FDS or Bust

Remember when you were a kid and a half-day road trip was a b i g d e a l so you’d put a little sign in the car window “Vegas or Bust” or whatever? I think this is a bit like “old school” dating. Lots of short trips, no real commitment, and everyone was cool about it. Grabbing a milkshake Friday with Frank and a drive in movie Saturday with Tony was normal for all parties.

Then maybe you get your first job and start flying for fun. Okay, it’s 2020 so we all actually worked s*** jobs for at least the first twelve years, started when we were 14, and had maybe a 12% chance of lucking into a job that would let us afford a flight to freaking anywhere that wasn’t for a funeral (Gen Y represent!) but for the sake of the analogy just pretend, k?

So flying trips are a lot of commitment. You actually put real effort and planning in and once you’re on that plane, it’s wheels up man. No going back. This is modern dating. We treat modern dating like trial marriage, especially if we have spent our entire life programmed by circumstances to chase stability. Stability costs money so when we’re modern-style dating and find a guy who seems to be an emotional fit, we shack up or get otherwise exclusive. Wheels up.

And then along came freaking COVID. Anyone who read the essay Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado and got it was not surprised by COVID. Why? Because they understand fragility. They live one paycheck away from disaster and disaster is inevitable for the vast majority in the US. Sheer entropy and a failed education system mean the hurt is coming and you can do nothing but pick up the pieces, over and over, never getting ahead. So to try and break the cycle what do you do? You hit the Internet and get street smart. And then, oh lord then do you learn who the predators really are. Forest fires. Asteroids. Alien life. Solar storms. Biowarfare. Cyberattack. We even have a wiki page and a Doomsday Clock. You also learn about hospital chargemasters, monopolies and duopolies, ceo salaries, and civil forfeiture. They aren’t out to get us. They don’t even see us. Armed with all this existential dread we don’t have the luxury of wasting spoons on, we knew the “good times” (hah!) had to come to an end. It’s why we fetishize zombie movies and boast about what we’d do; we’d literally have more control and autonomy and options in that scenario than we do surviving daily normal life. But I digress.

COVID did to my travel analogy what FDS did to my dating life. Road trips and flights are the past; it’s 2020 and neither a milkshake nor a trial marriage are gonna cut it. We’re now playing the long game and operating with intent. FDS made me realize I’ve been looking through the wrong lens and doing it for the wrong reasons. I need to move towards something real and not run away from all the things I don’t want, and lord did I have a list. This is the first time I saw a How-To manual!

It’s hard to be a queen when you exist in survival mode until you go through enough pickme situations gauntlets that you realize your choice of a partner will almost certainly make or break your happiness. Hands down, full stop. If you eff this up you will die unhappy. It’s a big deal and yeah, we actually do know what a big deal is ...

Still don’t believe FDS is important? Practice it so you don’t make my mistakes. How did I love scrotes? Let me count the ways.

  • my first boyfriend ghosted me and I cried three weeks on the front porch watching his truck drive by
  • my second boyfriend would accuse me of cheating if I didn’t answer when he called and his only criteria for our future was to be within driving distance of his mummy
  • my third boyfriend said girls whose thighs don’t touch can’t be trusted, wanted to “put a baby in me” and then dumped me because he likes petite (short) women
  • my fourth boyfriend dumped me for a girl he’d never met in person but who was arguably stunning on MySpace. He tried to crawl back and caught me nailing a gifted teddy bear to the hood of his new truck
  • my fifth boyfriends best friend raped me and I was blamed and dumped
  • my sixth boyfriend raped me when I was too tired to leave, too young to know how to call a cab, and too broke to afford one, yet I kept dating him
  • while breaking up with my fiancé, he first tried to overdose and then hang himself with a belt, then knelt on my chest to hold me down and screamed in my face. I smiled while pinned and said “Do your best.” I had to buy my own engagement ring yet he had a nice Xbox and an anime collection
  • my next relationship lasted 10 years and I became a kinkmeisha. If you’ve seen it on Reddit, I’ve probably done it. I left when “be nice to me” stopped working, when my growing self-respect became an issue, and when I was told he doesn’t date fat chicks

Forgive me, FDS sisters for I have sinned. I have been single for four years now and only after finding FDS last week could articulate what I did want. I had no role model that didn’t wax biblical (submit to your husband!) and I swallowed the ladder theory hook, line, and sinker so I doubted male friends, too. For a while I made it by loosely modeling myself after my Shiba-Inu; we get along fine so long as my interests align with hers and she unapologetically takes up space! It’s good in theory but FDS is the Bible of how to walk the talk.

It’s never too late, sisters. Date like your life depends on it, because it does. FDS or Bust.