hello Wonderful Readers,

I’m writing to you from Santa Fe, New Mexico. (Well, actually, I got Covid, so I’m secretly finishing this a week later back in Mexico City. Please forgive me.) I’ve just finished a week on a remote ranch in The Land of Enchantment. In the desert, I went on lots of reflective walks, looked up at the sky, and cried into the mountains. Yes, it was very dramatic and revealing, and I’ll share some of those lessons below. This retreat has helped me gain so much clarity. I got to work with the sensational brand strategist Robin Fisher Roffer, and I now have 20 new female friends ( and three male friends) about age 60.

Despite my Covid fatigue, I’m revving like an engine to reveal all my exciting plans for Misseducated next year with you. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know that I’m terrible at keeping secrets. I’ll share what I have in store for Misseducated in the coming weeks (hint: more workshops!). Still, I have not forgotten my promise to tell you the story of how I met Todor or how he found me, but that will have to wait until the New Year. Next week, I’ll be offline because Friday, January 3rd, is my 30th birthday. I have planned to spend it frolicking with friends in a place I like to call “the hippie Hamptons of Mexico City.” Before I head out, it’s time to bask in the best of Misseducated in 2024.

Here are the top 5 articles. Drum roll, please…

Misseducated Top 5 Articles in 2024 🥁

* How to Not Care What Other People Think 🤔

* What I Learned Hosting A Sex Writing Workshop ✍️

* What is it like to orgasm on psilocybin? 🍄

* My Hard Biological Truth 🤷‍♀️

* On Dating Mexican Men 🇲🇽

I hope you enjoyed reading these pieces as much as I loved writing them!

What The Desert Taught Me 🏜️

Here are the three biggest lessons I can offer you after wandering around in the wilderness:

* Keep Going 🚀.

Last year, I achieved my childhood dream of publishing my first novel, and this year, I celebrated my 1st Author Birthday. I learned that achieving your dreams is really hard! Not just because it takes so much to change everything in your life to accomplish them, but because once it’s all over, you’ll be left with the looming question: what the f**k am I supposed to do now?

This year, I struggled because I didn’t have an answer to this. Still, I just had to keep going. I kept writing Misseducated every week. I kept doing things that inspired me, like working with my writing teacher, Ann Randolph, and starting to write my second novel, still terribly titled “Rainbow Lake.” For many months, it was an act of faith. But I just had to trust that at some point in the future, I was going to figure out what the f**k I was doing.

On my way to the ranch, I caught a couple of astounding words from Seth Godin on Lenny’s Podcast. He said,

“…the thing about projects is when you run out of time and you run out of money, the project is over. Don't run out of time. Don't run out of money.”

I might not have all of my ducks in a row yet or know exactly where Misseducated is going all the time, but I still have time and money! So, I’m going to keep going, and I’m not going to give up.

* Have a little courage 💪.

“Courage is the most important of all the virtues. Because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” – Maya Angelou.

I’ve shared Maya Angelou’s quote on courage many times. It’s even the epigraph of my novel, These Perfectly Careless Things. As I worked with Robin during the retreat, I felt like I was standing on the fence between my old life in the last three years and a new life where I take my sex writing teaching seriously, and I really try to build Misseducated as a business around my new mission. Yet, a big part of me wanted to continue to wallow in self-doubt, inadequacy, and the plain comfort of living a smaller, quieter life.

There was one woman on my retreat, Jane, who had been toiling with the specific wording of her mission around her client business for days. But then, when we did the exercise of “A Perfect Day In Your Life,” she stood up in front of the whole group and said, “I wake up. I drink my coffee in my sunroom. I no longer have clients!”

Wow! She went on to share that she had been so inspired by the courage of the other people in the group that she decided to dig deep and discover what she really wanted: not to have any clients at all! She planned to off-board her clients as quickly as possible and wrap everything up in the next six months. Yay, Jane!

Jane’s revelation honestly shocked me. I wondered if I could take a dash of her courage and the courage of the group as well. Once I remembered that courage was all I needed, deciding to take this evolved version of my “career” seriously was easy. I was already on the fence. I just needed to tip my balance and let myself fall forward.

So, with 2025 around the corner, I hope that whatever you’re toiling with, you can take a bit of Jane’s courage through these words, tip your own balance, and fall forward into living your more exciting, bigger, and better life.

* Be present🧘‍♀️.

My mantra going into my retreat was to challenge myself to be present. I’m not going to lie: 2024 was a year of a lot of uncertainty for me. I didn’t sell as many copies of my book as I expected to. I’ve tried over and again to build my social media following organically. My head and my energy have been constantly spinning. How could I keep moving forwards when there were so many things that I sucked at? In these last few months, I’ve felt weighed down by all my little failures that had accumulated over the last three years.

Taking time away to go to the desert changed all of that. On my second day there, I went wandering off on the land and stumbled across a very creepy little shed that turned out to be uninhabited, thank God (it was private land, after all). Inside was an old rocking chair with a plaque and a quote from Terry Tempest Williams on it. Now, I had learned about Tempest Williams as a writer and environmental activist from a landscape architecture class that I took with the great Professor Frederick Steiner, Dean of the Design School at the University of Pennsylvania. Stumbling upon this quote screamed all kinds of synchronicities to me. This is what it said,

“It’s strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on. If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self.” – Terry Tempest Williams.

A pilgrimage to the self, indeed. I later learned that the quote had been placed there by Lee, the gentleman who cares for the land on the ranch and who teaches “wrangler yoga” to guests like me. He spent a couple of years living in an ashram in India, so he’s a great meditation teacher as well.

Attending sessions with Lee forced me to be present, which meant letting go of all my itchy failures of the recent past. To be honest, I hate meditation and yoga, partly because other people always tell me to do them. But once I decided to challenge myself and be present, I could finally clear out the clutter of whatever was going on in the back of my brain and let it go. Let it all go, baby!

So, wherever you are in the world, I hope that you are taking a moment to be present and clear out your mental clutter, too, so that you can start your new year afresh.

Celebrating Wins in 2024 🏆

Writing for you this year has been an absolute treat for me. I’ve loved incorporating more read-along podcasts into my work, and I see the numbers tick up each week as more of you want to hear the spicy stories (and there is plenty more spice to c…

Hello Wonderful Readers,

Yesterday, a poet asked me,

“Do you ever tell lies?”

He had locks of brown hair, a strong jawline, and wicked eyes that smiled. I caught his gaze for a second, but then I quickly looked away. I focused on his somewhat dorky, checkered shirt. My shoulders hung heavy with guilt as I listened to the catchy notes of Lou Reed that played over us from an old vinyl turntable.

I was three hours into my first date with this poet at Hule, a trendy, bustling bar in Mexico City. The night air was scented with a thin layer of cigarette smoke and air pollution. We had gotten along rather well, laughing a lot, until that moment. Could he sense that I was hiding something?

“I h-had to lie the other day,” I admitted, stumbling over my words, “But I believe lying is really bad. And I never do it.” I took a large sip of my IPA. I let the sharpness of the alcohol zap my throat.

“Why did you lie?” he pressed me. It was the next most obvious question. Urgh, I was terrible at this, I thought to myself.

“Well,” I started, and then I immediately regretted everything as it came out of my mouth, “I had to go to the doctor to get…um…my IUD replaced. I didn’t meet the requirements, but I only had one day to get it done in England for free. So, I had to go to this clinic and give them a fake name and a fake address. Anyway, I got it done.”

I bit my tongue. Didn’t meet the requirements? Oh, please.

The truth was that I had scheduled that appointment in London two months in advance, and when I finally went to the doctor, she had asked me, “Have you had any unprotected sex in the last three weeks?”

And I answered honestly, “Yes,” because I’m a clueless fool. And then she stared deep into my soul and said, with pity in her voice, “You should probably take some emergency contraception because you could be pregnant.” This was a ridiculous thing for her to say because I still had my old IUD inside of me, and I apparently study and care about women’s health, and I thought I knew about these things. And that even if my IUD had expired a month ago, it wouldn’t just stop working overnight. But I couldn’t be sure without reading all the medical fine print from the IUD companies on the internet and deciphering a bunch of Reddit forums that night. And now, after eight years of not having to worry about pregnancy, this nurse was dishing out to me all the shame that I’d thought I was smart enough and wise enough to avoid and made me feel like I was being totally reckless for having what had been a beautiful, deep connection with a very sexy man.

The truth was that I then had to tell Todor*, this very sexy man that I was sleeping with and whose dangerous sperm was potentially still swimming inside of me, that I might be pregnant after I had let him cum inside of me as many times as he wanted to because that was what I had wanted also. Needless to say, discussing my potential pregnancy with him was kind of a vibe killer because he said to me, “I don’t want to have a kid.” I didn’t have the guts to tell him, “I want to have a kid, but maybe not today, but maybe if we were actually boyfriend and girlfriend, I would have wanted to have one with you, but we live in different countries on different continents, and I am honestly so depressed being here in London, and I would never come back here, at least never again during the winter, if I could avoid it, but I’m too scared to tell you that.” And that after fulfilling my weird impregnation fantasies, while I had quite enjoyed my times with him, actually facing the reality of potentially conceiving a child together didn’t feel quite as cool or fun or sexy as those times had been.

The truth was that I had then had to leave that clinic without my new IUD and wait for another couple of days for all of Todor’s dangerous sperm floating around in my inner caves to die before I rushed myself to another clinic on my last day in London. There, I gave the doctor, who was really quite a kind woman who did not deserve to be lied to, a fake date of birth and a fake address, which was definitely super illegal. And then I lied to her that I hadn’t had unprotected sex in the last three weeks so that I could do what was right for my own body because I really did need that Hormonal IUD to help with my periods and also give me a solid form of birth control for the next eight years. I was privileged enough to live in a country that offers socialized medicine, but that has a lagging enough technological system that didn't check between clinics, and I could take full advantage of it for my own benefit.

The truth was that once she had finally inserted my new IUD, which was physically painful but that didn’t scratch the surface of this evident emotional turmoil, she suggested to me that I probably would want to take it out before the eight years were up, meaning that she expected me to want to have a child by the time I was 37, all that being contingent on finding a partner and us wanting to start a family together, which would not be an easy decision, and that person was tragically but undeniably not going to be Todor. I was turning 30, and I wasn’t a teenage girl anymore. The eggs in my ovaries were not going to live forever.

The truth was that this made me feel very sad. Remembering all of that, I really had no business being on a first date with this funny and charming Poet Man anyway because it had barely been a week since I had left Todor behind in London, the city I grew up in and used to call home but frankly hated visiting, wondering all the while why modern love had to be so f*****g hard but also knowing that I would never be happy living in London again. I had gone through so much in the last three years to build a beautiful life for myself in Mexico, and I wasn’t about to throw all that away for nothing.

The truth was that I had spent most of that week before the date randomly sobbing whenever I got a brief moment to myself, especially whenever I sat down to play “Mad Rush” by Philip Glass on the piano in Soho House, where Todor and I had celebrated his birthday and my first author birthday together a mere month ago. And I had finally felt loved by someone else for a brief moment in time after years of dating a******s or perfectly lovely men with whom I had no future, and now the one person that I had quite liked and I believed had quite liked me back couldn’t be together, and that made me so, so sad. And that in my first week back in Mexico City, I had intentionally returned with my other friends to the places where I had memories with Todor so that I could paint over every scent of him that kept creeping up in my body, whether that be at my favorite pizza place or a random spot on the street near my house. And I had initiated 60 days of no contact with him also, or until further notice, so I could rip out the roots of whatever love for him I had that was growing inside of me and lob that tree off at the lowest point of the trunk possible.

The truth was that I still had the card that Todor had given me. I had stashed it with the book that he had bought for me in the closet in my house because I didn’t want to get rid of them yet. Still, I also didn’t want to come home and see them and think about them and think about him every day, and I knew that he would understand that. However, the fact that I knew they were still in my closet and that I am thinking about them even now made it even more clear to me that I still wasn’t over him. I might have to get rid of his gifts if I ever wanted to be, but we had ended on good terms, so there was really no reason to be quite so drastic in my actions to remove him from my life anyway.

The truth was that, as funny as this Poet Man was, he was never going to know any of this, and as I had no intention of going home with him, I would keep it that way. Because, practically speaking, while many of us dating in our late twenties and early thirties are not virgins…

Hello Wonderful Readers,

I felt a lot of resistance writing this piece. I’m very tired right now. Most of you reading this are not in high school, and any of my younger cousins or friends who might be are probably just scrolling on TikTok. You can see how my inner critic is already working against me! That’s why it’s important to me to challenge myself. I’m determined to write and publish this piece for you anyway.

I’m stealing the idea of this list from Austin Kleon, who stole it from Debbie Millman. I listened to his story about it on Millman’s podcast this week. Here, I’ve cobbled together ten things I wish I had known when I was graduating from high school. That year was 2013, and a lot has changed since then. Instagram existed at the time, but it wasn’t widely used. This was years before TikTok, when the first major sex scandal about Jimmy Savile came out, and Oscar Pistorius, the South African sprinter, had just murdered his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

I was finishing up my A-Levels at my incredibly fancy and academically rigorous “secondary school,” Westminster School in London. I had gotten rejected from all the top universities I applied to and was on my way to taking a gap year. I had no idea what I was doing with my life (spoiler, I still have no idea what I am doing now). So, without further ado, this is what I wish I had known at that time.

1. The mean girls don’t matter in this cruel world 🌎 .

You know Harriet and Layla, those two super b****y mean girls who kicked you out of their cool girl group? And then you cried every night when you went home for months because of all the debilitatingly painful social anxiety they made you feel? Well, it turns out that both Harriet and Layla were seriously addicted to cocaine. Yeap. So, when everyone else is starting university, they’ll both end up going to rehab. And the good news is that once high school is over, you’ll never speak to them again. In fact, one girl in their group, Sala, will run into your sister one day in TopShop on the high street. She’ll try to apologize for bullying you, but by then, you’ll be living your best life in California, so you won’t even give a f**k.

Bad things will happen to the people who treated you badly, and for a brief moment in time, that revenge from the universe will taste so sweet. But the sad news is that bad things will also happen to people who don’t deserve it. Your friend will have Crohn’s disease flares that prevent him from working for years. Your other friend’s dad will die of pancreatic cancer. Your friends’ parents will start dying, but luckily not yours, yet (touch wood).

The point is that you truly have no idea what is going on in other people’s lives. While I’m not excusing the people that treated you horribly, often the people who are the meanest and cruelest and the most fucked up are, in fact, suffering the most on the inside. So, don’t take it personally. Just keep calm and carry the f**k on with living your best life as much as you can. Life is cruel and unfair, and not everything happens for a reason because there is actually an unimaginable amount of needless suffering in the world. Which brings me to my next point…

2. You have suffered enough 💁‍♀️🩸.

So, you first got your period when you were 11. Even though you had to pop 800mg of ibuprofen every couple of hours for the first two days each time, because your cramps were too painful, you told the GP when you were 16 that your periods were “normal.” Well, girl, let me tell you: they weren’t. Experiencing that much pain on a regular basis is completely unnecessary. In fact, sooner rather than later, you’ll decide that you’re done having periods altogether. You’ll get a Hormonal IUD, the Liletta, and that will stop your periods for a good 7 years. You won’t even stock tampons in your bathroom anymore, and you’ll never look back.

You come from a super privileged background, but that doesn’t mean you should continue to torture yourself with pain. “I’ve had two C-sections, and I’ve suffered enough,” the comedian Ali Wong will say when she talks about the mom guilt she feels for not making her kids salmon with quinoa or when one of her friends tries to warn her against taking pain killers that she needs because those medications could transfer into her breast milk.

Just by the very nature of our reproductive organs, females have suffered enough. You’ve suffered enough. Don’t believe all the hocus-pocus of the all-natural girls who use flowers and bathe in rivers instead of taking real medication to manage their symptoms. The pain and faff and b******t of all the periods you’ve already had is already more than enough. Western medicine might not be perfect, but f**k it, you’re not spiritually superior for not putting hormones in your body. Don’t shame other women for putting chemicals and medications into their bodies that they need, either, or for dancing with the fairies and reading crystals. Do what works for you, and don’t be f*****g judgmental. Take the pills, or get that Hormonal IUD shoved up your vagina and run. Periods are a complete f*****g waste of time for you, and you should know sooner rather than later that you’re done with them. Get the medication you need, be grateful for it, and move on. And the IUD also prevents pregnancy, which is great news for you 😉.

3. No one remembers the worst moments of your life, except you 🙃.

Remember when you were sitting in the middle of Yard a couple of months ago, and you were wearing your favorite dark blue jumper that you got from a vintage shop on Portobello Road, and all the other students were about? And then, out of nowhere, a bird shat all along your arm? And then Harriet and Layla and their stupid gaggle of super b****y friends laughed at you? Well, you might have felt like you were going to die in that moment from shame, and that is seared into your memory to this day. But trust me, no one remembers that event now.

The bad news is that you’re going to remember the most painfully embarrassing moments of your life. The good news is that nobody else will. When it comes to these super, earth-shattering moments of shame and embarrassment, the only thing you can do is have immense compassion for yourself. First, give yourself a hug. Physically hug yourself, don’t just give yourself that flimsy mental reassurance. And then whisper words of endless acceptance and forgive yourself. Reassure yourself that no one else is going to remember and that you are nothing but a little imperfect human worthy of love and belonging.

4. Make your own money 💰 🤑.

In your senior year of college, they will start offering Business Analytics as a new major at your fancy business school. While all your other friends are winding down and partying up, it will be the best decision of your life to take those coding classes and build the technical skills of that major. You’ll find learning to code difficult, but then you’ll graduate from college with this whole extra monetizable skillset that even the banker w*****s and the consultants won’t be able to compete with.

Even though it’s boring and corporate, having marketable skills in this economy and this world is very important. You have to make enough money to support yourself and keep yourself safe. Having your own money will give you the freedom to move around wherever you want. It also means you don’t have to answer to anyone. When you get fired from your job, and you have to move in with your boyfriend at the time, you’re going to regret not having more of your own money.

So, make sure you start building some skills that are valued in the economy. There will be a pandemic, and you’ll get fired, and the economy will suck for a while. And the only way you can make it through all of that is by having your own stash of as much cash as possible. Then you’ll be able to leave any situation that you don’t like. Study hard. Get some marketable skills. Then, save…

Introduction

Hello Wonderful Readers*,

A very contentious topic came up in a conversation with my female friends this week. I discussed with them how I’m single and looking for a partner in bed and in life. But how old is too old? And how young is too young?

When I decided to write about this topic, a cultural icon immediately came to mind: founder and innovator Cindy Gallop. She’s currently 64, and she has shared her sexual preferences and experiences with dating apps publicly:

“I date younger men for sex. I want lots of stamina and very short recovery periods. I don’t get those with men my own age...I was completely honest about everything, including my age…I got an avalanche of responses, which was very good for the ego. 75% of those responses were from younger men.”

Her perspective got me thinking. How common are big age differences in heterosexual relationships? Is Cindy Gallop a lone wolf (or a lone “cougar”) in today’s world? And are relationships with big age gaps less likely to work out?

I dug into the science to answer these questions. While I’ve found some fascinating things, I will say that to get a complete picture, I could have looked at more data from studies on dating apps and whether these findings hold for LGBTQIA couples because these statistics focused solely on heterosexual couples. The reach of my work here is limited, and there’s always room for improvement.

So, let’s dig in!

The State of Age Affairs

There’s a clear trend in heterosexual marriages in the United States: now, more than ever before, husbands and wives are likely to be the same age. According to Pew, the average age difference in the United States was 4.9 years in 1880, 2.4 years in 2000, and 2.2 years in 2022.

In the data below published in 2008, you can see that for marriages in England and Wales (a proxy for “Western” cultures), there is a bell-shaped distribution of the average age differences between couples. Most married couples in recent history have had a husband who is slightly older than the wife. But this is a difference of less than 5 years, and it has been declining since 1963. Indeed, 51% of opposite-sex marriages today have spouses who are two years apart in age or less, which is up from 46% in 2000 (Pew).

Are Relationships with Larger Age Gaps Less Successful?

To answer this question, I looked at large-scale studies on divorce rates by age difference. Of course, divorce rates are not the perfect measurement of relationship success. A couple can fight every day and stay married, which is probably worse than a couple that divorces civilly and stays friends. As Divorce Therapist Oona Metz has shared, “What the new research shows is that conflict is bad for kids.” Ideally, I could have looked at relationship conflict and age differences between couples, but as far as I’m aware, no such data exists.

It turns out that the age difference of a couple is NOT a major predictor of whether the relationship will end in divorce. The bottom line, according to this 2008 study from the National Office of Statistics, is that, at least for now,

“propensity to divorce is not strongly associated with marital age difference at an aggregate level, although further research would be required to control for mortality and any other factors that may affect the risk of divorce.”

Other studies have suggested that in order to interpret these findings fully, researchers would need to disaggregate the data based on whether one of the partners was married before and who initiated the divorce. It’s well known that about two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women, so these divorce statistics may well be skewed toward women’s preferences.

Unfortunately, as I dug into this data, I found a lot of crappy news outlets that totally blew findings from certain studies out of proportion and came to conclusions that were misleading or just plain wrong. One poorly researched article on a website called MarketWatch concludes, “The bigger the age gap, the shorter the marriage.” This is not true. The second source they cited has since redacted an inaccurate chart where they tried to show the increased likelihood of the marriage ending based on the age difference. I smell b******t! Still, I had to get out my magnifying glass and relearn how to read coefficients from my Statistics classes at Wharton just to determine that this was indeed a shitstorm of statistical insignificance.

As far as we know today, an age difference does not significantly impact the success of a relationship. However, there are a couple more interesting insights below the surface.

Extra Interesting Tidbits: Things To Consider

Male Preferences For Younger Females and Vice Versa

A study conducted by Professor David Buss at UT Austin investigated sex differences in mate preferences in 37 cultures with 10,047 participants. Its findings might partially explain why men are slightly older on average in married couples than women. Their key result was:

“Females were found to value cues to resource acquisition in potential mates more highly than males. Characteristics signaling reproductive capacity were valued more by males than by females.”

Basically, females take more than just physical appearance into account when selecting a mate, as they might want a partner who signals resource acquisition for their potential offspring. Additionally, males might prioritize physical appearance and have a preference for younger females because of “a biological adaptation resulting from the greater potential fertility of younger women” (Office for National Statistics), especially if they want to produce offspring and have a family.

However, this is a generalization and certainly not a rule. There is also a variety of other social trends happening. For example, women’s increased access to education throughout the world has coincided with an increase in the age of marriage. Plus, while women might have preferred older men for their access to financial stability and resources, the gender pay gap is decreasing with more of us females entering and staying in the workforce, so this is becoming less socially relevant. Indeed, among unmarried adults, single women without children now have, on average, as much wealth as single men (Pew).

Until Death Do Us Part: Widowhood & Living Alone

The only reason to be concerned about a large age gap with your partner is whoever is much older is obviously more likely to die sooner, leaving the other person widowed and most likely living alone.

According to Pew, as the share of husbands who are older than their wives has fallen, widowhood for women ages 65 and older has fallen to 30% today, down from 45% in 2000. Given this spousal age gap and the fact that women tend to live longer than men globally, about 20% of women over 60 live in a solo household, compared to about 10% of men (Pew).

Is Everyone Coming to Cougartown?

There’s been a lot of talk about “cougars” in the news, or “age-hypogamy,” where the female is older than the male in a heterosexual relationship. A study released in 2003 by the UK's Office for National Statistics concluded that the proportion of women in England and Wales marrying younger men rose from 15% to 26% between 1963 and 1998. Still, these forms of relationships are rare, even though they are slightly on the rise. By a different definition, “recent US census data has shown an increase in age-hypogamous relationships from 6.4% in 2000 to 7.7% in 2012.” (Wikipedia).

Despite the sensational news, cougars appear to be happier than other females who are in relationships! There is some evidence that “woman-older partners were the most satisfied with and committed to their relationships, relative to woman-younger and similarly aged partners, consistent with socio-cultural predictions” (Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2008). And for all my older, single female readers, there’s evidence that age doesn’t matter to male partners as much as beauty. Yes, unfortunately, you’re s…

Dear Wonderful Readers,

I am sitting in the airport, grumpy with myself. I’m in Terminal 2 at Heathrow in London. For such a massive space, this place is oddly quiet. There’s only the shuffling of footsteps and the thumping wheels of carry-on suitcases.

When I go to the airport, I often feel inspired because, in the most physical sense, I am going somewhere. But I don’t feel inspired today. Twelve hours into my travels, I’m incredibly jet-lagged, and I’m also stuck in a funk. I’m about to turn 30, and yes, I’m lamenting about my “writing career,” or my lack of it. A sluggish sense of dread has been hanging over me for weeks. It’s the lack of momentum. I quit my full-time job almost three years ago to become an author and a writer, and things have been going okay. Recently, I even drafted my second book. But nothing sensational is happening.

Perhaps I’m more worried about this than usual because I’m about to visit my family. My mother has very high expectations of me. She’ll never admit it, but she wants me to be very rich and very famous. As famous and rich as possible. Not only am I neither of those things, but I am also far less rich than I would have been if I had just stayed in my boring tech job, even if I would have remained deeply, paralyzingly unhappy in the process.

I remember how uplifted I used to feel when I was in this exact airport. I remember flying back to university in America and listening to the podcast How I Built This with Guy Raz, specifically the Airbnb episode. That story gave me a sense of possibility—that external pull, that demand; that someday, I could be “successful” also.

So, I connect to Heathrow’s WiFi with a fake name and a fake email address. I whack on the episode. I’ve still got three hours to kill before my flight to Derry (which will later be canceled). The podcast episode begins to play. The inflections of Guy Raz’s familiar, measured voice captivate me. I am caught up in the catchy music and the suspenseful sentences. Joe Gebbia, one of the co-founders of Airbnb, speaks to me through the void,

“It was not a smashing success at all…It was completely demoralizing. Like, 2008 was the worst year of my life…Because you’ve put so much into this thing, like, there was nothing else going on in my life except this. And to put it in front of very credible investors, the guys who had picked the Googles and PayPals and YouTubes of the world, and for them to look you square in the eyes and go, “Well, this is weird, I’m not investing in this.”

This episode was recorded in 2017, about seven years ago. We now know how the story plays out, as Airbnb recently celebrated reaching 2 billion lifetime guests. Yet as I relisten to his words, the podcast episode strikes a new chord with me.

I gaze drearily into the high ceiling above me, which is framed by purple and gold fairy lights and the odd wreath. I am reminded that in Airbnb’s story, really smart investors and even their close family members and friends didn’t see the company's potential. Not even the founders themselves understood what Airbnb was or what it was going to become at points in their own journey. I chewed on some Haribo sweets from WHSmith as an insight sank in:

Even really smart people are wrong about stuff all the time.

I sat up a little straighter in my hard, plastic seat, which I had found impossible to sleep on. Maybe I’ve been wrong these three years about how success can even happen for me. Maybe I’ve been approaching my life too rigidly, with too much structure. Recently, microdosing on magic mushrooms has helped me see that my solidified weekly work patterns are holding me back. My problem is that, from all the fancy schooling I’ve had, I was told that I’m a smart person, which has made me believe that I make smart decisions. But if I think I’m smart, well, that means that I could be just as wrong as the investors who turned down Airbnb. And I’m not just wrong about predictions of the future. I could be wrong about anything because the truth is that I have no idea what aspect of my work, if any, will lead to my success or why. I don’t know what part of my work will resonate most with people. In fact, many of the pieces I write that I think are going to resonate with the most people actually don’t. There is no way for me to know.  

I watched this clip of an interview with Adam Grant that describes exactly this. He says,  

“…the more brilliant you are, the worse you are at recognizing your own limitations.”

Describing myself as brilliant is a stretch; arrogant is more like it. But what is the antidote to my arrogance? Inc magazine contributor Jessica Stillman paraphrases Grant:

“What’s the antidote to this kind of overconfidence that’s so common among smart people? A stiff dose of humility.”

Hah! Humility. Well, now that I think about it, I do have a favorite wrong prediction in mind about commercial success for you that demonstrates this. And the story of it goes like this…

About ten years ago, my sister and I were home for the holidays, and she brought her friend from Cambridge University over for tea. Joscelin, her friend, was this thin, nerdy guy. He told me that he was studying music and starting to play some gigs in London. Curious, I asked him if he could share some of his music with us. I don’t remember much about what he played, but all I remember is that it was ultra-modern, disjointed, and weird. As I listened to it (or tried to), I thought to myself,

“This guy is not going anywhere. He should go back to studying music academically because he’s never going to make it.”

But then, fast-forward about a decade. A couple of months ago, I was scrolling through Instagram. I was watching an Instagram Reel of Vanity Fair when they interviewed Margot Robbie and Florence Pugh, and then…

“Joscelin? What the f**k!” I said aloud to no one.

Except that his name is not Joscelin anymore. His stage name is Jerskin Fendrix, and he was in the Vanity Fair video because he composed the music score for Poor Things, starring Emma Stone. So, the guy who I thought would remain a totally unsuccessful musician forever (sorry, Joscelin) has now been nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Score.

The moral of this story is that I have no f*****g clue about how the world works, especially when it comes to commercial success. As I continue to listen to how the potential investors in Airbnb failed miserably, sitting in the middle of this airport, I realize something: I must embrace the fact that I can be totally wrong. I must embrace the fact that I don’t have all the answers, and many of the answers that I think I have are totally wrong.  

This message from “the universe” has been coming to me in more than one form. Just last week, I was walking down the street when I passed a tiny piece of paper on the pavement. I knew from its shape that it was from a fortune cookie. Not my fortune, but one that, apparently, I was meant to stumble upon. It said,

“Ideas you think are absurd will lead to your success.”

I took this photo of it (above).

You see, no matter how smart we think we are and how great the decisions we believe we are making are, we need to leave a giant space open in our minds and our hearts. A giant space where we accept that, much like the very smart investors who turned down Airbnb, we may simply be wrong. We may even be wrong about most things. And this is a good thing if we believe it. Once you’re aware of your own limitations, you can start to entertain ideas that you think will not work out. Because the truth is that neither you nor anyone else in the world knows if they will or not. Only time will tell.  

So, what have you been wrong about? And what could you be wrong about right now? Leave a note in the comments.

Lots of love, and enjoy your weekend!

Tash

💌 ✍️

More From Misseducated

Introduction

Hello Wonderful Readers,

One year ago, I became an author. As I tucked into a giant half-baked cookie pan and vanilla ice cream to celebrate (thank you to the charming man who ordered it for me), I reflected on my failures and learnings this last year. Today, I want to share those with you.

This year, my attitude towards living a creative life has changed completely. Since I started believing that self-improvement is a farce, I quickly put aside all my excuses to “merely do the work” (Seth Godin), and I found myself with a complete first draft of my second novel. This perspective will take a little longer to explain than a 2,200-character Instagram caption, but I believe that you deserve something comprehensive on this topic. So, I hope that what I have learned is helpful for you, for brand-new baby creatives and aspiring authors alike.

Here goes nothing.

* You must keep going. 

After I held my first book baby in my hands, I expected to feel happy. Instead, I felt depressed for a long time afterward. I had spent 14 years, about half my life, as “an aspiring author.” Now that I was simply “an author,” that identity shift completely overwhelmed me. I felt like I was facing the death of all my former selves who had made my book happen. In fact, years ago, I had accepted the very real possibility that I might never publish my book at all. Now, I was bewildered. Did I have it in me to sit down at my desk again? What else did I possibly have to say?

After you accomplish anything major in life or go through any major change, things will take time to reorient themselves to a new normal. You will have to become a new person with new goals. How do you do that? My writing teacher, Ann Randolph, shared a story from Steven Pressfield, which I’ll paraphrase poorly:

Steven Pressfield spent ages working on a draft of a book. When he submitted it to his editor, he expected to sit on his hands. But as soon as the editor received it, they said to him, “Great. Now go start the next one.”

Put simply, you must keep going. Sometimes, it’s the only thing you can do. Once you’re past the craziness of the launch, the screening, or the wedding, the next steps of life remain. Starting another project might feel cruel at first, but please don’t sit around.

After I floated for a couple of months, slowly, I got my butt in the chair, and I started writing again.

* Be very attuned to which projects you want to do.

 “You have this natural want. That want is the thing that moves evolution. Like a plant, it's like, "Oh, there's sun. I want to move in that direction." It’s the thing that allows us to know that's our evolutionary path…And they kind of show where the growth is occurring or wants to occur." – Joe Hudson on Lenny’s Podcast.

I had an idea for a second novel about three years ago. I wrote a small bit of it in 2022, but then I stopped. I was worried. Do people even read novels anymore? I should be writing SEO-optimized articles, I thought to myself, if I really wanted to be a successful writer. This preoccupation with what I “should” be doing left me stagnated, flailing, and ultimately stuck.

Then, at some point a couple of months ago, I basically decided: f**k it. I didn’t care whether or not anyone would read my second book. I wanted to write that story for myself! And write that book, I would. Once I made that decision, everything changed. Suddenly, I felt inspired by the world around me again. As I wrote my second book, new ideas for other projects and pieces came to me constantly. Energetically and creatively, it was like night and day.

I can’t overstate the importance of this: as much as you can, when you have an idea for a project that you really want to do, do it. Run towards it and embrace it. Get started. Somewhere. Anywhere. The energy that you get from doing the one project you really want to do will solve everything.

If you find yourself thinking, "I should do XYZ project or activity," stop for a second. Notice how it feels in your body. Do you feel heavy? Do you feel guilty? Do you feel stuck? Now, imagine doing something you want to do. Do you feel lighter? Do you feel curious? Do you feel excited? Try to do things you want to do more often.

* Make up a deadline. Create a friendly routine.

“Discipline and freedom seem like opposites. In reality, they are partners. Discipline is not a lack of freedom, it is a harmonious relationship with time.” – Rick Rubin, “The Creative Act: A Way of Being.”

I had a very unproductive summer. But then, in September, I went to a writing workshop with the London Writers’ Salon to mark the start of the “100-Days Challenge.” This workshop was an initiation. There were 100 days left in the year. F**k! I thought to myself. 2024 was almost over, and I had little to nothing to show for it. It felt like it was now or never.

I sat down and started writing 3,000 words per day on my second novel. Surprisingly, I could hit my word count in 2-3 hours. Once I was in flow, I noticed that I felt energized; I found joy in writing the scenes and figuring out the plot points. Perhaps, like the birth of a second child, the book just slid right out of me. I finished the first draft just last week, about a month into the 100-Days Challenge.

My original deadline for the first draft of the novel had been September 1st. That came and went. Then, I started working towards the 100-Days Challenge, and I blew it out of the water. In general, I hate being told what to do. But once I found a simple structure that I could stick to every day and tick off once I’d completed it, it was ironically freeing.

So, to get your project done, set yourself a deadline. Yes, it will be totally arbitrary. If you pass that deadline for whatever reason, that’s okay, just set another one. Once you've chosen that goal, try to work backward and set up a daily practice, so you make a bit of progress each day. As Rick Rubin says,

“Find the sustainable rituals that best support your work. If you set a routine that is oppressive, you’ll likely find excuses to not show up. It’s in the interest of your art to create an easily achievable schedule to start with. If you commit to working for half a day, something good can happen that generates momentum."

* Compete with yourself.

“…the only person you’re ever competing against is yourself. The rest is out of your control.” – Rick Rubin, quoting John Wooden in “The Creative Act: A Way of Being”

To write my second book, I set myself a target of 3,000 words per day. Why 3,000 words per day? Because on my semi-productive days over the summer, I could comfortably write about 2,200 words per day. So, 3,000 was a tiny bit of a stretch for me. Could I write that much? The challenge seemed exciting but achievable. Plus, I had a funny feeling that once I sat down to tackle a scene, reaching a 3,000-word goal would be easy. I was right. Within a couple of weeks, I finished the first draft of my second book, about a year after I published my first.

Once you start competing with yourself, you will enter a completely different league. That momentum will be insatiable. The psychologist Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson encourages us to ask ourselves: "Am I performing better than I did in the past? Am I learning? Am I getting better?" "Am I smarter than I was a week ago, a month ago, a year ago because I’ve been taking the time to learn?"

So, if you challenge yourself to a duel, you'll soon be surprised at just how far you have come.

* ⁠Enjoyment is everything.

I love my mother, but she has a particularly draconian perspective on life. When she was working on her PhD thesis, I encouraged her to celebrate after she finished each chapter. Instead, she insisted that she could only celebrate once the whole thing was finished. Did she celebrate when she finally defended the thing? Nope. Not hardly at all.

I believe that hard work matters, but I also believe that enjoying what you do and celebrating wins along t…

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Hello Wonderful Readers,

As you come out of the bathroom at Casa Franca you see him standing there, kissing her. She has her back to you. You see his swoosh of black hair, and his mustache. You can tell from the way he’s holding her. It is him. You just know. Before you can remember his name, and before you remember that you blocked his number on your phone over a year ago, you get a heaving, painful feeling in your chest that melts into your stomach. It sinks and swims in that kind of teething nausea. It’s in some weird, cavernous pit, deep within your insides that you had no idea existed. You did not take Biology for long enough to name those inner depths.

You feel like a shaking image of your past self and your present self are oscillating into one. Like when you threw a bouncy ball as a kid, only to have the big up and down swooping motions of the ball bounce lower and lower and faster and faster to the ground. No wonder you feel sick to your stomach. The anxious, dazed, heartbroken person you were the day he broke up with you on the sidewalk outside your house meets your present self. Who you are now. A young woman on the brink of thirty with longer hair. He once told you he preferred women with longer hair. Have you been trying to prove to him all along that, at some level, you are lovable?

What are you feeling in this moment? Is it your disgust at him, and how he treated you? Are you recoiling from him as if from a hot flame? Or is your body shouting at you, “Danger!”? Or is it your pure, unaltered, seething hatred of him that you were never able to say to his face, that you’ve suppressed all this time? You grew up in a place and a culture where it was bad to feel anything. Since then, you have become quite fond of the multi-feeling. The complex feeling. A feeling that, in moments that smack you in the face like this one, has many layers and many tinges of the same, repulsive hues of brown in it. Like a bruise that springs up on your knee. But that s**t isn’t “bruise” color. It’s dark and oozing blue and purple in the middle, and lighter on one side in a molded yellow that somehow transitions into your normal flesh color. This bruise is a part of you, nonetheless.

There is some physical pain, undoubtedly. The kind of heartache where the barriers between the physical body and the emotional body, mind and soul became a blur. Of course, your brain is in your body. You were wrong to believe that these things were separate. Obviously, each of them needs the other. Otherwise you wouldn’t be alive.

As you see him close his eyes, you remember the time when you were trying to cuddle on the couch in your living room, and he said to you in a low voice,

“I just feel like we have no emotional connection.”

After you had slept together for weeks and you had neglected your job and your rest and your normal existence and your habits. You were torn off from your own self and your own life like a ship in a storm. You missed a deadline or two and your teammates and your clients became worried. They were wondering: is something wrong? But you were too distracted. You were trying to care for this new-born baby dragon of a relationship. So much of your soul had already been burnt alive for this male creature. And at one point, around this time last year, you had slept over at his house so much that your lives had kind of melded together; well, your life had melded into his.

You remember seeing his eyes quivering in that moment of tenderness on your couch, and somehow you found yet another well of compassion inside yourself to dig from for him. And you said to him,

“Hey, don’t worry at all. You can’t force yourself to feel anything. An emotional connection is something that we can build over time. You’ve been in love before though, right?”

And he explained to you, as a full-grown-adult-male of 34 years or something, that maybe he had been in love before, only once, but he wasn’t really sure. It was with some girl he had a “spiritual connection” with in Tulum. And then after you comforted him emotionally, and felt pity for him in a way, you still let him stay over that night at your apartment and have sex with you. And that level of weird, pitiful intimacy had morphed into something strange and emotionally confusing inside of you.

At the time, you knew it wasn’t you. And yet you kept trying. Kept hurling the bowling ball down the alley with little safety. With neither of the side railings on either side to catch you. After you had been so sure when you went to the bathroom in his house the first night you met, and he had this beautiful, glorious, clean apartment in Condesa, with vast, light wood floors that made your apartment feel like a shoebox. You had said to yourself, as you sat naked on the toilet,

“I want to have children with this man.”

And in that sense, with your own color-blindness to reds, and your aversion to flags, you let the preciousness of your dreams creep into this man’s eyes, through his crop of black hair, through his glasses. You didn’t really want to write about him since. Not even today. You didn’t want to waste any more of your breath on him. Not until you realized that he had wounded you. Let the light in and shined it brightly on your trembling, neglected inner child. Let him play with your soul like a demi-god, all the while your inner child was wailing at you with cries of abandonment that were unfamiliar to you, to your own self, so you left her out on the landing to cry herself to sleep, just like your dad did once, and you continued on. It was not that this man had abandoned you. It was the person he had made you into: someone who abandons herself.

He told you he wasn’t interested in monogamy from day one. He told you that his ex-girlfriend apparently called him a psychopath. And at the time, you thought that was odd and wondered how long they had dated for. You see, despite being emotionally reckless with many men you meet, you’ve also become a lot more attuned to what men tell you that other women have said about them. You take his word for her word, and you think: what prompted a woman to say that? He also had an infuriating way of saying, “No?” rhetorically at the end of his sentences. This was nothing to do with his accent. He had perfect English after studying in America. And if it was him, he made this squelchy sound every time he kissed you. After every, single, kiss. It was so annoying. He also told you he used to have “mommy issues”, but that he didn’t anymore. He had promptly gotten over them somehow, even though he hadn’t been to therapy. He was adamant about that.

When you see him again at the jazz bar, you wonder if you were too harsh for blocking him on everything and never speaking to him again. You reconsider this because you honestly believe he was not a bad person, just one of the most emotionally irresponsible people you have ever met. Undoubtedly. You think back to his special interests in startups, his businesses and an anime series he couldn’t stop talking about, and you wonder if the fact that his father has autism means that he might have it also. You reassure yourself that there is truly nothing wrong with that if he does have it, but getting a diagnosis might be helpful for him to know. But you are not a doctor, so why are you thinking about this, anyway?

You remember his hairy inner thighs, and the grunting, exhale he always squeaked out as he came into the condom. He was always very nervous about contracting an STD, and he had a strict exercise regime schedule that he stuck to, and his house was immaculate. Those things you liked, or found useful, but you wondered if you could ever get used to his sex squeak. Could you accept him and love him anyway? Even though, in the whole month that you were together, he never once offered to go down on you? And that made you question your decision to go natural and leave…

Hello Wonderful Readers,

Late last Thursday evening, I felt terrible. As I walked with my two friends through the dark, tree-lined streets of Mexico City to a cocktail bar, a giant, hollow pit was growing inside me. Not because I was hungry. I had just eaten two slices of my favorite pizza in the whole world: the Picante Pep from Hanks. But not even that salami, basil, and sweet, spicy honey could comfort me. Arturo, my new love interest, had promised to meet up at Casa Franca. And I still hadn’t heard from him.

My phone lay message-less in my purse. I ground my teeth in this godawful purgatory. My heart had sunk somewhere between my knees and my feet. Part of my disappointment and hurt was oozing with my anxiety into a mixture as toxic as nuclear waste in my mind.

Maybe I won’t meet with him for jazz music and dancing like we planned? Arturo isn’t interested in me, is he? Why can’t I date a nice guy like him without scaring him away? What’s wrong with me?

I felt like a fool for dressing up, looking hotter than I had looked in weeks. I wore a crimped red dress and dark purple turtleneck top, black tights, and big, clompy black boots. My dark, purply red lipstick matched my dress, which was the same length as my black blazer with gold buttons. Whatever, I huffed to myself. None of this mattered if I wasn’t going to see Arturo.

But what do they say? When God closes a door, he opens a window. Well, don’t even start me on the concept of God being a male. At least Ariana Grande was right about something.

My friends and I arrived at the cocktail bar, Salón Palomilla. I kept trying to focus on what they were saying, but I still felt too distracted. It was hard to divert the course of my thoughts when the destination of Arturo was seared into my brain. We walked down the mirrored corridor, passed gold bottles of expensive alcohol, and climbed the back stairs to the rooftop.

Our surroundings transformed. Serpent-green walls were interrupted by low-lit, quirky paintings of women’s bodies, something between Picasso and Miro. The starry sky stretched overhead like we were in the top capsule of a spaceship filled with Mexico City’s hottest and coolest bright young things. Just arriving there, I felt slightly elevated. Do I sound entitled for feeling self-important when I walk into a room of exclusivity, pomp, and snobbery? Probably. I gazed at couples whispering to each other and groups of friends sitting on velvet couches around black onyx coffee tables. They talked and checked us out as we passed. But much like the stars in the night sky overhead and the bubbles in some clientele’s cocktails, I too, felt like I had risen.

On the way to our table, I suddenly caught sight of someone strangely familiar. He was sitting in a high-backed armchair with a female friend at his side. I believe they were friends because they seemed utterly uninterested in each other, at least compared to the other couples in the room who were sitting much closer together and seemed more enraptured in each other’s physical and personal business. But as you know, I have been very wrong about this in the past.

I only caught sight of this man for a split second. I couldn’t be sure. Was it him, though? If it was who I thought it was, well, then it was Guillermo García Garrido, one of the hottest and most successful internet chefs of my generation. His initials should not be confused with GGG, a tagline some men use on dating apps to proclaim themselves as “good, giving and game” (good in bed, willing to give equally to their partner and game for anything). Perhaps Guillermo, if that’s who he was, was GGG. A conversation about Guillermo’s supposed sex life, for me, would be a whole other situation.

Now, I’m not one for cooking shows. I don’t give a s**t about cooking recipes at home, and I have never used my oven in the two years I’ve lived in this apartment. But the truth is that Guillermo could feed me s**t-stew, and I’d eat it. The man is like a small walking god. He had a beautiful, rounded nose and luscious locks of brown hair. And when I say luscious, I mean a little long in places, but the kind that he would curl down in front of his face when he made his cooking videos. I don’t remember how I had come across him on the internet. But this beautiful man, born in Chicago to Mexican parents, had achieved something that I thought was impossible. Guillermo is so attractive that for a brief moment in time, he convinced me that vegan food is sexy. Known as “That Vegan Guy” (this is not his real handle, of course, I have anonymized him), since he moved to Manhattan, his career had exploded, and he’d soared to more than 400,000 followers on Instagram.  

Of course, once I stumbled across his work, I began to salivate over the vegan things he was cooking. Well, not for the food. I was there for the videos of him being hot and cute, biting into a deep, juicy mushroom burger, and rolling his eyes back in his head because he was enjoying his own food so much. The pleasure of it all, just watching him chop, stir, and devour, was enough to keep me on my toes as I looked into his equally dashing dark brown eyes through my screen. What else can I say about him, except that he was so hot? And just like any fangirl on the internet, I quickly developed a crush on him the size of Mount Everest. I formed a strange, para-social relationship with him, wanting to touch and lick this man who was touching and licking so many delicious things in his videos. Well, that’s the weirdness of the internet for you.

Yet, in 2021, I soon became very disinterested in his vegan cooking. And so, in an act of stupidity or genius (I'm not sure which), I decided to troll him on Twitter. Now, I know I’m being a complete hypocrite here because I believe trolling is bad and it’s not a nice thing to do in general. What I did was wrong, I admit it. But at the time, it was the pandemic, and I didn’t give enough of a f**k about anything. And I honestly didn’t think he would reply. So, here is the interaction that we had on Twitter:

If you can’t speak Spanish I flit from trying to sound cool to the immediately desperate reaction of:

“Seriously, tell me when you don’t have a girlfriend. Maybe we’ll meet someday. Who knows.”

And who knows, indeed? Had I just finally met That Vegan Guy in real life? Had I prophesized this meeting three years earlier? Or was I just fangirling and salivating over nothing and no one?

My friends and I indulged in rounds of cocktails and passion-fruit kombucha with a salt rim, which I quite liked. Despite the chance of seeing Guillermo, I still felt down about Arturo, and I turned to my friends for consolation. But when I mentioned to them who he might be, of course, we erupted in giggles and quickly came up with a new challenge:

I had to determine whether this man was indeed Guillermo García Garrido, and then I had to do whatever was in my power to talk to him.

Rather than being normal and mature adults, my friends quickly dared me to walk back to the entrance to try to catch his eye. I got up and dawdled back to where I had seen him, pretending to look at the art. But based on where this guy’s chair was sitting and facing, it was impossible to look properly. He also now seemed even less interested in talking to his female friend, and he was on his phone, which meant it was even harder to look directly at his face. I returned to the table with my friends, unsuccessful.

But then, about 20 minutes later, this Guillermo-lookalike got up from his chair and walked beside us to the bar at the back of the room. He disappeared behind some curtains into a cornered-off section. I whispered to my friends,

“Okay. What should I do?”

“Go for it!” my female friend said, “I mean, you miss all the shots you don’t take.” She winked at me with undeniable excitement and cheekiness. So I took a deep breath and stood up. Yes, I thought to myself. I had nothing to lose again.

I tried to wal…