I’ll start with a big spoiler: my singledom affirmations for the new year will be no different from the old ones. Entering the new calendar year doesn’t have to mean new beginnings at all. New year, old me. New year, continuing on the path I already started, because it’s a good one. Changing the date does mark a neat origin point to trace back to, but it’s as arbitrary a beginning as any other.
Personally, the official new year is my least favorite festival. I don’t like the imperative of lavish partying on New Year’s Eve and the short-lived January crowds at the gyms. None of the permanent changes I ever made to my life started on January1st: they started when I was ready* to commit.
Nobody asked, but most beginnings and seasons of change find me at two times of the year. In July, they come on the heels of birthday-adjacent ruminations and taking stock of another year of my life. In September, which traditionally marks the new school year in my home country, the autumn air now subliminally smells of change and a true new beginning. A lot of them have no discernible beginning at all. I fell into them so gradually, it now seems they were always here.
Whatever the case might be for you, whether you are climbing towards changes or already rolling with them, whether it’s a part of a new year’s resolution or a state of mind with no end or beginning, here’s a little list to inaugurate the new year. Use it in whole or in small parts, in no particular order, whenever you need reinforcement on the singledom struggle bus.
(More parts will be coming)
1.Being single (or not) is a question of sheer chance
I will repeat this as a broken record: we are not single as a punishment for some fatal character or physical flaw. Being single is not a failure to perform some mysterious behavior or magical spell. It is in large part outside of our control and more than anything dependent on chance. There are people who go on thousands on dates and didn’t meet one interesting person. There are others who met the love of their life in the maternity ward. Neither of them made their relationship status “happen”, if anything it happened TO them.
Now, think how many people in couples are immature, mean, stupid, dishonest, traumatized and perpetuating their trauma. Most of their relationships won’t be healthy, but they do have them. On the flipside there are throngs of wonderful single people. There are gems and duds on both sides of the coupling spectrum. There are people conforming and non-conforming to the current beauty standards, too, and all in the same proportions, and anyway that standard changes incessantly across time and latitude. There is no confirmed correlation between who and how we are and whether someone appears who wants to create a couple with us.
Yes, there are “strategies” from all kinds of dating experts we can use to increase a dating success rate, but for one, these also don’t work for everyone; for two, they are based on the idea that we need to fix yourselves, when most of the time the blockage is in only in the people we meet just not clicking; for three, a lot of these “strategies” are based on pretending to be someone we’re not and instead catering to patriarchal dynamics hurtful to all involved; and for four, they are only focused on getting the date or tricking commitment, unrelated to actual level of satisfaction from the resulting relationship. So, whatever the dating gurus say, we can’t “make” someone truly love us and build their life with us if we want to be anywhere near healthy. It has to, you guessed it, happen. Or not.
2. Being single is just being: a neutral circumstance to which we are the ones assigning meaning
Singledom is just the way things turn out. It is an objective life circumstance, nothing more and nothing less. Being single for a long time (and what constitutes “a long time” anyway?) also doesn’t mean we are holding out for a knight in shining armor and the most ideal relationship that ever shipped. We’re single for the foreseeable future and that is a fact of life, not a sad one and not a happy one, just a fact. Now what will we do with this reality?
There’s an analogy I’ve seen used, comparing our life circumstances to the weather. In his life-changing book How to Build the Life you Want, Arthur C. Clarke also talks about our emotional reactions being like the weather conditions. No matter how much we try, we cannot control the emotional weather, it just freaking happens.
We are conditioned by multiple factors like upbringing, opinions of others, peer pressure, other circumstances etc to react a certain way to certain events, but there’s a kicker: even if the prevalent opinion about rainy days is “bad and sad” in Northern Europe, in the middle of the desert rain would be a blessing and we would be running out outside to dance ecstatically, getting soaked. This is not to say singledom is a desert, but rather that our reactions are not fixed in our nature. Even if society and our great aunt are telling us to mourn our single status, the choice is still ours to make the objective circumstance of single status either into a well of tears or into a joyful ecstatic dance. Or, more realistically, something in between: just a life, with its own ups as well as downs, not better and definitely not worse than any other.
3. Life is hard because it’s hard for everyone, not because I am singlE
Isn’t grass always greener on the other side? If I have straight hair, I might think curly hair looks nicer, while a curly-haired person might sigh after rod-straight hairstyles. The dynamic becomes different when the other side is the officially accepted / promoted one, and ours is the one with more negative connotations, let alone discrimination. With the incessant “find a man” messaging it’s even tempting to bemoan the single life problems and wallow in its hardships. The discourse is ready for the taking, ripe for he plucking, right there to repeat as our own.
For this temptation, I sincerely recommend spending more extensive swaths of time with our coupled friends. I can guarantee some of them will want to share exactly how not perfect coupled life is, too. Toxic couples would be very low hanging fruit, as one evening with those airing their dirty laundry in public makes me thank heavens I don’t have to put up with anything similar. But that’s not the point. The point hits home when we look at a happy couple. Talk to them and note how their life is not all rainbows and butterflies.
It might be a belief we internalized from popular culture that coupling solves all issues, or makes all the troubles lighter, but it’s nothing more than an illusion. Think about it as coupledom propaganda, if you will. No life is free of problems. Everyone has the same likelihood to encounter hardship, some of it will be of a different sort whether we’re single or paired, but it will weigh exactly the same. That weight can be distributed with a partner in some cases. In others, it will still be all on only one person in the relationship, or in some cases, made even heavier by the other person making it potentially worse. Singledom just nets out in the middle.
On top of that, as a single person we are also not always completely alone with our troubles – if they get hard to bear, there’s family, good friends or communities who can help lighten the load. The person closest to us (in the next room) is not always the best support (unless we are very lucky).
4. Single or coupled, I am always enough
Whether single or coupled, whether struggling or content, we are always enough. Another relieving consequence of accepting singledom as objective fact rather than some sort of failure is taking away the guilt attached to it. As a fact, we haven’t met an adequate partner. Maybe yet, maybe we never will.
There is no reason, and as such no fault. It is not because of any inherent lack. It’s not for not trying hard enough or trying too hard. It’s not because of the negative thoughts. It’s not because being stuck or “late” in life. It’s not because of that stubborn backne that refuses to go away. It’s not because of the annoying laugh.
If life feels like a struggle right now, we’ve already established that it is also a struggle to many people in couples, too. If we’re doing the work but keep lapsing and succumbing to negative thoughts, it only means we’re human like everybody else. There is no magic trait we are missing and no amount self-work that will one day make us say “I’m flawless” every second of every day.
Everyone has flaws, everyone has worse days, everyone gets curveballs thrown their way, and everyone gets over those – sometimes not the most graciously, efficiently, commendably. Struggling is not why anyone is single or not. Being a work in progress with little actual progress is not why anyone is single or not. Everyone struggles, goes through growing pains, sometimes contradicts themselves. It’s okay, and it’s not keeping the love of our lives at bay.
5. “Why are you still single” is not actually a question to the single person, but an insecurity of the one who is asking
Firstly, it’s never an okay question to ask and not a way of just making conversation. In her wonderful book reflecting on aloneness, How to Be Alone, Sara Maitland points out how it’s widely considered offensive to ask a similar question on any other topic, but somehow okay to do it about singles and smokers: “why are you still single/ not married yet?”, “why won’t you stop smoking?”. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I still don’t think many people are actually calling out the smokers in their vicinity, even though smoking is most definitely a choice and a hurtful activity, while being single is neither. It’s like asking “why is the sun shining today?”, essentially. We don’t go around asking that, or asking coupled people why they are coupled / married (which would be an excellent question to some of them, actually).
More pertinently, why does the asker feel compelled to voice this question in the first place? Not because we invited it, minding our own single business. The usual reason lies in some sort of insecurity or even plain fear.
Firstly, it could be an insecurity about their own life choices. They might be in a relationship or not, but they assign a disproportionate amount of importance to finding a mate as a measure of success (usually by a certain age), due to all the conditioning they received and have not managed to call BS on. They are not asking to understand, but to reinforce their own sense of superiority in conforming. Seeing us single and happy would ruin their certainty that their path is the correct one and one that gets them brownie points.
Secondly, it could be a crusader asking: a person who subscribes to the traditional, so-called “family values” in a version that doesn’t’ allow dissenters (yes, like in the Middle Ages). So as a person without a full-on family, or at least a person on the way to procuring one, they might see us as fair game for proselytizing. It doesn’t matter if we hold traditional values close ourselves, what matters is making sure that we know how bad we should be feeling about being heretics having a different lifestyle at any point in time. In their case, making us feel bad will help with their fear of the other, whose very existence is seen as an attack of sorts.
Whatever the reason, at its essence it’s a malicious question designed to cause hurt, even if the asker thinks they are coming from a place of loving concern. A happily coupled person who lives and lets others live would not be asking. We can try rising above and refusing to engage with the interlocutor’s fears. It’s not worth letting their fears and narrow worldviews muddle our peace. If they do, the indignation is fully justified because, to reiterate, making us question our life is not an acceptable small talk topic.
* I want to clarify that we are never fully consciously ready for most big changes. If we waited for that elusive readiness to start anything we would never actually get it done. So when I say I was ready, it was readiness to TRY. A strong enough internal objection to the status quo to try and bear the discomfort of changing, often only lead by my brain OR heart, while the other one played catch up. Readiness in this context is openness to trying and seeing what happens. Fearing but doing it anyway.
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