Not Scorned, Just Fun

ADVICE: How to Navigate an Awkward Situation

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Designs for Living is an advice column "dispensing sound advice in a noisy world.” Need advice? Write to me here. The previous home of this column was The Baffler. Paid subscribers get access to this column and the entire archive of advice.

Merle Oberon telling it like it is

Dear Marlowe,

It feels like as a single woman I’m forever having to navigate Situations!

I’m going to a wedding this summer which a boy I had a very intense short encounter with is also going (avec his girlfriend - who he got back together with the week after our encounter, which he did not tell me, and which I had to find out months later at a party). To me our experience together was a fun little summer moment - something I explicitly told him - but the way he handled things makes me feel like I’m painted as a Scorned Woman in the friendship group attending this wedding.

How do I act in a way that preserves my dignity but more importantly that I still have fun at the wedding? Bisou, thank you!

Signed,

Not A Scorned Woman xx

Dear NASW,

I hope I’m writing this in time to help you! When I say I’ve been here before… I’ve BEEN here before. I think I’m in a constant state of this social situation in some form or another simply because previous suitors of mine… pop up EVERYWHERE. They seem to always be partnered and their partners always attached to their hip (not that there is anything wrong with that, it’s just that then I am outnumbered… It’s simply math).

Being a single woman is always more threatening than when people know you are safely attached. A single woman is unpredictable! She has sting! No one can predict her next move! This comes as someone who has lived much of my adult life single or publicly single and privately under contract (If ever you see me write the words “my boyfriend” in the present tense, know that I’ve been kidnapped and someone is trying to badly impersonate me). Simply put, it’s much easier to paint a single woman as scorned, than to accept she might be having the time of her life.