After a quick google, I realize that not only is this not a common phrase but I may have actually just made it up entirely/butchered some other sayings into becoming this one:
You can’t save the wedding china.
I am a notorious saver of things. When I find some material object that I love, I often find myself struggling to use it lest I ruin it or get it dirty. Then why do I keep buying bright white shoes, you ask? I love to suffer I guess lol.
I have a pair of brand new BRIGHT AS FUCK neon pink running shoes. They’re not white, but marks and scuffs will still absolutely show. They’re not even that expensive, nor seemingly something that will go out of stock. And still, they sit on my bedroom carpet, by the closet mirror, unworn and unmarked.
Tomorrow I will wear them outside I promise. Tomorrow I will use the wedding china.
Because I know that you can’t take it with you (when you die).
Writing isn’t all that different from the way I regard unmarked shoes. I’ve been saving most of my positive (and not-positive) sex and dating stories for over a decade now. All the stories that happened when swiping on the apps and messaging on the site lead to actual dates and connections, of which there are many. There are a hundred reasons I’ve held off on posting them but 99 of those reasons are absolutely perfectionism and feeling like I can’t just give people one story without context that somehow my whole life needs to be shown and I have to do it with precision and perfection and an absolute certainty that I’ll just never have—and while logically I know this is untrue—it is a feeling deep in my soul that I struggle to override.
When I first started writing about sex and dating, it was 2009 and blogs were all the rage. I started my blog (called Something She Dated) to chronicle the ridiculous and often hilarious dating adventures I was going on. At least on or two of those tales were later re-written to become short stories and appeared in my first collection: Love Poems for Butchers.
If you have amazon prime free shipping, I won’t be offended if you buy it from amazon, I promise. Especially because it’s on sale through them right now.
Many of the old blogposts are even available to be read on my current site: VictoriaNachos.com.
But that book was a long time in the making. I didn’t end up publishing it until 2020 and while it included some of the blogging tales, it also showcased later stories I’d written in grad school and the three years that followed.
But it’s not like I stopped dating during that time.
Love Poems for Butchers takes place from the age of seventeen to thirty-two (the summer after I completed my master’s degree). I completed my MA in 2014 and the stories that happened between then and now (almost a decade of sex and dating and personal growth later) have just been sitting and waiting for the right audience.
I had thought it would be in a second and third book that they would make their first debut. But I’m tired of waiting (for perfection) and thrilled by the resurgence of blogs (even if we call them substacks, newsletters, whatever). It seems a perfect fit to start releasing them on here.
So that’s what I’ll be doing here in 2023—releasing all the great and terrible and weird and wonderful and puzzling and pleasing sex and dating stories of the last decade for paid subscribers (and will still likely end up in book form down the road).
I will continue to publish at least one free post a month but those posts will be less stories about my sex and dating life and more about whatever issue is plaguing me that month or some great advice I’m just dying to share.
So with all that said, I wish you well in 2023 (and can’t wait to turn things back to 2014 with the next post coming this month).