Quirkyalone A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics Chapter One A Girl and Her Word "It's okay that I am alone." "But maybe there is something wrong with me?" "Maybe I'm just too picky." "I'm young, I should be out there having sex." "But I hate having sex with people I'm not really attracted to." "Except when I'm traveling." It was amazing how many times I could run through the same thoughts without arriving at any resolution. I was not a social leper at age twenty-five. But I was not the most accomplished dater or girlfriend either. Of course there had been flings, obsessions, dalliances, some of them even temporarily earth-moving, but none that had ever transformed me into someone's girlfriend for longer than four months. Being constitutionally incapable of halfhearted romantic involvement, I rarely played the dating game. Sometimes, while walking alone and getting lost in my thoughts, I felt strong and complete and good, at home with myself in my city and with my friends, but there were also moments when I would question my patterns and my confidence would ebb. Faced with some of my friends' steady relationships, I would wonder, What's the difference between them and me -- or me and the consumers of Modern Bride magazine and Cosmopolitan ? Why is it so much easier for them to find romantic partners? If there is a whole population of people who are running in and out of long-term relationships, how do they do it? And finally, the kicker, Am I the only one who feels this way? I might have convinced myself that I was, except for Tara, my soul mate during my first year of college. We spotted each other as kindred spirits during orientation and had been friends ever since. She matched me year for year in almost perpetual singledom. Cut to New Year's Eve that year, 1998, almost 1999. In retrospect, it makes sense that quirkyalone was a New Year's baby. New Year's Eve at midnight -- like the senior prom and the buddy system at camp -- is one of those moments when we are all asked to line up two by two. It's also one of those turning-point holidays when we are asked to appraise our lives. That New Year's, I visited Tara for the holiday. We reminisced about our college-era zine, Cupsize ; we dissected that wacky new show Ally McBeal ; we checked in about the continued mystery of our singledom. The universal question seemed to be hanging in the air: Why was it always this way for us? We'd lived long enough to start setting patterns. I was relating the last tragic story of my love life, she was relating the last tragic story of hers, ending with, Hmmm, didn't work out. What next? It was cathartic to recount another round of failed attempts at relationships and reveal the depths of our confusion, but we had no answers still. It felt like a rerun. How many times can you end a story with, "But it didn't work out"? We had been talking since October about what we would do on New Year's Eve. We always had high hopes for such holidays even though we knew most New Year's Eves turned out awful or, more to the point, spectacularly awful, with us freezing to death in the streets of Manhattan. This year we decided we would take a new, more adult approach. Instead of trying to find the Shangri-La of New Year's parties in Manhattan, with an unending vista of unattached, charming New Yorkers dying to meet us, we would take a safer approach. We would wed ourselves to our friend Marissa's party in Brooklyn and lay down some roots. After a lifetime of New Year's searching, we were ready to make it one party, all night long. I still expected to find a midnight kiss. How hard could it be? Stunningly, after my third reconnaissance mission around the apartment and on the roof, by 11pm I was forced to make a negative assessment. Things were not looking good. Many friendly familiar faces, but no mysterious strangers. At this point, all I had left was hope for a wild card, a late arrival. My only prospect was the mysterious, as yet unseen unarrival. Even at 11:45, my eyes were trained on the door. I'm not a quitter, and if there was any chance of a midnight kiss, I was going to find it. As we began the countdown to 1999, I called a halt to the search, and my vision broadened to take in the whole room. Looking around the room, I saw something I hadn't seen before. I realized what I was looking at. A sea of people not kissing. In all my obsessive searching, I had never considered this possibility: a New Year's Eve Party Totally Devoid of Midnight Kiss. I like to think of that as the click, when I moved from thinking that Tara and I were the only ones to seeing us as part of a group, a moment, and perhaps even a movement. The morning after, Tara, Marissa, and I met at a diner for our traditional New Year's Day brunch. We talked resolutions, of course, and again tried to figure out why we had just witnessed a whole party of people not kissing at midnight. After polishing off our coffee, pierogies, French toast, and home fries, we bundled up to walk to the ATM. That's when and where it happened: in an ATM vestibule on a brutally cold, windy New Year's Day. I punched in my code. While waiting for the money to spit out, I turned around to them with a spontaneous declaration: "You know who we are? We're the quirkyalones!" Quirkyalone A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics . Copyright © by Sasha Cagen. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics by Sasha Cagen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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