How to date yourself
1: This should be obvious but start with flowers.
Take a walk in a garden you like and pick (don’t necessarily pluck), the brightest, softest and most surreal looking flowers. String them together or stick them in a vase full of water. This will forever be the nicest bouquet you’ve known.
2: Make yourself a meal from scratch. Grind, pound, mix, marinate, season, simmer and slow cook a very special meal of caramelised onions, a tender something or the other with sugar, salt, butter, love and patience- just for you.
3: Go to a movie by yourself or eat at your favourite restaurant alone, wearing a shade of lipstick called Rubi Woo or Shameless Harlot. (The lipstick isn’t that important, it’s just a detail). Once you get over the first twelve minutes of weirdness, this will start to feel first quite natural and then quite good.
Besides you can concentrate on what you’re eating.
4: Pluck any overbearing romantic cliché out of thin air and make it belong to you. Make this cliché an individualistic activity that does not have to be dressed, fussed, mussed and drowned in couple-hood and all its isolating metaphors. Go watch the waves and the sunset, light those candles at dinner, hold your own hand even, but do it for you.
5: Make a playlist of songs that speak to you. Take melancholic songs, happy songs, songs from 1994, songs about breakups, songs that make you hum, songs you’re embarrassed to hum- any and every song you’ve ever loved. Now play those songs on cab-ride though a wet, gloomy city. I can’t think of anything more romantic than watching your city (especially if it’s Bombay) come alive to the soundtrack of your choice.
6: Someone asked me to describe my perfect date. I thought about it and decided my perfect kind of date would be a long, lovely walk through a slightly falling apart, once-beautiful/still-sort-of-beautiful neighbourhood where the houses are a mix of very old and too new in a way that makes you miss what was and what could have been.
What I’m trying to say is take yourself on a walk that’s full of forgotten beauty.
7: Get comfortable with your own company instead of seeking ways to avoid it. Be by yourself in ways where you’re with yourself. The thing that comes from being alone is becoming aware of who you are, what you want and what you absolutely, cannot, stand.
And while most people spend their entire lives trying to figure themselves out, those who date themselves are the ones who know themselves.
8: Share something with the world and you and no one else —
pet a stray cat, smile at a solitary stranger, leave a note in a library book you loved, wave at children in a school bus, run for the sake of running, skip pebbles in ponds, look for the shapes in clouds, pickle vegetables, turn old fruits into jam, collect fallen leaves in 67 different shapes, help old ladies carry their groceries, grow a monstrous monstera, learn to identify birds, worms and butterflies — carve a soft space for yourself in the world.
