I believe in life after love.

The last six months I lived in Tokyo were some of the most lonely months of my life. And then there was Mr. Pretentious. He was in Japanese language school, and he’d just graduated from college, where he’d learned to smoke a pipe. We were both bitter about love and spent our evenings drinking, reminiscing about the past, and checking out the exciting Tokyo nightlife, which meant clubbing in Roppongi and checking out bars. At least we could be lonely together.

Mr. Pretentious was a writer, or a blogger, to be more exact. He kept a blog about his misadventures as a foreigner in Japan, and his family and friends would make comments. I read his blog often, too, and not just because I was in the pictures he posted and a partner in crime for some of the stories. He was witty and sarcastic, which was thoroughly entertaining.

When I left Japan, I was sad to leave my friend, Mr. Pretentious, since I thought he would probably get so depressed without me that he’d give in to his melancholy and become an alcoholic or stop functioning. I tried to keep in touch with him, and I kept reading his blog. Then a few months after I left, he met a girl, and suddenly things were great for him. So great, apparently, that he stopped writing on his blog. He even memorialized the moment by writing a post about finding a girlfriend.

To this day, there hasn’t been an update, even though three years have passed, he left Japan, and he married that girl. Did a relationship kill his creativity? Or was he posing from the very beginning?

I’ve noticed that some of the people who claim to be most bitter and jaded, who claim to “not believe in love,” are the same people who will dive into love fastest when given the chance. Mr. Pretentious clearly belonged to that group, and I am no exception, either. I went eleven months without a first date, which is the longest first-date hiatus I’ve had since 2005. I would be proud of that, except that somehow my creativity dried up. I suspected my life was less interesting inside of a relationship. Or I just wasn’t ready to blog about it. Or I got lazy. Or maybe it’s true that dating the same person makes one boring. Or all of the above. I’ve never asked Mr. Pretentious-Now-Happily-Married what happened to him, but it seems happiness covers over sarcasm and creativity. Yawn.

For a while, I’ve been thinking I should write a book about my experiences as a single woman and how I’ve grown into myself. Being in a relationship was making me feel boxed in, like I couldn’t write with integrity about single-ness when I was seriously dating someone. I thought perhaps the story of my single life was ending, and it made me kind of sad. But now I see the real story might be just beginning.

I no longer have such a good excuse for writer’s block. Here’s to a fruitful time of creativity, and more first dates to look forward to. And here’s hoping for strength for such a journey.