Originally published September 2022.
I used to live in hell. Cozy place, great amenities. For me, hell was a decade of “looking,” and if you’re currently single over the age of about 29 or so, you know full well what I mean by looking. From my late 20s to mid-30s, if I was waiting in a line or watching television, I was also swiping through hundreds of (the same) faces each day, searching for my husband. In ten years of looking, I never found him, I never even found one relationship at all. It’s not so much that I didn’t find what I was looking for, because now I’m able to reflect on this time through a lens of logic and see how dating culture was never crafted for my success — just the opposite — but rather it’s that I found so much badness instead.
There’s such comfort to me in the fact that the experience of singlehood is a great unifier. I don’t have to regale this community with “horror stories” in order for you to “get it” like we’re at dinner and I’m having marriage trouble and I need you to remind me of how shitty things are on the other side. All I have to do with you is say the word “dating” and you’ve already poured me a wine and baked me a scone. The horror stories aren’t the exception anymore. They’re the rule, and the “good” stories are often the ones you never hear, because they’re not dating stories, they’re “how we met” stories, and we don’t have those yet.
So for a decade I kept myself available to a culture that was verbally abusive, disgusting, entitled, dismissive, cruel, offensive, flakey, and more than anything, uninterested. I used to think it was just uninterested in me, that I was somehow bringing all this badness upon myself, but wouldn’t you know a little self worth will snap you the fuck out of that doldrums real quick.
I never left. For ten years I never even fathomed the concept that dating wasn’t required of me. It never registered in my brain as a possibility. I thought that since I was still single, I had to keep dating. My singlehood was the thing that locked me inside the dating world and the only way out was “finding someone.” At least that’s what it felt like in my head because that’s the way we’ve all been taught to view being single. If you’re single, you date, and you can’t stop dating until you’re not single anymore.
When that’s your mindset, a very valid mindset by the way because it’s what we were taught since we were children, you’re going to meet the business end of the badness. And while we might all be able to shrug off a shitty experience or two, I have deep concerns for what years (and years and years and years) of terrible treatment in the dating space can do to single women. My concerns are valid, I saw what the dating space did to me.
It broke me. It shattered my self image, my self esteem, and my own understanding of my value as a human being. I never, and I mean fucking never received one message from the dating world telling that I was any kind of good at all. The messages were instead that I was not attractive, not worth effort, entirely dismissable, and useless for anything other than free access to sexual favors between the hours of 1AM and 5AM EST.
But it was always okay. None of it was ever enough to make me do anything beyond “taking a break.” It never dawned on me that something I had to take these kinds of breaks from wasn’t ever going to completely change its entire fucking tune and suddenly be this amazing resource for finding love. You know how we’re taught to “give them a chance” as singles, as though every opportunity, no matter how mediocre, is the last one that’s ever coming along? I absolutely loathe how that narrative translates to dating culture itself. How many chances do you think singles have given dating at this point, and how many times have we received nothing but information that not only will it not change for the better, but it will also continually get worse? And still, there we are, still dating, still giving that space a chance to entirely transform itself into gold. It isn’t ever going to be gold. Start entertaining that idea, if you can.
So yes, for a decade I was being shit on by the very space where I thought my husband was hiding, permanently convinced he was a diamond lurking in the turds somewhere. And it was always fine with me because one day, any day now, I was going to meet my husband and allllllll the crap I’d endured would suddenly all be “worth it.” Sound familiar?
It doesn’t matter what happens to us in dating, it doesn’t matter how many disappointing or cruel experiences or terrible stories or tears or therapy bills we have to go through because this is about achieving a very specific goal, finding a very specific person. That person, according to legend, is going to be so amazing that they will suddenly wash away all of the pain that came before them. The ultimate carrot on the cruelest stick. So I absorbed countless moments of pain, shame, disappointment, emotional abuse, and frustration for ten entire years, because I knew I wouldn’t stop until I found one that was “worth it.”
My future partner’s worth has nothing to do with my dating past. That’s something you don’t realize when you still have dating culture’s blinders on. They come free with every dating app and they still fit real life dating, too. Dating wants you to think they’ll be worth it, because if you didn’t why the actual fuck would you put up with what modern dating culture has become? Further, why would you keep paying it money to participate? It’s a carnival game, a Vegas table, a bottle of snake oil sold off a traveling truck. And it’s all there and waiting for anyone who’s still ashamed of singlehood and thinks that finding a partner is how you “win.”
(At this point I’ll remind you that if you haven’t read it yet, A Single Revolution, my firstborn, is designed to help you shed the shame of singlehood.)
My future partner is never going to “make up for” what I went through when I was looking, because that can’t be quantified, and therefore it can’t be compensated. There will never be a reckoning for what I went through because that kind of fair outcome doesn’t exist. There is nothing other than my own self worth that is ever going to make me feel good or even just okay with what happened to me. It was a hard thing to realize and harder still to accept, but in building my self worth and learning its inherent nature, I also began to understand that a past full of pain cannot diminish the self worth that currently, and permanently, belongs to me.
“He’d better be worth it.” I can’t put that kind of responsibility on my husband! I can’t put that kind of pressure on a relationship, to “make up for” the years I spend in misery. Can you imagine throwing that one out every time someone leaves dishes in the sink? I don’t want my future to constantly have to compensate for my past, that sounds exhausting. I don’t have high hopes for the longevity of that partnership that’s built on a foundation of compensating for dating culture. That’s unfair, illogical, and unnecessary. All my future partner needs to be “worth” is the partnership we share. He needs to be worth me giving up my singlehood, which is precious to me. Anything beyond that is just glitter.
You might be asking how. How did I go from living in dating hell to viewing my singlehood as a precious thing that I won’t give up for anyone unworthy? I think we can all agree that after a decade of hell, arriving here took its fucking time, but really I think it was an inevitability. I think that wrong always loses. Maybe not as fast as we want it to, but when you’re deceiving and mistreating people, eventually those people will wake the hell up and build a career out of setting their friends free from your fuckery. Essentially, if you are a cog in the dating culture machine, still taking advantage of single people’s loneliness and shame, I’m onto you. I’m also not prone to silence.
Once I stopped believing the fallacies of dating culture, and started living in the realities of what all the little pieces of “looking” actually amounted to, self worth sounded so much better. An easy sell, really. I started entertaining the idea of my own value, slowly learning to put my worth before my singlehood, instead of diminishing myself down to nothing the way dating culture wanted me to because it’s the most desperate of us it makes the most money from. After I disallowed that access, singlehood showed me how wonderful it actually is pretty fast. It’s hard to argue with a completely uncompromising life, honestly.
We don’t have to live in service of someday. We don’t have to let a future state make a terrible present bearable. Your present matters as much as your future, and your past doesn’t dictate either one. There is nothing to “make up for,” there’s only what we’ve learned, and what we choose to take from it. I stopped counting on a man being worth it someday and realized I was worth so much better right now. I stopped living a life that looked for proof of worth in romantic encounters and started finding all kinds of proof on my own. If we never take the time to establish that understanding of value, if we never know that other people aren’t responsible for setting that value, we might find ourselves more vulnerable to dependency on romantic relationships for our worth.
I don’t want my future partnership to define me, define my worth, or compensate for a decade of disaster. I want it to add to a life that’s already whole, valid, and good. My self worth showed me how to find that life, and I trust that it will also help me tell the difference between people who belong in that life, and those who don’t.