Layoffs, Notes from the Breadline, Romance and Dating

Notes from the Breadline: Alone, Alone, Alone

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Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Notes from the Breadline,” a column by a laid-off lawyer in New York. Prior columns are collected here. You can reach Roxana St. Thomas by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.
On a drizzly Thursday morning, my friend Giovanna calls to invite me to lunch. “I have a window between a meeting and a conference call,” she says, referring to concepts that are increasingly foreign to me. “Come and meet me.”
“I don’t know,” I say guiltily, tallying the lunches, dinners, and coffees to which she has treated me in the past few months, “you just bought me dinner.’
“Don’t be silly,” she says cheerfully. “Consider it a public service, since you’ll have to shower.”
“Whoa!” I tell her, “let’s not be rash.”
“Take a shower,” she says sternly. “I’ll meet you downstairs at one.”
A few hours later, we are sitting at a restaurant. Giovanna is dressed beautifully for work, her hair and makeup perfect. Although I have showered, I realize that I could easily be mistaken for her maid. We talk about her new colleagues, her most recent deposition, and my job search, before the conversation turns to what women invariably talk about when they talk to other women: men.
Sitting at the table — hands wrapped around our coffee cups, voices lowered conspiratorially — I am reminded of television commercials in which women confide sheepishly about unseemly problems, like occasional irregularity or embarrassing ring-around-the-collar. But, before a chipper paid spokesperson can appear, offering us laxative yogurt or assistance with our laundry woes, we identify the issue at hand: DWUI.
No, puzzled readers — not that DWUI. Without diminishing, in any way, the seriousness of operating a motor vehicle after tossing back too many suds or hitting the pipe, let’s be clear: we are talking about something entirely different. We’re talking about the insidious problem of Dating While on Unemployment Insurance.
Read about the perils of DWUI, after the jump.


DWUI comes up in the midst of a conversation about Giovanna’s forays, since her breakup with Tony, into the dating pool. I am debriefing her about a text message she sent me while having drinks with a man — a lawyer — she met at a hearing. After a few fawning emails, he asked her if they could get together for a cocktail.
Giovanna told me about her putative date with the same degree of enthusiasm one might muster to announce a trip to the grocery store. “I don’t want to go,” she said glumly. “It’ll just remind me how much I miss Tony.”
“Just go!” I told her, trying to sound upbeat. “Better to tell yourself that you’re moving on than to pine away for him”
“Yeah,” she said, unconvincingly. “Okay.”
Despite her misgivings, Giovanna went out for drinks with Nick, the lawyer. “I didn’t feel a connection,” she reported on her way home. “Maybe it’s just too early to tell.” But, she told me gamely, “I’ll go out with him again. You never know.”
Alas, Giovanna’s second date with Nick was equally uninspiring. “Still on date,” her text message read. “I got nothin’. Nice guy, but he’s a typical lawyer. He has nothing to say and I’m out of stories. Can I go home now?”
When Giovanna finishes telling me her story, over coffee in the restaurant, she announces that she is through dating, at least for now. “I’m not even going to try for a few months,” she tells me. “I just need to be alone, focus on work, and try to figure out why I’m not where I want to be in my life.” Besides, she adds, “I don’t really have the time to date. I get home at 9:00 at night, and I don’t really feel like talking to anyone when I do. It’s not exactly conducive to a relationship.” She pauses, looking wistful. “Maybe unemployment is a mixed blessing for you,” she says. “At least you have the time to date.”
The thought catches me off-guard. “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I never really thought of it that way.” A gentle wave of anxiety washes over me. Have I failed — again — to see the silver lining in this situation? Should “Meeting guy; spending abundant free time dating guy” be on my “Things to Do While You’re Unemployed” checklist, along with reading Moby Dick and finishing the sweater I started knitting six years ago?
“Well,” Giovanna says, “you had more time for Cliff when you guys were dating, right?”
Yes, I tell her, I suppose I did. But the more I think about it, the more it feels as though my ill-fated relationship with Cliff happened a lifetime ago. Since then, something has changed, and although I’m not quite sure why, DWUI now seems nearly impossible. Why, I wonder, has unemployment given rise to a monastic need to be alone? When did joblessness render me unfit for human companionship?
As I ponder my reclusiveness, a few answers present themselves readily. First of all, I have been a little bit lazy about showering … although that could be circumstantial, I tell myself quickly, pushing the thought aside. I start again: first of all, I met Cliff, and — moments later, it seemed — I was laid off. I didn’t have time to think about unemployment as something — a circumstance, a life event, or a life-altering event — distinct from our relationship; they were, as we say in the trade, inextricably intertwined. And, in truth, our timing had some fortuitous aspects. I wasn’t working on weekends, and my schedule was more flexible than it had been in years. I had no deeds to do, no promises to keep. One time we went skiing on a Wednesday.
But Cliff also shared the early days of unemployment, when, in hindsight, I was still blundering, dumbfounded, through its weedy underbrush. We formed a connection before I could fully understand how unmoored I would become, or appreciate the extent to which joblessness would sink into every crevice of my life. Because Cliff saw me take the first (of many) awkward steps, I didn’t have to explain why, figuratively, I resembled Steve Martin’s character in “The Jerk.” And, of course, he was on my side, which he expressed by channeling his impressive capacity for contempt in the direction of my former employers; rather than fussing with a nuanced analysis, he was quick to assure me that they were “fucking savages.” Support, I learned, comes in many forms.
Of course, things with Cliff ultimately began to fray, for reasons unrelated to my unemployment. But before they did, I started to sense the weight of my joblessness on our shoulders, and felt the strain — of worrying about money, looking for work, and fighting the rising tide of panic — trickling through the cracks in our relationship.
Post-Cliff, the fact of my unemployment has become mine, and mine alone. Perhaps, as Max told me, it is because unemployment isn’t something that you share with other people (give or take a few thousand readers). Perhaps a layer of emotional Magic Shell has formed over whatever nougaty vulnerability I once had. Whatever the reason, DWUI suddenly seems immensely complicated.
In the weeks after Giovanna and I talk about it at lunch, DWUI suddenly becomes a reality. My friend, Trey, breaks up with his girlfriend, and — through a combination of subtle hints and distinctly high-schoolish gossip sessions with girlfriends — it becomes clear to me that Trey wants to be “more than friends.”
Rather than presenting itself as a fascinating possibility, the thought of dating someone fills me with apprehension. Why? I ask myself. What’s to agonize over? Trey and I are great friends; we get along beautifully; he dotes on me incessantly. Why not forge ahead? My other friends are enthusiastic. “Take a chance!” they tell me. “It might work out for the best!”
Still, I can’t shake my sense of uncertainty — and it’s not Trey. It’s me. My life has none of the parameters that were there a year ago, no shape that I can readily define. I have no roadmap to guide me in a particular direction from here, and (if I am honest with myself) no real idea where “here” even is. I feel as though I live on an island, with only one coconut tree. I’m not sure that I can accommodate visitors.
“Don’t rule out the possibility,” my friend Haley pleads. “You guys spend a lot of time together anyway; just see what happens.”
But what happens, among other things, is that I am quickly confronted by one of the perils of DWUI: money. Money is increasingly tight, and Trey knows that, although I am not selling pints of blood or collecting bottle deposits, I am definitely on a budget. So, no matter where we go or what we do, he insists on paying. “Don’t worry about it,” he says lightly, waving off my attempts to contribute when a check comes, or as a cashier waits expectantly for us to settle up.
“You can’t pay for everything,” I tell Trey, but he insists. We are soon embroiled in an epic battle to see who can throw their money down first. We leave more than one waiter standing helplessly by the side of a table while we smack each others’ hands away from the check, and on a few occasions he distracts me with the tried and true, “Hey, look who just walked in!,” snatching the check while I search the restaurant for a familiar face. At some point, he starts getting up to “go to the bathroom” before the bill comes, and then pays furtively, before I have a chance to protest.
“I can’t deal with this,” I tell Giovanna. “I mean, Trey is incredibly generous, but I don’t feel comfortable with this whole thing. I didn’t think money was that important to me, but I don’t feel right about being treated all the time … I don’t feel like I can pull my weight.”
“Of course it bothers you,” she says matter-of-factly. “You’re a single woman, you’re used to making it happen for yourself, and all of a sudden you’re forced into the 1950s? No wonder you feel uncomfortable.” Her tone softens. “Look,” she tells me, “there’s nothing wrong with having a guy take you out. I don’t think money is the issue here. Maybe you’re just not ready to be in a relationship right now, while you’re still working things out with your job situation.”
What, I wonder, does my joblessness have to do with dating? Over the next few days, I turn the question over in my mind. Is my sense of equality, of being a true partner, tied to financial security? Am I lost without a job to define me, like King Lear? Or, after months without work, do I feel as though I am defined by life in the breadline? Moreover, can I, in good conscience, drag another person into my personal quagmire?
A week later, I meet my friend Jimmy for lunch. While we eat, I tell him about the situation with Trey.
“Why am I so reluctant to get involved with someone who seems to really care about me?” I ask. “Isn’t that a good thing?”
He thinks for a moment, studying my face. “Do you remember what you told me when you and Cliff split up?” he answers. No, I tell him, groping for the memory. It seems like a long time ago.
“You said, ‘I just wanted something extraordinary, and if I can’t have that, I don’t want anything.’ Do you remember?”
“How will I know if anything is extraordinary if I’m not even open to the possibility?” I say, surprised by how urgent I sound. I feel a surge of frustration, a hot spear of anger at something I can’t identify. “Why am I fucking frozen this way? Is life supposed to stop until I find a fucking job?” I kick the leg of our table, rattling the dishes and spilling coffee.
Jimmy looks amused. “Easy, tiger,” he says, laughing. I try to scowl at him, but I can already feel myself smiling, moderately chagrined by my own schmaltz. I throw a lemon wedge across the table and it lands, with a dull plop, in Jimmy’s coffee.
“Look, Rox,” he says, when we have stopped tossing the detritus of our meal at each other. “I know you, and I know you’re going to try to weather this thing on your own. You’re not going to try to share it with someone. So give yourself a break.” He fixes me with a hard stare. “Besides,” he says, “you need at least one hand to grab something extraordinary if it comes along, and, at the moment, both of yours are full. Am I right?”
Jimmy is right. He looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to say it. Finally, I give in. “You’re right,” I say. “Ass.”
Jimmy smiles triumphantly. When the check comes, he makes me pay.
___________________________________________________________________________
Roxana St. Thomas is a laid-off lawyer living in New York. You can reach her by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook. And check out the Notes from the Breadline t-shirt store here.
Earlier: Prior installments of Notes from the Breadline

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