the eternal bachelorette
On Materialists, soft-apocalyptic LA, dating in DC, and why for a woman who doesn't need saving, choosing love isn’t a grift—it’s kind of radical.
As I touched down in LA over a week ago for the premiere of my film, I was met with a slight dread. I'd expected an orange-y sun to light up the backseat of the ride to my Airbnb in West Hollywood, but found clouds and a heavy haze instead. In traffic, I spent a few moments blankly staring at a text from a guy I'd recently gone out with on a date, asking when I'd be back in town. After a few more hours, I figured he'd finally left his office, so I sent the text, saying that I thought he was great, just not a match.
At this big age, you know instantly what something is and isn't. Once in a while, you're surprised. But mostly, dating lately has felt like a string of gracious declines to lovely people.
I tend not to make plans on my first day or two in town, partly because my lax West Coast friends need some time to warm up to being summoned, but mostly because I like how being alone feels in LA.
The city was briefly home to me many many summers ago when I was a struggling actor trying to take the #4 bus across from the CVS on Santa Monica Boulevard after my restaurant shift ended. Now I was back having a full-circle moment, finally getting to see myself on the big screen in a feature film and in the same CVS, watching tired bodies filter onto the #4.
Hollywood now feels like it's entered a soft-apocalyptic state. Self-driving cars line up at red lights; inside, their backseats are filled with friends on a night out, leaning forward to grab the aux cord — no driver to annoy. (Wouldn't you want to sit up front… just in case?) Meanwhile, autonomous delivery carts buzz by on sidewalks, carefully making space for me like any sensible robo-gentleman.
Though I'd returned for work, love and dating were on my mind.
Perhaps it was watching Erin Brockovich on the flight over, a film I hadn't revisited since I was a child.
"Are you going to be something else I have to survive?" Julia Roberts wistfully asks a bearded, motorbiking Aaron Eckhart.
I rewound that line twice. All risk, no certainty. That's what dating is. I'm not a single mother with two kids, two ex-husbands, cockroaches in my house, and an obsession with a groundwater contamination legal case, but I'm a woman who has learned to be wary of promises. Talks of a future. Eventual emotional attachment and what comes thereafter.
I took myself to see Materialists at the Landmark on Sunset. I had already read every review of Celine Song's new romance film about Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a kind of eternal bachelorette (and failed actor) who is a matchmaker for a living. Lucy is then forced to reckon with her ideas about love and dating, mainly through her relationships with two men who couldn't be more different: John (Chris Evans), a poor actor from Lucy's past, and Harry (Pedro Pascal), an ultra-high-net-worth unicorn (he checks all the boxes).
Some critics have claimed that the film "trips up on its own high-mindedness," failing to close the gap on the age-old dilemma of marrying for love or money. Others felt some of the narrative themes too grim to work with the film's lighter moments. But it was Angelica Jade Bastién's take in Vulture that struck me the most—arguing the film misreads modern love entirely, with leads who lack chemistry and characters dismissed as "threadbare ideas improperly stitched together."
I see this film as good because it presents itself so much like a play (the director is a playwright), and as something that doesn't need to be dissected from every angle. As creative writers, at least in the workshopping process, our job is to engage with the story the writer is choosing to tell and how to improve it, not to reimagine it into the version we might have written ourselves.
Critiques are necessary. However, as I grappled with what I'd seen versus what I'd read, and as a person who creates art and doesn't just critique it, I disagreed with their reviews. But mostly, I felt this way because I'm a woman who has lived—and is still living — the messiness of modern romance. Materialists moved me.
It doesn't matter that Dakota Johnson and I are the same age and born 16 days apart in October (I had a hunch she was one of us) or that I speak at the pace of a bullet train, and am rarely able to match her sleepy, unhurried speech. I saw a lot of myself in Lucy.
Sure, she's meant to be universally relatable. But there's something radical about seeing a woman on screen who isn't 25 and effortlessly fielding offers from every eager suitor. Lucy is seasoned. She's a woman who’s wise to the game (and, finally, not in a Carrie Bradshaw way, I'm sorry), and, we find in the film, along with her, how much our views of the game can change.
I, too, am a kind of eternal bachelorette. I've had plenty of boyfriends, but I'm seldom attached to anyone. Sometimes by choice. Sometimes not. I spent the first half of my twenties in search of a serious boyfriend (and had a few), probably still caught up in my Catholic guilt of not marrying the first guy I was with. The second half of my twenties was spent exploring. Maybe this is a big city thing, but we all got the bug—the one you get when you feel your youth slipping, so you regress a little. Pushing the boundaries of how late you can stay up on a Tuesday, meeting a guy at Bathtub Gin, followed by a slice, a make-out, and an early morning of long meetings, and doing it all over again. You're still convinced you're invincible. We do this right before we start taking our jobs and pay seriously, and the pressure to, you know, cave.
"I just don't want to settle," I'd tell my therapist.
She'd tilt her head quizzically and say, "Marriage is settling."
She wasn't wrong, but it didn't have to be with the wrong person. We'd go back and forth about different types of relationships and different kinds of partners. Some relationships might accelerate my ability to have a family earlier, while others may take me in the opposite direction. Going back to school would likely blow everything up (and it did).
In Materialists, Lucy talks about dating as a marketplace. Part of her job is doing the math in matching people: "Marriage is a business deal, and it always has been," she says. Lucy meets unicorn Harry at a wedding of one of her clients. Throughout the film, we see them engage in manicured, measured conversations in public at swanky dinners and in private at his $ 12 million penthouse—a kind of emotional tidiness meant to convey a lack of intensity. Their decision to date over drinks feels like the framing of a business deal. He gives her a solid yet sterile business pitch to date more seriously, in which she obliges, and somehow, this leads to sex?
But Lucy values money above almost everything else. That's part of what draws her to Harry. He even has to clarify why he's choosing her over someone ten years younger and not yet in a hurry to start a family.
Bastién argues that there are apparent gaps in Song's storytelling that don't wholly justify the “why” of the characters, describing the relationship between Lucy and Harry as merely a love montage. Isn't that the point? Harry barely occupies much of her thoughts in the rest of the film because he doesn't enliven her. Their being together is so rational that it becomes an afterthought. This happens in real life. When a person is with someone who doesn't excite them, the other person becomes invisible.
The last time I spent a significant amount of time in Los Angeles, I'd left it playing house with a man I'd just met only weeks earlier through a mutual friend at a Dodgers game.
"PS, there is a single man who is coming," her text had read, "He's like the goodest good vibes, but like not really your type?"
He was a surfer. Not by trade, but he was bred in the Palisades. The kind of guy who woke up each morning drinking his black coffee with a fixed gaze through his living room window, a mere block from the ocean, measuring the morning surf, and debating whether to pull on his wetsuit or his dress shirt and slacks.
Initially, I wasn't sure if there was a spark because we were separated by five bodies at the game. But after drinks and karaoke at our friend's house, it was clear we had chemistry and a love for the ridiculous. We exchanged numbers. He asked me out the following day, and I told him we could meet when I met my deadline.
As our date approached, I'd mentioned that for the past few weeks I'd been sleeping on a friend's air mattress in her apartment in Eagle Rock. He suggested I finish out my trip with him. I could be the first to stay in the guest room of his new place.
I texted my friend:
"Murderer?"
"No. Can confirm."
When I arrived at his house at the beach before our dinner reservation, he was on a call, graciously signaling if I needed anything while effortlessly flexing authority to whoever was on the other end. Meanwhile, I was pacing his hallway in a kind of Larry David tizzy, completely unable to distinguish which identical bedroom was meant for me. I mistakenly chose the wrong one—his, of course. Neither of us corrected the mistake.
An intense New York writer—but more free-spirited than she lets on—temporarily crashing in the home of a former military California guy comically obsessed with efficiency, a spot on Tom DeLonge of Blink-182 impression, and charmed by specific details in her newspaper article most people would miss.
It felt like some offbeat Nancy Meyers rom-com, except instead of reflecting on how we were rebuilding our lives at sixty after a divorce over crisp sauv blanc in Calacatta marble dream kitchens, we were in our mid-thirties assembling his new dining chairs from Wayfair, sharing how we'd avoided our first divorces by never getting married in the first place.
However, when you have enough physical attraction and superficial common interests in these instances, it makes pretending to be really compatible for four nights seem easy. It makes somewhat different political viewpoints and fundamental worldviews briefly irrelevant.
It wasn't just that he lived to make money; it was that, somewhere in the middle of a conversation about finances, he revealed he wanted to wait to have children until he made enough to afford multiple nannies. To some women, that might sound practical, compelling, and even appealing, especially to an ambitious woman who doesn't want kids to slow her career. But to a woman who wants to see a father parent, it's hard not to hear that and think: Oh, he's already planning to outsource fatherhood.
You try to shrug these things off. But deep down, you know—you're fundamentally different. Not because he wants to make money (always a good thing) or that he allegedly wants to maintain the same freedoms at the same time as he wants his hypothetical kids (and, sure, that could change), but because, for him, making the most money is most important to him. And that feels less likely to change.
I might be calmer, less frantic if I were with someone who made a ton of money, or if I made more. I may even seem more desirable. But that cannot be the only well from which I siphon my interests or desires. It can't be his, either.
There's nothing inherently wrong with how a guy like that sees the world. Honestly, most men do. And for many of them, it's not their fault—they've been conditioned to be providers, to believe their value is tied to how much they earn.
But that also means we're just not a match. And if we're not in love? Then that kind of fundamental conflict—two people with opposing reasons for why they wake up every morning—isn't just incompatibility. It's a business deal destined to fail.
In Materialists, we learn that Lucy has a past with John, an actor/cater-waiter, when sitting at the singles table with unicorn Harry, who is impressed with her talent and eager for her number. Upon hearing Lucy's preferred drink order (a coke and beer) John, played so impossibly beautifully by Chris Evans, places both next to her on the table. They embrace each other warmly and speak with each other later as he packs up the truck to leave the event space.
It is clear they have a past, yes, but also that there is still something present—something intangible. The need to stand so close to each other means that a body part is bound to press against another. The cautious curiosity when asking if the other is dating. The not wanting the conversation to end, even when there's nothing left to say.
Scenes with Lucy and Harry are sharply contrasted by the moments she shares with John. After John performs in a small play, he invites Lucy and Harry to join him and the cast for drinks. Harry mingles with the other actors (shoutout to a scene-stealing Madeline Wise, whom I trained with back in our teen years at Lee Strasberg), leaving Lucy and John alone at the bar.
Off a look, John senses something is bothering her. He doesn't probe too much, but she takes in his acknowledgement. Harry doesn't seem capable of picking up on this subtlety. If we're lucky, we'll have a few men in our lives—friends, lovers, exes—who've known us. Those we've mutually absorbed, who can sense tension in us before it even forms. Though this moment quickly dissolves as he says something careless. Insulted, she runs off.
Bastién criticizes Song's choice to provide context for Lucy and John’s relationship through a clumsy flashback, where they both fight over their financial struggles. Mostly, Lucy is very mad at John for being broke. Lucy had spent her life watching finances impact her own parents' marriage. Bastién argues that their past is marked by resentment, but I don't see an ounce of that in their exchanges. Furthermore, she can't understand why ***SPOILER*** she considers getting back together with him when there's no plan of how they'll do things differently. "Evans's eyes go sherbert soft when he looks at her, and Johnson smiles coyly at him," she writes, "but that can't power a bond meant to withstand the pressures of capitalism on romance."
Why not? After seeing John again and coming to terms with her passionless relationship with Harry, she quickly refastens her emotions to him. Bad things happen, and John is the first one she calls. That bond is just as worthy of withstanding the pressures of capitalism on romance. Money comes and goes, but who do you want by your side when the asteroid is on its way?
After all, Lucy is the eternal bachelorette—not in the tragic, House of Mirth sense, but in the self-sufficient, fulfilled one. She has found purpose beyond acting and built success on her terms.
Song doesn't portray Lucy as a woman down on her luck, waiting for a hero. She's alone not because she lacks love, but because she doesn't require it to define her. She doesn't need a relationship—she wants one.
When Lucy and John finally realize they need to address what's unfolding between them again, she asks him to explain why he loves her. "I just do," he tells her. He makes it clear that he wants to be with her, stating that there are no negotiations because he has nothing to offer her beyond love. We watch Lucy struggle with the reality that if she accepts this proposal, she may face a tough life. He still has two roommates and lives paycheck to paycheck.
There's a kind of shame and vulnerability that Chris Evans plays that feels all too real. I see my ex in it—a British actor whom I fell in love with while he was in a Broadway play. In the stretch between that show and his next, opposite Jude Law, he told me a friend had given him a job making bags just to pay the bills.
We ended things the first time after a year when he'd moved back to London, and we learned that his next production wouldn't be transferring to New York. It was too hard. We were so young and so broke. There was no version of the future where we could afford to travel back and forth with any absolute consistency.
We tried, over the next several years, to find time for each other. But when love is made of fleeting moments, it's hard to keep it whole. You change in each other's absence. You meet different people. And the versions of yourselves that fell in love begin to drift.
Years later, we'd talk about how real it was and how impossible it was. Still oceans apart. And even if we were in the same city now, I know: if he said the same things to me that John said to Lucy, I'd have to confront what choosing him might mean for me. However, in this hypothetical scenario, and if we were in love, I'd consider it.
Bastién argues that Song's "textureless" film is a kind of grift—that choosing love in a modern world, especially after Lucy has framed dating as a "marketplace," is ultimately delusional. But I think she misses the point. You can choose the broke man, if you'd like. And sure, it's easier to do if you're not broke yourself. That's not delusional—it's realistic. To me, the film's message felt like the opposite of a fantasy. It suggests that as our circumstances change, so can our perspectives.
If Lucy were to return to a relationship where all the conditions that pushed her away the first time were still in place—no growth, no time passed (what, a month?)—then sure, I'd question what kind of different outcome she could expect. But that's not what's happening here.
People evolve. Their priorities shift. What once felt like a dealbreaker might not anymore. Can anyone rethink what matters most to them—love or money? Honestly, can't we have both?
I saw Materialists as a heroic woman's story. Lucy isn't seeking rescue; she's choosing from a place of genuine autonomy. She's already survived the version of herself that was broke and chasing a pipe dream. Now she knows how to stand on her own.
As I left the Landmark by myself and headed toward Hollywood Boulevard to peek at the theater where my film would play in the coming days, I thought about my own Materialists story.
I've come to learn that the income, the homes owned, the secondary and terminal degrees, the impressive job titles—those things are all fabulous. But they're no substitute for a genuine connection. That inexplicable pull you feel toward someone, when your list of reasons for liking them can't quite account for why you feel what you do.
I met someone I thought was wonderful in D.C. Two weeks after we first started talking—and just a day before our first date—he received devastating news: he was at risk of losing his job. He told me this openly, within the first hour. A government worker, suddenly staring down a future he hadn’t prepared for.
In the days, and weeks that followed, his outlook wavered—one day cautiously optimistic, the next quietly despairing. I offered to step back once or twice, to give him space, but he insisted he wanted to keep going. We checked in often, making sure we both still wanted the same thing: each other.
We tried to look past the reality of what he was facing—his dreams swiftly unraveling before his eyes—until we couldn’t. It was too much, too soon. And so, he called time.
I struggled with that. I still do.
Since then, I've been on dates with wildly intelligent, generous, and good men. This is dating. You move on. But it's also okay to recognize something special in someone. When nobody seems to replicate his gaze, the soulful way in which he talks about the things and people he loves, or the conversation that led to six and a half uninterrupted hours on our first date.
Like Lucy, I did the math. As we got to know each other, I considered what it would mean to be with someone who might become unemployed. Could I support someone during a low point in their life—this early? I added and subtracted all the possibilities, and I had to do it fast. But what made it less frightening was that, for the first time, I had full confidence in what I brought to the table. And I trusted what we felt between us. That made moving forward feel easy.
It would have been okay with me—even if it was too soon, even if the romance had to forgo the things that usually make it light and easy and fun. I could’ve done that.
But a few weeks after he ended things, he messaged me to say he was leaving town.
We can't always know what's meant for us—until we do.
After returning from LA, I spent some time with my sister, who had recently turned 40. She was explaining the shift in conversation among friends to plastic surgery procedures—the price of maintaining youth while she enjoys aging. A married girlfriend of mine, in her mid-thirties back in New York, messaged me details of attending a birthday party where babies were the topic of conversation. Each of them tends to their newfound pressures, and I'm still questioning if love is possible.
Dating is a quandary, but I’m no longer confused about what I value. I still believe it’s a kind of marketplace—yes, but not one where the only stats are salary and height.
Maybe that’s why I liked Materialists. It plays with the idea that statistics—and their emptiness—are “value,” only to reveal that the real currency is intangible.
And that is the truth for the eternal bachelorette.
We don't want saving, we want to feel seen.