This piece is Katie Klabusich’s fourth dispatch from the front lines of her romantic life for the #Its Totally Me dating series, which follows Establishment writers Klabusich and Wagatwe Wanjuki as they utilize professional matchmakers and the insights of various experts to get to the bottom of their perpetual singledom.

You can read the series’ introductory post Life is indifferent to those of us living it — a hard lesson I’ve learned over the years.

Romantic friendship between women in Europe and North America became especially prevalent in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with the simultaneous emergence of female education and a new rhetoric of sexual difference.

The study of historical romantic friendship is difficult because the primary source material consists of writing about love relationships, which typically took the form of love letters, poems, or philosophical essays rather than objective studies.

Some assume that one of the “buddies” is always being strung along, secretly hoping that the fucking leads to something more serious.In a few days, I’m going to Cuba on vacation with a guy I’ve been sleeping with for eight years, but whom I've never once called my boyfriend.We live on different continents, but inevitably, a few times a year, we find each other somewhere in the world, have a few days of romance, and then go our separate ways.In historical scholarship, the term may be used to describe a very close relationship between people of the same sex during a period of history when homosexuality did not exist as a social category.In this regard, the term was coined in the later 20th century in order to retrospectively describe a type of relationship which until the mid 19th century had been considered unremarkable but since the second half of the 19th century had become more rare as physical intimacy between non-sexual partners came to be regarded with anxiety.My challenge for this series has been facing 20 years of frustration to try and determine what the contributing factor pie chart looks like: How much of my inability to find a romantic partner (or partners) is straight up luck, and how much is something I can control?In the year since Wagatwe and I started this project, I’ve recognized an important truth: It is the -romantic relationships in my life that have actually opened me up to the possibility of falling in love.