Dating someone feels so strange. Strange to me, I’m only spe..

Dating someone feels so strange. Strange to me, I’m only speaking about myself. I don’t understand how my friends work 8-hour shifts and then come home to cook and clean for the person they’re dating. I don’t understand how they lie under someone at night who drank beer and insulted them earlier. And they’re happy about it. After a night of sex, they go to work or university to grind like cursed souls, their cheeks glowing, makeup perfectly intact.

I don’t understand how my friends look at a goblin with an extra chromosome who bought them McDonald’s once and think, Yes, I’ll spend the next three years with him. I don’t understand how they graduate from universities only to spread their legs for men who barely made it through ninth grade. I don’t understand how they go on dates with men ten years older who started the conversation by sending a dick pic. I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I refuse to understand.

How, without the ability to live safely and comfortably every day, do they have children? Only to go back to work after maternity leave, grinding away just to keep the heating on in their tiny apartments. So that their kids can go to schools where they’ll be emotionally scarred. So they can work tirelessly every day, terrified of losing their jobs and being left without bread on the table. So they can come back to apartments with sticky plastic tablecloths on the dining tables from spilled tea.

I don’t understand how women have sex just for the fun of it. I don’t understand how women have children with men who can’t offer them complete security.

I remember when we were 13, my friend and I would talk about sex in the locker room before sports practice. She kept saying she couldn’t imagine touching a penis. And I, acting like an expert, insisted, Everyone thinks that at first, but then everyone gets married and has kids. We will too, after 20. Now we’re 26. She’s slept with half the city, and I still haven’t touched that mysterious penis.

What I don’t understand is ordinary life. I look at it as if from inside a bubble. In my bubble, I know exactly how love and intimacy should feel, but it seems like that’s just something I made up.