Did I Invent My Girlfriend?

Amy Shearn sees eerie connections between her current partner and the fictional one she created for her novel, long before they met.

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Things were pretty normal with Sarah until I realized I had created her.

Well, allegedly she existed and lived a whole backstory before we got together, but who can say for sure? We met on Hinge. Yes I know that’s the most boring sentence in contemporary romance. I had previously enjoyed some more rom-com-ready meet-cutes, so I was preemptively unimpressed by this beginning. But, whatever! There was no reason to think this was going to be any great love story, so it didn’t matter whether or not there was a charming anecdote of the unexpected way in which we met, since it wasn’t like we would seven months later be going to friends’ art openings arm-in-arm and getting asked about our origins while Sarah nuzzled my neck or anything like that, who would even ever expect that?

In my four years of dating since my divorce at age 40, I’d developed a theory that a friend pointed out was a kind of chaotic bisexual version of the Dating Voltron: The way to win casual dating (for the record, the prize you win is “not getting depressed”) was to in effect construct one great partner out of the best bits of multiple partners. Nothing good could come from expecting one person to be everything. Hadn’t this been the takeaway of marriage?

The Unified Partner—one person in possession of all the things—was kind of a silly childish expectation of romantic relationships that, hello, I had outgrown. Since my committed years, I had read the books and the thinkpieces and put in my 10,000 hours of studying pseudo-therapeutic Instagram stories about dating and polyamory and relationship anarchy (sounds so much cooler than it probably is), and now I knew better. And looking for love? Love? Couldn’t be me. I was too busy, too old, too smart.

In my four years of dating since my divorce at age 40, I’d developed a theory that a friend pointed out was a kind of chaotic bisexual version of the Dating Voltron: The way to win casual dating (for the record, the prize you win is “not getting depressed”) was to in effect construct one great partner out of the best bits of multiple partners. Nothing good could come from expecting one person to be everything. Hadn’t this been the takeaway of marriage?

Therefore—and I was always upfront about this, though it does seem to be the default in the world I live in—I tended to date a few people at once, who all together would suit my various needs. Someone was great in bed; someone was funny; someone had unique ideas for dates (Bowling instead of beers? Who are these people?). Let me tell you, if you ever find yourself dispirited by the offerings of Online Dating, try expecting each person you meet to have one (1) outstanding quality. Everyone has at least one great thing about them! And anyway, it’s easier than feeling disappointed in people.

And thus one October I found myself pursuing a Hinge queue stacked with half-hearted opening gambits. A friend of mine, flipping through the wares as partnered people love to do, tourists in the country of Dating, tapped on Sarah’s picture. “Her. I like her. Something about her smile.” I looked at her profile again and agreed. Sarah had been fun to chat with, giving good banter in a way that seemed promising. We arranged to meet on a Wednesday night, since it turned out the evening class I taught was in her neighborhood, so I would be there anyway.

To be honest, I’d started to tire a bit of my relentless dating cadence. Spending weekends going out with someone new every day and every night had at first been thrilling, and was certainly interesting for data-collection, but look, 40-somethings need to sleep now and then.

Plus, I’d spent the summer pining after unavailable people, which frankly I do not recommend. I was all for being unpartnered. It felt free and radical after being a wife for so long. But it was only going to work if other people did it too!

Then again, it’s not like the situation was desperate. I liked having my alone time, my parenting time, my time with my friends. I liked not having to check in to see if someone was okay (which for some reason in my mind was a lot of what a serious relationship would entail). I liked that, on a night when my kids were at their dad’s, I could opt to either sleep with a situationship, or stay home watching X-Files while feeding cheese to my cat. These were my God-given rights as an unmarried bisexual! Was I ready to surrender them to a… relaysh?

So while I didn’t need a new life partner, I did feel ready to connect with someone who seemed like, I don’t know… a serious person. Maybe that’s why we met when we did. Or maybe it’s because a few weeks before I matched with Sarah, my teenage daughter had gotten me for my birthday a cute, woo-woo The Lovers-tarot-card-themed candle I’d been admiring at our local cute, woo-woo things store, which promised to summon a love match.

Sarah and I arranged to meet at what we’d soon realize was in fact the worst bar in Brooklyn. It was dark, or anyway it was that orangey tint that New York gets when it’s meant to be dark. She was standing outside the bar when I arrived, and she stepped out of the shadows, and woosh, there was that thing, that thing in the solar plexus. There in the streetlamp’s hazy gold, she undid me—both androgynous and beautiful. Dressed like (in her own description) a teenaged boy, with choppy short hair, perfect bone structure, lush eyelashes, a mischievous dimple, a smile that can knock you over. She opened the door for me and something about the way she moved her arm made me think, oh I bet this person is good in bed. I was gathering data, okay?

She was standing outside the bar when I arrived, and she stepped out of the shadows, and woosh, there was that thing, that thing in the solar plexus. There in the streetlamp’s hazy gold, she undid me—both androgynous and beautiful. Dressed like (in her own description) a teenaged boy, with choppy short hair, perfect bone structure, lush eyelashes, a mischievous dimple, a smile that can knock you over.

We talked for hours, made out on the sidewalk after, and have been essentially talking and making out ever since. I said to a friend early on, “Like, I think she’s hot and I want to jump her bones, but I also want to talk to her all the time? And she’s really fun and funny? But also really smart and like, I could imagine her meeting my friends and I don’t know, even my kids someday? And all of these things are in the same person, it’s so weird!”

“Yes, that’s generally the point of dating,” said my friend dryly. “Everyone wants to find that person.”

A few weeks or maybe months later, I was rereading my forthcoming novel, which had just gone through copyedits that I had to check over. I kept calling this book “the horny divorcee novel.” I’d finished writing it in a kind of a fever about a year-and-a-half before I would meet Sarah, and in the time since had to revisit it occasionally, as happens throughout the publishing process. But recently, I’d been preoccupied with other work (not to mention my new girlfriend) and I hadn’t been thinking that much about the horny divorcee novel.

When I reread it after meeting Sarah, first I laughed out loud, then I felt the creepy shiver of the—what? Supernatural?

There it was, in the book: The moment of first seeing Sarah.

Order the book…

In the book, the main character (who happened to be, like me, a recent divorcee dating for the first time) decides to create her own “perfect person” from bits and pieces of who she meets on the apps. She is building her own chatbot (unlike me, she has tech skills) that she is shaping into her ideal partner. And she has just thought of this idea for the first time when she sees, in the light of a streetlamp, the physical manifestation of her perfect person. The person is androgynous, gorgeous, with a choppy short haircut, high cheekbones, lush eyelashes, a kind of rangy physical swagger—it’s not spoiling the book too much to add that eventually they meet and she is also funny and clever and kind.

In many, some-nearly-eerie ways, the person answers to the description of, that’s right, Sarah.

Sarah has suggested, so gently, that maybe I just have a type, and so in inventing an alluring mate for my main character, of course I summoned a snarky soft butch. Maybe this is true, but I had not thought I’d had any particular type, nor had the collected data suggested as much. I’d been married to a man who was far on the “tall and broad-shouldered with constant 5-o-clock shadow” end of androgynous which is to say not at all, and since then I’d dated men and woman and nonbinary people of all matters of physical descriptions, and saw the beauty in all of them.

A few weeks or maybe months later, I was rereading my forthcoming novel, which had just gone through copyedits that I had to check over. I’d finished writing it in a kind of a fever about a year-and-a-half before I would meet Sarah. When I reread it after meeting Sarah, first I laughed out loud, then I felt the creepy shiver of the—what? Supernatural? There it was, in the book: The moment of first seeing Sarah.

I had also not really articulated to myself that at this moment in my life, for me, like for my character, an ideal partner would be a woman.

I thank Sarah for her theory, and continue to joke (?) that I invented her.

Adding another layer to this is Sarah’s own story, which isn’t mine to tell, but of which I only will say that she was worked to reinvent herself, has taken herself apart and put herself back together in a way that seems at times to me like a physical manifestation of what I did to my life when I left my marriage.

And thus we met in a similar place in our lives, each freshly…something—and ready to really go deep in a relationship.

Maybe this was the biggest fantasy in what I wrote. Maybe what’s more significant is not just that I subconsciously thought it would be fun to hook up with hot girls who have short hair. The gift I wanted to give my heroine—who was trying to be fearless in the face of utter upheaval, who could barely admit to herself that she could really use some love to go along with everything else—was an actually wonderful person stepping out of the shadows right when she needed it. Right when she was starting to wonder if she would ever again feel she had a partner alongside her.

After all, this is the joy of writing novels, this getting to make things turn out on the page how you wish they would in real life. It’s always a bit strange to see what your mind manifests when you let it loose. What you let yourself dream for, when you don’t know you’re dreaming it for yourself.

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Previously Amy Shearn wrote “Writing is About Making Choices” and “Seeing Someone” for Memoir Land.