Words by

Rowan Alder

 Lately I’ve had the creeping suspicion that being single in Iceland can really suck.
Let’s say you’re walking down Laugavegur, minding your own business, as you do, when suddenly you are approached by a couple that you know that now has a child, or at least an old friend who reveals that they are now suddenly encumbered with a young one. No problem, right? But let’s say this happens nearly every time you go out. Let’s say that now instead of people droning on about the frivolity of hip and lucrative careers you are now bearing the fazed, tired and whispery smacking sounds of parenting jive and wax poetic. (Honestly, do people just have kids out of boredom? It’s like some fucked up Icelandic take on keeping up with the Joneses.)
What do you, as the single, now apparently alienated individual do on your Friday and Saturday nights, and importantly, who do you do it with? Will you resort to touring the bars on your own? Will you duke it out with your video game collection at home? Will you load up your blue-ray editions of season four of Breaking Bad for the umpteenth time? No, no. That’s lonely as fuck. How about you do something creative, or at least practice your Gianna Michaels-aided stroking techniques? Lol, it’s been done. So then, who or what will help you weather the storm?
Well, for sure you can count on the endless regimen of starry-eyed tourists hunting for the Northern Lights on Laugavegur, but that’s really, really tedious and so fucking boring. You have to get to know them, feign interest in their pursuits, pretend to ignore their chests, endure their horribly loud and obnoxious North American accents, etc. There’s always the parasites haunting Monte Carlo and Monaco, but you can’t stop laughing at the thought. So what do you do?
Well, maybe there is no real answer. Finding moments when your friends are free, or being free yourself maybe the only recourse, but it’s unstable at best. After a long week’s work, tiring yourself out, failing to hook up with co-workers, praying to get laid on the weekend, Friday and Saturday night rendezvous at the bars call to you like an Adhan from the Riyadh of decadence that is 101 Reykjavík (Amsterdam or Bangkok is probably tied for the Mecca). But for how long can this go on?
Forever, it seems, and as the weeks go on, your youth continues to diminish, your cynicism increases and your friends grow more and more burdened by life and your shenanigans. At some point, it’s no longer fun to be trashy on the weekends, and instead becomes quite sad. You’ll never be as idiotic or determined as Roosh V, anyway. Anyway, he had money and some degree of success, and that’s what people like.  
On a side note, what a thrill it would be to bed an Icelandic banker, lawyer or politician, to really push hard into their erudition, years of experience and bourgeois social mores with your fancifully proletarian phallus. I’d like to think it would be marvellous, like fucking the Prime Minister in the ass, each pump extolling the virtues of Marxism into his neo-liberal loving, Republican bootlicking person. Now I’m just going off on some wild tangent. Whew.
Right. Because I gather that any decent person would tell me at this point to shut the fuck up and quit whining like a little bitch, I’ll simply say that being young and single in Iceland sucks, and therefore maybe I should just stop being single. Anyways, the youthful part will fade in time. Here’s to the fading flicker that was once a bright and burning flame.