Or, to be more precise, the Hollywood execs behind Drew Barrymore set unrealistic expectations for love.
I grew up with the belief that finding, and holding on to, love was exactly how I saw it in the movies. I grew up thinking that a man would come to rescue me from singleness (should I choose to be rescued, that is) and that there had to be dramatic grand gestures. After having messed up "big time," my true love would arrive at my work unannounced, stand on my desk, and declare his undying love for me. Or he'd convince a marching band to play a Frankie Valli song across a soccer field while he sang to me.
Heck, even a slow motion airport chase would do. These types of things almost always end in dramatic airport chases.
Naivety was my guiding factor as I began to date, and I learned quickly that love is not always a romcom.
In fact, very little of the time did men even offer flowers. Usually they just offered sex, with a heavy dollop of disappointment.
"Is your mom hot too?" I was once asked after a second date.
"You weren't born a Jew," another lamented.
"I don't date new vegans," an infamous date of mine had admitted.
In this book, each chapter is a story of a date gone wrong or love lost to circumstance. What once started out as a free form of therapy turned into a quest to help me to discover why, after many disastrous attempts at dating, I was single. And the answer I kept coming back to was clear.
Dating sucks!
But when that's all you're offered and you have a strong affinity for sex, maybe I suck too.
Dating Sucks! (...and So Do I!) is a collection of erotic stories that attempts to unravel and explain the pratfalls of modern intimacy in the age of swipe culture.