Narratives

Spring, Dating, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

May 03, 2026

It is still Spring.

I hate Spring. It is probably my least favorite season. Winter is easily my favorite: cold and gray and short is how I like my days (but not too short, which is why I struggle even on a short visit to the PNW). Fall is fine: it is exciting to feel the world change, to watch Winter creep slowly into the environment, stretching its fingers into the light and the air, sliding between leaves and wrapping around stalks and pressing down lightly on the grass. And then there is Summer: I hate the heat, but I learned to embrace it, basking in the glory of the sun—perpetually near a pool, where I can escape when I need relief.

But Spring…Spring is the chaos of regeneration, the bright spirit of renewal pricking at my subconscious, urging me to do, do, do. It is a time to start projects and to make lists and to take stock (or to take action on all the things you took stock of while cooped up through the Winter). Spring Cleaning, Spring Romance, Spring Birthdays—the natural response to Spring as a season of rebirth is written across the rhythms of human history. It is a season of promise.

But what about promises that cannot be fulfilled?

I have been away from this blog for a hot minute, as you may have noticed. This blog has been in existence for a year—a milestone I missed entirely, as I was particularly busy with work this year. Last May, I wrote about a massive work project I had then, as well—the undeniable cycle of Spring governs the rhythm of my work projects too, generally offering me a bit of respite through the Winter, with things kicking up as the weather turns warm. But work is not the only thing that pulled me away from writing last month: in fact, the same project that kept me from my blog also offered me some relief from a preoccupation that has taken to haunting me annually around this time.

My birthday is in April, and it serves, in my mind, as a sort of metonymy for the press of the season. When I was growing up, living in two houses, my birthday was An Event—I would have up to four different celebrations, with family (times two), extended family (times two), and friends, causing the occasion to extend over at least a week. I was the center of the universe for one week out of the year, and I loved it; it was not always acceptable for me to consider myself the center of the universe, but for my birthday, it was expected.

I know my situation was not unique—nor was it a unique struggle to go to college and experience the collapse of that paradigm almost immediately: I spent my nineteenth birthday crying on the couch while my best friend watched House next to me.1 We celebrated my birthday, of course, going to P.F. Chang’s (or Chuy’s?) that weekend, but I still understood that my birthdays thereon would no longer be defined by the extravagance I had grown accustomed to.2 Many of the birthdays that followed have been fraught for me, emotionally: my body, governed by my subconscious, expects a certain level of fanfare, which circumstances do not always allow me to muster.

These dual pressures, of Spring blossoming with opportunity and my birthday bearing down on me, form a narrative in my mind: the hustle that is my lifetime companion takes on an urgency, as if any chance to self-actualize might finally disappear when the day of my birth passes. As if a door will close, rendering irretrievable some undiscovered key to my self-actualization, with the mere anniversary. As if this Spring will be my last chance to find happiness with another person.

That’s right: this post is also about dating! I am dating—I am on the dating apps. It sucks as much as you imagine (more, frankly, if you have not heard tales). I am a Woman Seeking Men, but I know that the difficulties are not distinct to my situation; I have talked to plenty of men, by now, who face their own struggles—and we are all being crushed, together, by the perverse incentives of the dating apps themselves, which seek foremost to exploit us and keep us wanting.

But what I want to focus on right now is a pattern I have observed among the men I browse and match with on the apps: how the narratives we hold about ourselves and what we want undermine our own goals, how they distort our understanding of what we want from dating. Too often, I see a profile where a man says that he wants a woman who is, “Kind, funny, smart, hard-working, well-read, godly, gracious, forgiving, respectful, industrious, intelligent, honest, loving, sweet, sour, umami.” Every time I read such a list (and, though I embellished the qualities included in this list, it is usually just a list of a dozen or so adjectives, none capitalized), I think, “Okay…and what are you bringing to the table?”

One of the most interesting pieces of (online, specifically) dating advice I have read recently3 suggested that, instead of tailoring your profile to what you are looking for, you should use it to highlight what you like about yourself. I have been sitting with this idea for months—noticing not only how I was taking the former, recommended-against approach, but noticing, too, the mental checklists that were outlined in the profiles of my matches.

Each of us seems to have this narrative of what we need or want in a hookup, a partner—what have you—but that is not, in my experience, how relationships work. People tend to be attracted to qualities with which they have had positive experiences; part of getting to know a person is discovering new qualities to be attracted to (or put off by, but we simply do not have time4). Moreover, even though it defies conventional wisdom to expect people to change, people do change. Couples often grow into each other, being molded by the other person’s needs and quirks and aversions. The narrative that you should be looking for the candidate who meets your bespoke criteria, rather than looking for someone who is worth growing for, is poisoning online dating.

Then there are the narratives people have about themselves. I have an odd personality tic: I expect people to be who they say they are, and if I see a contradiction, I ask about it. You do not have to believe me when I say this is unintentional (I am working on it), and I certainly am not going to explain where it comes from—suffice to say that I have an inconvenient habit of pointing out cognitive dissonance to the people experiencing it.5 This is a particularly maladaptive habit for dating, because it means I am regularly pressing on weak points in the narratives people have about themselves, raising their defenses before I can actually get to know them.

If you watch Survivor, you have observed the nadirs of the human capacity for self-awareness. Season after season, I am astounded at how many contestants regularly make statements about themselves that are directly contradicted by actions they take in the show. I am less surprised by how hard they will fight to defend themselves if the contradictions are pointed out by other contestants. I believe we all harbor at least a little bit of self-delusion—a thin layer of self-constructed lies that protects us from the full and terrible knowledge of ourselves. In some people, the layer is rather thick; some people cannot see themselves at all. But for most of us, the layer is a thin one, pruned by the shears of regular social interaction.

You see, other people are capable of showing us that truth—not always, and not always accurately, but broadly, we can understand ourselves better through interaction with others…if we allow them to show us the things we cannot see in ourselves. Narrative is at the heart of this process: if you allow space for other people to challenge your personal narrative, you may discover something new within yourself. You may change—you may grow.

So are identities just the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are? Yes…? I think it is more complicated than that—and I wrote this post less to explore my numerous theories about psychology and more to tell you where I have been for the past month (gestures to all of the above). But I need to draw some sort of conclusion, and so I will conclude with an example of how self-narrative can be leveraged in a positive direction.

For most of my adult life, I have been disheartened by how I saw femininity constructed in America. When I was a child, it was a common schoolyard insult to merely be called a girl (like…even if you were a girl), so we collectively rejected our gender and each sought to distinguish ourselves from the “other girls”. That’s right: the Pick-Me girl is a Millennial—we survived our youth by denying our girlhood, and now we are considered enemies to Real Women. But what the real women embody does not look much better: from the emotional labor to the girlboss feminism to the tradwife chic, the trappings of womanhood suggest a gender thoroughly at sea with how it is supposed to manifest.

Over time, I became convinced that there was some tribal knowledge that had been lost in the generational trauma of the twentieth century6—some primal mode of womanhood that had been squished beyond recognition, by white picket fences and fourth-wave feminism alike. I went in search of it, and my therapist pointed me towards Women Who Run with the Wolves.

You see, this book has undertaken the same project I conceived, to articulate an essential vision of womanhood, liberated from the constraint of societal expectations. The author of this book, trained in archetypal psychology (if I had known that this was a thing you could train in, I would have pursued it with all of my heart), has transcribed folk tales from around the world and collected them in an anthology, each accompanied by a psychologically-grounded analysis of what the story reveals about womanhood. It is absolutely marvelous.

It was through this book that I became acquainted with Skeleton Woman, a manifestation of what the author calls the Life/Death/Life cycle, “a cycle of animation, development, decline, and death that is always followed by re-animation.” In the story of Skeleton Woman (which you can read here), this cycle is imagined as a story of a skeleton who is revived to womanhood by the care of a fisherman, after he brings her bones up from the sea floor in his fishing net. The woman was living, died, and lived again, as all things must to be truly alive.

I am in my late thirties. I am not quite middle-aged, but with each passing birthday, that infamous milestone looms a little bit closer, making each birthday feel like another hour slipping away in the twilight of my youth. When the sun dips below the horizon, what opportunities will disappear with it—what keys will be left behind the door I mentioned earlier? This is the question that haunts each Spring in the fading Spring of my lifespan.

Skeleton Woman tells me that my sense of urgency is misplaced: the death that awaits me as I approach mid-life is not a true death—it is the decay that will make room for new growth, that will feed the first shoots of my next era. I have already begun to plant those shoots, sorting some chronic issues with my mental and physical health, establishing habits that will serve me well beyond a single season. Yes, my body is older and creakier than it was a decade ago, but rather than fighting the wear of age, I am finding ways to move around it. Similarly, I am publishing a novel on this blog—something I could only do once I let go of the dream of being (traditionally) published. The decay of one dream made room for another.

It is still Spring. There is so much to do, but I have time to do it. And the things that I do not accomplish—the opportunities that eventually disappear…well, I am confident that new opportunities will twinkle to life in their wake.

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