I forever feel like everyone else gets more messages, more calls, more notifications than me. Everyone around me is forever looking down at their screen, laughing at something funny in their family group chat, swooning over a selfie from their crush, sighing as they faux-complain about how many notifications they have to read. And I just sit there, pretending to be doing the same, when really the only people who would ever message me are in the very same room.
It’s pathetic, and I hate myself for caring. But I do. I just want a guy to text me and let me know he’s thinking about me, to ask me how my day was, to send funny pictures to cheer me up when I’m down. It seems like everyone has that but me.
So, I do what I do almost every night when I’m down about my love life, or lack thereof. I whizz through my homework, take a long, hot shower, wait ’til my dads are both asleep – they usually hit the hay early – then sneak down to the refrigerator to retrieve half a glass of red wine. A full glass and they’d notice, but half usually slips under the radar, providing I remember to wash the glass and put it away again after I’ve finished.
Then I tiptoe back upstairs, lock my bedroom door, and engage in my dirty little secret: trashy rom-coms from the early noughties. Movies from before social media, before selfies, before the constant need for validation, before memes and Facebook politics. Just shamelessly cheesy romance and all the happy endings a girl could want.
My dads would murder me if they found me watching this crap. It’ll rot your brain cells, they’d say. Try this NASA documentary instead. Or if you have to watch a movie, at least start with Guillermo del Toro.
But hey. You can’t help what you love. And what I love is curling up in my empty bed with half a glass of red wine and watching cheesy rom-coms with the volume turned down low.
Ugly nerd on the outside, lonely middle-aged spinster on the inside. Form an orderly queue, fellas.
Tonight’s pick is Just Friends, because I have a massive soft spot for Ryan Reynolds, like almost everyone with retinas. It’s basically an in-depth study of the Matching Hypothesis. Ryan Reynolds’ character doesn’t get the classically hot girl until he changes everything about his physical appearance to match her level of attractiveness. Standard.
I’ve seen the film a couple times before, so I scroll aimlessly through my phone as I watch. Because I’m clearly a fan of torturing myself, I open up the conversation with Kevin – if you can even call a one-sided deluge of messages a conversation – and stare at my unanswered text.
Hey! You settling in okay? Hope you’ve managed to find a gaming buddy to replace Bryan.
And so begins the cringing.
Why did I have to go and make it so personal? I mean, he only told me about how much he was going to miss his gaming buddy because he was drunk. I’m pretty sure he did not want to be reminded of that. And here I go, dropping it into conversation like some kind of needy stalker. Does he think I’m a psycho for even remembering that? I bet he barely remembers what colour my eyes are, let alone the names of my best friends.
Hastily, just so I don’t have to look at it any more, I delete the message, wishing this very act would remove it from his phone too.
I sigh, shove my phone under my duvet and lean back against the stack of pillows I’ve propped against my headboard. The TV and my fairy lights flicker in the darkness. The window is cranked all the way open, and the street outside is moonlit and peaceful, save for a few crickets chirping in the trees. The smell of warm sidewalks and cut grass drifts into my bedroom on the breeze. I take a sip of heady red wine, enjoying the rich, fruity flavour and faint buzz of alcohol. I feel young and old all at once.
Speaking of old, this time next year I’ll be at college, if all goes according to plan. My first choice is MIT. Both my dads are alumni – that’s where they first met – and Leo is there now, studying Chemical Engineering. It’s a Kerber-Murphy family thing. And in twelve short months, I could be there too, studying Astrophysics at one of the best institutes in the world. I spent the whole of the tour visit I took this summer with goosebumps running up and down my arms.
That reminds me. Mrs Torres told me earlier in the week that she’d read over my personal essay and provide notes. I honestly don’t know what I’d do without that woman. She’s writing my letter of recommendation, too, and I have every faith she’s going to knock it out the park.
I pull my phone out from its nook in the bedsheets and refresh my email to see if she’s gotten back to me yet. Nope, nothing. Not even a single email. Seriously, am I some kind of leper? I text my group chat with Keiko and Gabriela just to make sure. It doesn’t even deliver to Keiko, and even though Gabriela reads, she doesn’t reply. She always does this – she’s usually too busy hanging out with Ryan to answer.
Muscle memory leads me to perform my cursory evening perusal of Haruki’s social-media accounts. He’s the kind of guy who’s way too cool for Instagram. He’s popular without even trying. So as usual, he’s uploaded precisely nothing today. His last post was a shot of Lake Michigan from the penthouse of his family’s flagship hotel, where he spent most of his summer working as a kayak instructor. A few posts earlier is a picture of him helping a tiny kindergartner to buckle his life jacket.
Something twinges in my chest. I wish I was the kind of person Haruki Ito could fall for. I wish he would look at me the same way I look at him.
I shift in my duvet burrito, suddenly restless and antsy. I want to do something about this. About this perennial feeling of being unwanted. Undesirable.
Maybe science has the answer. Science can answer almost all of the important questions in the universe. So why not this? We’ve been studying love and attraction for centuries. We know that lust is governed by both estrogen and testosterone, and that attraction is driven by adrenaline, dopamine, and serotonin. Long-term attachment is governed by a different set of hormones and brain chemicals: oxytocin and vasopressin, which encourage bonding. Each of these chemicals works in a specific part of the brain to influence lust, attraction and attachment.
Surely, throughout hundreds of years of studying these things, someone has found a way to manipulate them? I mean, come on. Imagine possessing a wealth of knowledge in this field. That dark part of your mind would totally be tempted to manipulate that information to your advantage, no? To find a drug or hack to get other people to fall in love with you. Hedonistic renaissance dudes weren’t exactly known for their moral compasses.
I pull up a new browser window on my phone and start researching whether anyone has ever attempted to manufacture these hormones and brain chemicals. However, all I find on Google are dating sites filled with hokey pseudo-science, and so-called ‘love doctors’ promising to transform the lives of even the most hideous homo sapiens. A cursory glance at some more academic sources pulls up social anthropology journals and neuropsychology papers which explore the theories behind love and attraction, but there’s nothing to suggest they’ve attempted to put these findings into practice.
I’m about to give up and focus on Anna Faris singing ‘Forgivenesssss’ on my TV screen when an abstract catches my eye.
Scientists have discovered the key to attraction lies in a new type of pheromone which has recently been identified in the Brazilian Honey Beetle. The researchers behind the study, all three of whom are doctoral candidates at the University of São Paulo, believe that extracting this chemical and distilling it into pill form . . .