Before I understood what they were asking, I took a friend up on one of these drinks dates. I chose somewhere nearby, so I could walk there, and when I arrived she was already sitting at the bar with a glass of wine. As I sat down next to her she told me how good I looked and stared at me, looking for any betrayal of how I was actually doing. I was spending more time on a beauty routine for my face, poking and prodding at my pores, hairs that had begun to sprout on my chin and other parts, which had seemed horrifying to consider just a decade before. She told me my maintenance routine was working.

“So how is it?”

“All of it or…?” I asked.

“Being alone.”

“It’s hard, but I don’t remember the last time I had this much time to focus on what I want.”

“What a dream,” she said.

She was blond like me, but much slimmer, from years of personal training sessions three times a week. Her hair was the kind that could hold a style with little effort and always looked freshly dyed. She was a person you would see on the street and instantly envy. Sometimes I felt like she wanted to be friends so she could always know where she was in the hierarchy of life. And here she was confiding in me about her general unhappiness. She wasn’t at the point of doing something irreversible, but a kind of malaise had settled over her life.

“I think my husband has a girlfriend stashed somewhere.”

“You do?”

“Not really, actually. It just sounds better than admitting that we’re both bored with each other.”

“It’s the boredom that gets you.”

“Everything is so tedious. We even have to make sure to schedule sex, because that’s become tedious, too.”

“Is the schedule working?” I asked.

“I feel like I could be having a lot more sex if I wasn’t married. How do you keep the excitement going? Does anyone know?”

“I don’t.”

She turned to me, and I knew what she was going to ask, because she leaned in closer to me and she had just ordered her third glass of wine.

“You must see so many different dicks now.”

I knew I was to perform the role of single friend she could live vicariously through. I could be honest and say I had been avoiding men altogether, which would make it seem like being alone was living at a deficit, or I could lie and let her have her fantasy of a different kind of life that felt more thrilling.

I knew these were the roles, because I had, at one point, asked single friends to play them for me, too. These conversations were to see how it was “out there.”