Originally published January 2023.
A word on amphibians. Pond-dwelling, less cute than something with fur, just generally kind of wet, you know the type.
“You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince.”
Words of wisdom, apparently, derived from fairy tales, a genre widely known for telling the truth. I’ve experienced this sentence, which is the English language equivalent of a scrunched up nose, tossed around whenever someone has just emerged from a moment of potential romantic partnership disappointed, confused, exhausted, angry, or some smoothie of it all mixed together. The kissing, in the context of modern dating and the heterosexual single women brave enough to engage in such a jello wrestle refers to the act of pursuing a partner. The frogs, of course, stand for men. Alright fine maybe the adage makes a point.
If someone is speaking to a single woman, purporting to give her advice or predictive information of any kind, I’m extremely likely to believe down to my socks that this person is full of shit. Dating advice itself isn’t far off from telling someone their future over a crystal ball in a tourist-laden area of town, but somehow we still cling to it, rather than question it.
That might be one of the biggest hurdles for me, human beings’ large-scale refusal to question the source of dating advice, or the source of accepted norms and outright commandments for how single women should behave. We just assume it’s true because someone said it, caring far more about ending our singlehood than doing our due diligence. You won’t buy something online without reading 50 reviews but, “Hey, have you tried sending this kind of message on a dating app precisely six hours after you match?” is somehow always worth a shot.
We also rarely question the methods by which these pearls were acquired. We just hear something like, “You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince” and shrug off our 27th shitty date in a row, then start preparing to go back for more because apparently, according to this “advice,” that’s just what people do. Because meeting “your person” is worth enduring anything, right? It’ll all be worth it once we find them, right? Right?!
I think we cling to dating advice because when you’ve been brought low by dating and countless years of struggle-filled singlehood, you’ll latch on to anything there is. All you’ve been through can’t be for nothing, that would be too mentally and emotionally devastating — we have to believe there will be a reward (partner) at the end. What if you’re only one piece of dating advice or even just a suggestion away from the eternal happiness we’ve been convinced is waiting for us in a romantic relationship despite the current global statistics on divorce? And when we’re at that low point in our minds, people are more than happy to make sure there is enough baseless dating advice to go around. They are especially ready and eager to give it to anyone who hasn’t allowed themselves the possibility that being single isn’t a negative state of human existence and dating isn’t a prerequisite for partnership. That’s who’s most vulnerable to dating advice nonsense and these people are also why I get out of bed every morning.
If all we’ve ever been taught is that being single is bad and wrong and that dating is the method by which singlehood is ended, we’re likely to stay running circles on the same flaming track for a good long while, swallowing cups of dating advice along the way that never quench a goddamned thing. I did it for ten years, what’s it for you at this point?
Frogs. As if it’s just part of the game, right?
Whoopsy! Got a bad one there. That’s part of it, sweetheart! Gotta kiss a lot of those unsavory critters before you finally find one that’s not terrible! Hey, you’d better get back in that water, stat! Keeping kissin’ em! The faster you suffer through it, the faster you’ll find him. Who, me? How’d I find my prince? We met in college, why?
I don’t like lying. And I think a lot of dating advice and commonly accepted ideas about what dating and being single are supposed to involve are monumentally sneaky forms of lying that hide behind good intentions that are hiding behind shame narratives. The world thinks singles should be ashamed of what we are, so it also doesn’t care when singles have to endure a dating culture that has become little more than frog kissing. Something shitty becomes something normal, over and over again. Because nothing is as shitty as being single, right?
This idea that going through hell is not only an expectation in the dating space, but a prerequisite for love is trapping a lot of single women in a tornado of garbage and thorns while convincing us that this hellcyclone is where our future spouse is hiding.
As an aside, you know what always puts raisins in my cookies? Any advice or ideas about singlehood that assume it’s a grind. This culture of difficulty, where we assume it has to be hard to find a partner, is incredibly dangerous for single women who are vulnerable and…I’ll say it, desperate to find someone. If everyone’s telling you that a really hard experience is normal, you’re likely to be completely unaware of when hard is too hard, and just keep going into infinity, to your own emotional and mental detriment. I’d like us to shed this assumption of struggle, this acceptance that if you’re going to desire love, you’d better be ready to go through hell on the road to find it. I don’t think we’re meant to live in the abuse of a difficult dating experience until we “find someone.” We’re allowed to get out of the struggle now, and meet someone literally any other way, is all I’m saying.
Do you believe it? The dating advice, assumptions, the “way things are?” And if so, have you ever asked yourself why? Why do we believe that we, singles, have to “kiss a lot of frogs” while some people bump into their “prince” coming out of the post office? I know you’ve felt it, the unfairness feeling when someone else has an easy time finding partnership while you struggle for years not knowing why. I know that feeling can make you feel less worthy, less desirable, it can even make you view your own future, something that belongs uniquely and inherently to you, with less or even zero optimism. And I hate the world for that sometimes, because I think your future is beautiful for all it holds. The fact that our timelines are different from other people’s doesn’t make them less-than. Honestly I think it makes them just the opposite. I like my bespoke timeline very much, even if the world struggles to understand how I could possibly enjoy it. I don’t owe the world an explanation, but I do owe myself the ability to love my own life—regardless of my relationship status.
There is no why. They aren’t “better” than you, that’s not why they “found someone.” There is no explanation that’s going to neatly package why some people struggle for years and some people are single for a week and a half. Dating and falling in love aren’t neat little if-then scenarios functioning like a vending machine. It doesn’t matter how much effort you put in, or what kind, dating never has to spit out a spouse for you. I wish it wasn’t this way, but I’m tired of single women running circles around lies waiting for them to become true. Stop waiting for this shit to be fair because it isn’t fair. And sitting with a certain level of unfairness, confusion, and frustration, while learning to not let these things overtake you is where your self worth starts to shine. Because no one on earth is better than anyone else on earth and I think it’s high time singles started thinking like it.
You were never deserving of a difficult singlehood or a miserable slog through dating. There was never anything about you that needed punishment or that much difficulty in order to get you “ready for love” or whatever other bullshit is being peddled by dating coaching these days. Partnered people aren’t partnered because they’re perfect — they’re partnered because they just are. It just happened, like a breeze blowing by a window at random. There is no reason to this, no predictability. And I don’t speak to the randomness of people falling in love to discourage you — I say it because I think there’s some self worth hiding inside the knowledge that love is random, and I want you to scoop it up.
The kissing frogs narrative tells you to not only accept your suffering, but to crave more of it, because there’s a reward waiting at the end of the struggle. It is lying, and it doesn’t care how much you struggle — there’s no piece of dating advice that has to cough up your husband after you follow it. And when someone comes back at you with, “Nuh-uh, I was dating miserably for years and then I tried this one specific thing and then I met my husband!” Good for Stacey, I’m so happy for her. But someone else’s story doesn’t have to keep all single women begging for more suffering on the chance something, someday, will click. Beg for suffering if you want. I choose ease, and the belief that the right relationships for me will happen without me making a payment of pain first. I don’t want a relationship I had to crawl across barbed coals for, I think that would make me resent a relationship that was anything short of perfect, and I don’t want to do that.
You actually don’t have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince. (Also, can we not with the notion of someone being a “prince,” I’ve seen the way these married men live.) You don’t have to suffer through anything in order to find love. That is not required of you and you do not deserve to struggle more than other people simply because you’re still single and they met someone last year.
The world is really good at convincing us to “pay our dues.” It does this so well that we never even stop to ask ourselves why we go along with difficult, unpleasant situations (remember internships?), we just participate on the promise of reward. But if you’re single, particularly later in life than you thought you’d be, you’ve been chasing down that reward for so much longer than you ever deserved to. It is too much. Remember that “too much” is an amount we’re allowed to recognize, and remove ourselves from. It’s not our job to take on the emotional responsibility of absolutely everything. Too much does exist, and we’re allowed to say no to it.
Dating and the pursuit of partnership asks too much of us — especially those who’ve endured this shit for a long time. You are allowed to acknowledge that the search for someone has asked more of you than you’re willing to participate in any further. It is okay to say, “I don’t deserve this,” and that doesn’t mean you’re “giving up.” It means you’re connecting with your self worth. You are allowed to walk away before your “reward.” There are rewards in reclaiming your life from dating culture, too.
You don’t have to kiss anyone, or anything, before you deserve to be happy. You were born deserving, lovable, and whole. Shame on society for ever feeding you a narrative that said anything else. We cannot explain away the struggles of singlehood and dating with a line derived from a fairy tale, no matter how much we need an explanation to soothe our sanity. There is no explanation as to why some people meet partners easily and some don’t. Understanding your worth and value, independent of your relationship status, is what helps you stop craving an explanation at all.
Your relationship status does not define your worth. It’s easy to forget this, or to never have known it at all, because we’ve been societally groomed since we were kids to believe that partnership and marriage are some of the highest, most praise-worthy achievements possible, particularly if we’re women. But what does that really say about worth? How can meeting a partner make you more worthy or more valued in society when we know this is something that happens, by and large, by fate and chance alone? Do you really think your self worth should be lower than a woman’s who happened to sit next to the right person on an airplane? Do you think her worthiness is why she’s partnered, or did she just get lucky?
Why are you not worthy of praise as well? Why is the life you’ve lived any less valuable than how other people have gone about things? What specifically is it about a romantic relationship that makes someone more able to love themselves than anyone else? Does that not seem strange to you, that something outside of a person could make them love themselves more? Honestly, if our self worth and self love are based on our romantic relationship status, I worry. I think that gives away too much control and power over our emotional wellbeing to something we’re only 50% responsible for. I want to be 100% sure that I deserve to be here, to be myself, regardless of whether or not there is someone else sitting on the other side of my couch.
They’re not partnered because they’re better than you, they’re partnered because their timing is unique to them, just as yours is to you. Separating worth from relationship status is, in my opinion, vital to a single woman’s self worth. The two things never belonged together, and we can split them apart any time we want. It’s okay if it takes practice and time. The biggest deal is that you understand you have the option. Your authenticity does not require you romantically binding yourself to someone else in order to be allowed to shine. Your humanity was never dependent on someone else loving or choosing you. But it might have something to do with the ways you love and choose yourself. Kiss whoever you want — or don’t. You’re still just as worthy of being who you are the whole time.