Our Manifesto & Raison d’Être

There’s a version of womanhood that doesn’t wait for the invitation, the proposal, or the permission. She books the trip to Provence for one, stays up late laughing to Mindy Kaling with her seed-oil free popcorn she shares with no one, and puts on an outfit she loves to head out to a bar seat at her favorite restaurant. She makes her king bed with sheets much nicer than any boyfriend ever had. She doesn’t need a date to order her a negroni sbagliato or an N/A dirty martini. She invests without the help of her husband, knowing that you don’t need to be a Mrs. to fund her future dreams and flights of whimsy.

She doesn’t need a better half, for she is whole. She has come to enjoy her own company, and savors her freedom and independence. She follows her curiosities and convictions, respecting herself enough not to settle for the wrong partner. She is not waiting for ‘the one’ nor believes there is just one person who will change the course of her life — which, by the way, is pretty damn fine.

We write for the women looking for something that actually resonates: less bridal shower and babymoon, more musings on life on your own terms.

Cinq Sept Cinq, or five seven five, are the syllables in a haiku. Il était une fois (once upon a time…) two best friends living in different cities started a shared note of haikus about their dates. Literary constraint became a creative and cathartic act — honest and humorous vignettes of what it’s like to date in your mid thirties. They had so much fun writing the haikus and sharing the stories behind them that they decided to soft launch it to the internet. This, dear reader, is Cinq Sept Cinq, and you are cordially invited to participate.

So is this site about dating or about ‘being your own boyfriend,’ in the words of our friend crush Olivia Dean? It’s both. We see whitespace for writing that resonates with her. A place for women to share wisdom, reflections, and real-life stories of lives well-lived as a party of one. And, at the same time, a place to share field notes from dating in the form of haikus. An invitation to female heroines to bottle up their dates into 5, 7, and 5 syllables.

At first, we wrote haikus exclusively as dark humor, for our fails. But because we are hopeful romantics, we are broadening them to include the dreamy, hoping-this-goes-somewhere dates too. The dispatches are all anonymous, submitted via our site and approved by our editors in chief. Eventually, we’ll invite people to submit multiple haikus that chart the course of a relationship. But for now, we’re sticking to one hit wonders.

We invite you to join us by submitting your Cinq Sept Cinq dating dispatch, and sharing your stories in the months to come.

The sections of our site are kindling. We want to see what words and formats resonate most with our readers, and have a little fun along the way. Have feedback? Send us a note with as many syllables as you want.