“Are you dating?” They ask me, my nice well-meaning friends.

It’s a thing that you ask single folk. It counts for polite if somewhat personal conversation. I ask my single friends about their dating exertions all the time. And it is always an exertion—a social exercise undertaken with all the enthusiasm of an after-work trip to the gym on a Friday. Any fun or joy that happens is a pleasant surprise, but never expected. But that’s not even the reason my answer to the question is unequivocally, “No, I’m not dating.”

The seismology of my personal 2016 tore my reality down, dismantled the structure of my adult life as I’d built it and left a smoldering wreck. Now that we’re on the greased Slip-n-Slide that is the back half of this surreal year, once again I trust the ground as a mostly reliable mass that stays put and lets me move my world under my feet, without sudden lurches into strange and awful new territories. (At least until we elect a President Trump, in which case we’ll all be dumped into the crevasse.)

New York agrees with me. The sticky hot summer makes me feel like I’m adventuring in some exotic land. For the first time in my life I live in a one-bedroom apartment all by myself. I have a job that I like well enough not to hate getting up in the morning. I have friends here who keep me busy when I want to be busy. I own a couch. But of all the things I have here, the most valuable thing I have is solitude.

When I commenced my last relationship, I did so with a twinge of mourning for my alone-ness. I didn’t just trade it in for a boyfriend—I traded it in for a boyfriend who moved into my studio apartment with me, a boyfriend who lavished attention on me, a boyfriend who returned all of my texts with impeccable promptness, who asked me what I was thinking. A boyfriend who wanted to sleep all night cuddled in close. I sacrificed my solitude in exchange for a man who checked all the right boxes. A lifetime of romantic longings made real, accessible.

I understand now that’s how he operates. He taps into that wistful need we females learn as girls, to be seen and wanted, to be affirmed by someone other than ourselves. I thought I outgrew that, but I didn’t really, it turns out. It was a flame that guttered, but persisted. And like any good sociopath, he perceived this old desire flickering in me, then manifested it and made it his own, so I was doubly bound—to reject it would betray us both.

The end was happening even before the end came. Before I discovered he was lying to me about his identity, his past, his everything. The promptness of his texts became oppressive. His arms around me at night like twin pythons. His attention was cloying, manipulative.

All the boxes had been checked, but this was not love. Still I played the part of loving him, waiting for my misgivings to quell. I kept telling myself it would get better, it was just a rough time, he would change. The usual mantras of denial.

The end came swiftly and with a dramatic fury that amounted to the worst days of my life. With necessary heartlessness, I sheared him from my life. I scooped him out of my reality and splattered him on the curb. I moved to New York. I have not looked back. And I won’t.

My solitude is precious to me. It is my peace and quiet in the teeming city. It is my serene apartment on a tree-lined street. It is my weekends of only the barest of conversations—ordering coffee, saying hello to a neighbor passing on the stairs. I speak so little these days; I’m left to my own thoughts and whims, to drift among the streets, finding the cool relief of the air-conditioned subway trains bearing me to places I haven’t yet been, where I wander in observant silence.

My solitude is also a shield. It ensures that I am not in danger of making any poor decisions for myself where charming men with falsified charisma and fake names are concerned. Or any men for that matter. I have tucked my desires—for romance, for love, for sex, for intimacy—all away into a hidden pocket, and I’ve stitched it closed.

So, no, I am not dating. I have no intention of dating anytime soon. Maybe one day when the thought of awkward conversations over drinks sounds fun. One day when kissing stops sounding so gross and sex doesn’t seem like an invasive medical procedure. One day when I stop having dreams where he is lying behind me, squeezing me so hard I can’t breathe; or those other dreams where I’m peacefully futzing in my apartment and he comes barreling in like he’d been there all along, and I stand there, aghast that I must do it again—amputate him from me, lance him from my life with all the pain and rage and blood. One day when I don’t wake from those dreams with my heart going at a panicked clip, terrified my actual life is the dream, and I’m still stuck in the suck of his need and his grift.

That, and I hear dating in New York is a nightmare.

So It’s going to be a minute. But thanks for asking.