ove had failed me twice in as many years. Between Veronica and Diane, I had become pretty jaded towards the whole concept. I saw friends stuck in stale, "comfort zone" relationships. I saw twenty-somethings acting like old married couples. I saw guy friends who couldn’t come out on a Friday night because they were "probably" watching a movie with their girlfriends. More and more, I felt sick to my stomach at the very idea that anybody who barely knew who they were as an individual could tether themselves to another clueless individual. I was done with all that. I was ready to be single. More than that though, I was ready to stop looking for a supposed "one," and instead begin the proverbial task of "finding myself."

It’s a cliche phase that everybody goes through at some point after graduating college. Some backpack through Europe. Some roadtrip across the United States. I lived alone for the first time in my life. I embraced the freedom of being single. I went out to bars with my buddy Bill. I went camping by myself, enjoying perfect solitude. I drove up to San Francisco on a moment’s notice. If I had wanted to, I could have lived anywhere in the world for a few months, then packed up my bags and moved somewhere else. I could experience everything on my own terms. I had no obligations to any other person except myself. Nobody to answer to. Nobody to break plans with. Nobody to disappoint when I changed my mind at the last minute.

What was I hoping to "find" in myself? What does anybody expect they are going to "find" in themselves? Who knows? I had a lot of fun during that year-and-a-half of "freedom," but I can’t say that I really "found" anything. What I didn’t realize at the time was that no matter how I disguised it or explained it away as something else, in reality I was still trying to find my "one."

(Unfortunately?) I never had a streak where I was coming home with a different faceless, nameless girl every weekend. There was Alison, a Princeton student home in Boston for the summer. We had a "three-night stand," getting together each time she came back into town. Beyond great sex, we were simply great together. We never ran out of things to talk about and our whole chemistry was on. I know this runs counter to the very "etiquette" of one-night stands, but I couldn’t help but wonder how things could have worked out had we given it more time. I moved to L.A. a couple weeks after our third night. I kept trying to track down her e-mail address and phone number from friends, but that third night still remains the last time we ever spoke.

Mandi was a senior when I was a freshman. Way out of my league, so of course I had the biggest crush on her. We ended up in L.A. around the same time and started hanging out. The "relationship" lasted less than two months and was never exclusive, nor was it altogether earth-shattering. Yet, I still couldn’t help but wonder if this was somehow fate: a crush finally coming to fruition. The tug for my newfound freedom was still there. Once it seemed that Mandi was getting too attached, I broke things off.

I was even allowing thoughts to run away with me over girls I never even gotten to first base with. Stephanie was a friend of a friend who was into Reiki, spiritual healing and other new-age crap. I was electrified by her. Drawn to her. Two days of cold shoulders later, I let the feeling slip away. Smitty was a girl in my circle of friends – the only friend who I felt any real attraction to. Our personalities just clicked together. We needed to be together. She had a boyfriend at the time – a stale relationship which has since ended – so I didn’t actively pursue her. But the more we talked, the more I became convinced that our paths should come together. As it would turn out, I met my "one" before this could happen.

Seeing as how I was more or less thinking thoughts of "the one" with fairly insignificant relationships and even non-relationships, it was only a matter of time before the real ghosts came back to haunt me. The first was Kirstin – the true love that could never quite work itself out. I had gone to her wedding four years earlier. I had seen pictures of her son. Yet, I wrote her a letter expressing every feeling I had ever had for her. I don’t know what I was hoping to accomplish. This was a purging of feelings more than anything – putting them onto paper so that my fluid thoughts could now have concrete words attached to them, making them easier to deconstruct and deal with. Amy – my first lots-of-things – was a little easier to get passed. I found her e-mail on an alumni website. We wrote back and forth about mundane things for a couple weeks and that was that. Dealing with Veronica was a constant process considering we were close right up until the point when I forsook L.A. – and our friendship – for good. Diane was a killer. I wrote her a thirty-page, single-spaced letter detailing everything that she had ever meant to me. It opened up a whole new can of worms with us where it seemed like we might finally get together, although it never happened. I was starting to feel like John Cusack in High Fidelity.

As much as I tried to convince myself that I was, I simply could not embrace the whole idea of being single. I kept wanting somebody. Not just a random somebody either. I wanted a girlfriend... No, I wanted a soul-mate. Trying to let go of Diane made this feeling perhaps more desperate. I never realized at the time just how hard I was trying. My friend Laura was the one who finally read it in me. I wasn’t finding myself because I was too pre-occupied with finding somebody else.

In the movies, self-realizations and changes in philosophy happen because of some big poetic event. Somebody dies and the hero realizes how short life is; a random stranger spouts wisdom that speaks directly to the lost soul; the dude steps on a bug and realizes that the guts stuck in his shoe are representative of the life he cannot leave behind... Nothing really happened to me to force the sudden change. It was merely a random e-mailed thought from Laura in mid-July. In fact, it wasn’t even related to this particular situation – something about why we live where we do if we hate it. But it took me less than ten seconds to make a major life-changing decision. I was moving out of L.A. by the end of the year.

This decision had impact on my life in ways beyond simple geography. I was cutting my tethers to friends and my anchor to a sense of home. I had no idea where I was going, yet I saw no other alternative. With no comfort zone and no safety net, I would be forced to find myself. With this one decision, all that I had been trying to accomplish for the last year-and-a-half fell into place. I put Diane out of my head. I stopped worrying about finding somebody. For the first time ever, I truly and sublimely began to enjoy being single.

One week later, I met Lauren.

PART IV - "THE NEW RULES"