Dear Reader,

I am writing for advice about my love life. After a long year, I’ve decided to jump back into the dating scene, but it’s been hard to open myself up again after some of my past love experiences. I have more baggage than most, so I think it would just be easier to explain myself. 

It all started with my first love, Derek. We met as lovers do, in our first week at college in the cafeteria. I got the roast beef sandwich, and he, a plate full of easily digestible carbohydrates – you know how boys are. On our first date, he took me to the beach. It was a cool September day, the air was crisp and the water was freezing. Derek didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he never noticed those sorts of things, and being with him, I didn’t mind so much either; our love would warm those waters. Looking back, that should have been my first clue. At the time, I was swept up in the currents of young love, but in retrospect, he had a fundamental coldness both emotional and physical. 

One thing led to another, and we ended up moving in together my junior year. That was when I really started to notice some weird signs. We kept running out of table salt even though I felt like I was buying it every grocery trip. On top of that, our water bill was 3 times as high as it should have been even though I tried to take short showers. My credit card bill showed I was buying pound upon pound of ice every month, but when I called the bank, they said it was the only purchase I’d made that was out of the ordinary. Derek always seemed to be busy, and so was I, so I didn’t want to bother him about it. Although, now that I think about it, I don’t remember what his major was.

A few months in, I woke up in the middle of the night to hear the bathtub running. I looked to my side to wake up Derek, thinking there was an intruder, but to my surprise he wasn’t there. I crept down the hall and opened the bathroom door to find Derek in the tub immersed in ice water and an unfathomable amount of salt, Kirkland Pink Himmalayan containers strewn across the floor. That was when I realized Derek was not a real man at all, but the cold-loving, halophilic archaea, Halorubrum lacusprofundi. 

After Derek and I broke up, I felt so lost. I rebounded pretty quickly when I found Henry. Henry was sweet, stoic, and resilient. I had never dated someone so strong or so popular. He was built like a tank. I mean, he had bilateral symmetry–what more could you need in a man? He thrived under pressure on the water polo team. All his teammates seemed to love him and his unbelievable endurance– they even nicknamed him “water bear.” He was such a hard worker, sometimes he would go days with food or water, or withstand high amounts of radiation, and be totally fine. He made me feel things I didn’t even know were possible.

But, as in all relationships, our honeymoon period ended. I began to take a harder look at Henry to see if this was really the man I wanted to spend my life with. When he would go into his work mode, he became totally unresponsive to my needs. It was like he went into a hibernation state, only to come back to life when it was convenient for him. Other things, physical things, started to irk me too. I noticed that his nails would get too long, he had one too many pairs of legs, and he only ever wanted to reproduce asexually. 

 “Oh god,” I thought “Janet, you’ve done it again.” There was only one answer: Henry  was a tardigrade: a microscopic eukaryote known to survive extreme conditions. How could I? How could I have once again fallen for someone devoid of human characteristics and unobservable by the naked human eye?

One nematode, one spirogyra algae, and two coccolithophores later, and here I am. A husk of a former woman. Dear reader, I implore you, for the love of God, how do I break this pattern? Please write in with any advice on how to find and date new types of men–preferably those that exist on a macroscopic scale. 

Thank you,

Mad about Microbes