Cold-Weather Arithmetic

Being single is a reasonable way to live for most of the year. You kiss whoever you feel like, come home at whatever hour in whatever condition, and you’re never stuck with that low-level suspicion that someone better probably exists and you settled too soon. Solid arrangement. The problem is specifically January, when the cold stops being weather and starts being an argument. A warm body for the couch, for the film you haven’t gotten around to, for cooking that’s actually more enjoyable with two people—you don’t need any of it, until the temperature drops and suddenly it sounds less pathetic than it did in August.

The Le Love blog is not helping. Just page after page of beautiful, sincere photographs of people in love—the kind you scroll through with a mild sourness that softens somewhere around the third page, then tips back into sour again, and then you close the tab and go outside and consider pushing a happy couple off a park bench. In the most loving way.