As people received vaccines and Hot Girl Summer was declared across the nation, I watched as my friends, all newly in love from their coronalationships, peaked longingly through the confines of their fortresses.
Then, the flood gates broke. Tinders were made and the first line in every bio was, “in an open relationship.”
I let this happen to me as well. I told my boyfriend to go wild, while I watched from the sidelines. After I dressed up for a brunch date and sat in the beautiful garden patio at Esselon, my boyfriend showed me his new poorly made dating profile.
“I never match with girls,” he explained to me in despair. I already knew this, when his first message to me was a list of his favorite beans. “I match with every boy, but we never message each other,” he continued.
I sat in the back of my roommate’s used Subaru Forester, with her partner in the passenger seat. “I just matched with [insert bleached hair, cigarette smoking, noise music making Five College Student who happens to be in the valley this summer],” she told us excitedly. Later I get the rundown about how she rarely gets messaged, can’t figure out if the “dates” she goes on are, in fact, dates, and how unpleasurable her casual sex is with the few who get there.
My single friends complain to me that they spend days flirtily messaging people on Bumble only to find out they are emotionally unavailable because they are in a committed relationship with my friend’s only other tinder match of the week. So not only are us cuffed girlies not receiving the validation we are looking for, we are taking up space in a territory claimed by the single community.
In the words of this column’s namesake, I couldn’t help but wonder, what are y’all really craving out of cuffed hot girl summer? While I have been out of the dating scene for a while, all I remember from it is the silly texting rules and regulations, and feeling bad about how no one wants me.
There is one friend of mine, and all her partners by proxy, who shatter all my ideas about the anguish of hot girl summer. She understands the key to the smooching desires of us early-twenty-somethings.
That key is: not succumbing to the desire to go meet new people after 15 months of isolation and date around. She falls deeply in love with her friends, teammates, and roommates. She is able to be involved in many open relationships without going on grueling dates. She lives in a world of abundance of love, that can be found anywhere that doesn’t involve an iPhone and a first date at Haymarket Cafe.
I have learned from the people I have fallen in love with this past year, and those around me who did the same, that we want the validation of feeling like a hot girl in this HGS. As controversial as it may be to say, you are not going to get that from dating around.
Please smooch, show love, give care, and validate your loved ones, so we can all live the HGS we deserve. And to all of you who are dating right now, I hope you are getting what you are looking for. I certainly don’t understand it.
