Originally published in December 2021.
I don’t sit with statistics. There’s no comfort for me in numbers on how the odds, systems, and actualities are rigged against those of us moving through life alone. Because I see them, I read them, and it’s like…no shit. No shit this is hard, lonely, and most of all—unfair. It was true before someone put it in a spreadsheet and it’ll be true after. There’s no comfort for me in data that states the obvious difficulties of single life because the data is never about solutions to them. The information isn’t new, but we equate paying attention to the data with doing something to actually change it. Simply saying “hey this is happening” isn’t the same thing as “and here’s what we’re doing to fix it.” Instead more dating apps come, more dating coaches set up shop, and we keep feeding a festering industry built on the flawed premise that single women are a burden, and single men are a catch. If you want to conduct a study that generates and then implements solutions for inherent human bullshit, I’m all ears.
Where is the real solution for an absence of human connection? We tell the outlandish stories, share the screenshots, but at the core of the vileness there’s a truth we’re ignoring because it’s more fun to tap a like button: We built a nightmare, and because we’re entirely stumped as to how to correct it, and because it’s making some of us too much money, we just keep telling women that love is hiding inside the horror somewhere. This isn’t dating, this isn’t meeting people. This is crawling through a mudpit filled with shards of glass and expecting to emerge from it a sparkling white gown.
No one can tell anyone where to actually find someone, and I wish we’d stop lying to each other. Because I want someone, I don’t have someone, and rather than continuing to harm myself in the pursuit, I’ve chosen to learn how to want something, not have it, and be okay anyway. It’s so rarely what anyone wants to hear, even though anyone saying what you want to hear is most likely charging a nonrefundable fee.
There isn’t a solution to the inability to simply find a partner, because a mechanism that instantly introduces you to your next great love is more sci-fi horror plot than actual ideal. So here I am left with the very tangible reality that it’s 6:30am, I want a cup of coffee, I don’t want to get out of bed to get it, and therefore I’m fucked.
Companionship is more than someone bringing me coffee, you’ll have to give my metaphor a bit of space. It’s such a human thing, partnership, love, having someone around. So many people find it, have it, keep it…but there’s a cohort of us, and not a small one, that simply can’t. No matter what we’ve tried or for how long, we simply cannot meet the right romantic partners for us. A glowing, thriving, valuable, beautiful contingency of women so left out of the narrative for no fucking reason that confusion gives way to anger gives way to exhaustion gives way to insanity. By the way, even if we weren’t glowing, thriving, and valuable, we’d still deserve love just the same.
Data doesn’t unlock anything for me. It doesn’t tell me why it’s so hard for so many of us to simply fucking meet someone. Data doesn’t see us cry. It doesn’t see us put in the work to become ourselves, to work toward goals, to spend the significant amount of effort it takes to retain one’s mental health and self worth as a single women in a world that views us as unwanted leftovers while telling us it’s all our fault as it feeds us a dating app full of mannerless shitbirds. There are never any solutions, just more digital suggestions, more baseless advice tidbits, more consequenceless thoughts on a dating culture reality no one understands and finds too shameful to sit with. I am not ashamed. I want someone, I don’t have someone, and that occasional sadness doesn’t make me pathetic, needy, or desperate. It makes me proud to be someone who continues to show up in service of her own happiness anyway.
I will not sit and steep in wanting, lacking, or pain. I wasn’t born to spend my adulthood that way. It is okay if something is painful. My 14th December alone is painful. It’s allowed to be. I’m lucky in that I made the choice long ago to not let that pain lead me, but instead to respect my pain and balance it with the rest of the good in my life. Maybe most especially when good seems hard to find. I’m luckier still in that I get to have a career that lets me help others do the same. There’s an unmovable fact: No one can tell you when and where to meet your partner. But we can help each other live well and find life’s abundance every day before (and after) that happens.
It isn’t something insane that we’re asking for. Companionship isn’t a crazy notion, love isn’t a mythical brass ring. These are things that millions around the world gets to experience, and so I often ask myself why we keep participating in a culture seemingly designed to provide them that tends to feel like it’s distancing us further from them instead.
How do we find each other? How do people meet? Where’s the study on that? Where’s the deep dive into distance, the exploration of why we get so excited about a story of how two people met under impossible circumstances? How did we let circumstances get this fucking impossible? The horror stories shouldn’t be the norm, and the success stores shouldn’t be fairy tales. We keep gobbling up both of them anyway.
We don’t have to be happy all the time to live happy single lives. Sad days are allowed, wanting and not having is allowed. As long as we know that it’s all valid. Feelings of confusion and unfairness are allowed, because the circumstances of being a single woman are both confusing and unfair. What they are not is a reflection of our deservingness, or desirability. Those things are both inherent and completely custom to us and our future relationships.
I want someone around, and he’s not here. In 14 years, I haven’t found him. More accurately, we haven’t found each other. And rather than stack those years as a failure pile, I’ve chosen to be proud of myself for still being happy to get up, and get my own fucking coffee, every day anyway. Numbers will say what they say, but what matters more to me is how our day-to-day lives speak to us, what they tell us about our worth. I’m not leaving that responsibility to a world that knows we’re single, knows it’s difficult and structured unfairly, and hasn’t offered a solution any smarter than a dating app. This is hard, you’re not crazy, you’re not alone, and even without someone around, you are allowed to be happy. Enjoy your holidays, because that’s allowed too.