Originally published May 2023.
The world likes to assume single people are dumb as a bag of jellybeans. You’ve felt it. The pervasive looking-down-upon that gets its power from the narrative that single people are lacking a partner. The story is we’re incomplete, and should thus exist in a perpetual state of search until we find a partner. Those of us who haven’t found a partner (fast enough, and wouldn’t you know that timespan varies based on who you’re receiving unsolicited advice from) are assumed to be “doing it wrong.” We’re failing at a required life task. This assumption lets the world assign all sorts of negatives to single people that have to do with us not knowing our asses from our elbows despite both body parts being of distinct shapes that are located in entirely different regions of our bodies.
If you’re single, you don’t know how to date, you don’t know how to choose partners, you don’t know how to carry on relationships, the world will even take it as far as suggesting that you don’t even know what you want, in life or in love. If you’re single, the world assumes you’re lacking information, and that’s what’s keeping you single you stupid, stupid person.
It’s a simple, convenient narrative: Singles don’t know what’s best for them. We are removed from the equation as beings capable of correct and productive autonomous thought. The narrative is demeaning, dismissive, and as rooted in reality as the Tooth Fairy. Just because someone else met their partner at work when they were 28, that doesn’t diminish my intelligence level at 36, Deborah.
How many insulting comments, rude suggestions, dismissive glances, and dollars have passed through single people who were convinced by societal shame that we don’t know what the fuck we’re doing? How much emotional and financial harm have we incurred because the primary thing people think about us is that we’re failing? You see it any time a person, most often if not exclusively a woman, is praised for her accomplishments and in the same breath demeaned for being single. “She’s so talented, she’s so successful, but she just can’t seem to tie a man down.” It doesn’t matter what we do — if we do it single, we’ve done it less.
The idea that singles are lacking information and that this lack of information is what’s keeping us single is harmful nonsense. First of all, it’s baseless. Coupled people aren’t currently coupled because they’re brilliant, or because they knew precisely when and where to stand in order to meet their partner. They didn’t unlock a secret level of life with their big, big brains and that’s where their spouse was hiding. They got lucky, fate did its thing, timing worked out in their favor, that’s literally it.
I’m tired of societal opinions of singlehood shaming away a single person’s self worth, but also our self-belief. We don’t deserve to doubt ourselves just because society thinks we should be married by now. There is nothing inherently broken about our internal orientation software. Just because a single person wants something in a partner (or doesn’t want it) that doesn’t make that quality wrong or bad. Just because we prefer one method of dating or another, the fact that we’re still single doesn’t make it wrong. The instant association of wrongness and mistake with single people’s thoughts and actions is incredibly dismissive, we know that — I just want to make sure we also understand that listening to it is optional. We can choose to stop tolerating this bullshit and choose other thoughts instead. Self worth is waiting for us in the dismissal of fault we never deserved.
Societal single shaming is so good at convincing singles that we lack information or intelligence that we ourselves will often wonder, “Wait…am I stupid?” If you hear someone tell you enough times that you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re likely to believe them or at least start to question your own abilities a little. And here’s the most frustrating part of the devaluation of our intelligence: It suggests that other people know us better than we know ourselves.
“Ugh, give me your phone, I’m sure your dating app says the wrong thing or you’re using the wrong photos.”
“Just let me fix you up, I know you better than you know yourself.”
“Sign up for my dating coaching package to stop getting in your own way when it comes to finding love.”
Societal opinions of single people put our autonomy and our intelligence below our assumed “need” for a partner. The world views single people as “doing it wrong” no matter what it is we happen to be doing. It’s not unlike how we treat children, assuming they don’t know the right way to do something until they are shown how by someone else, rather than letting them figure things out for themselves and gain the education that comes along with a little organic DIY.
You’re not stupid. You’re not “missing something.” Your singleness doesn’t signal a problem with the way you operate in the world. There are far too many messages and reality TV cringe-fests that paint singles as “needing help.” Because when the music stopped everyone grabbed whatever partner was closest and we were left without one. Maybe it’s time to stop seeing that as a failure, and start recognizing it as a blessing instead.
Yes, my singlehood is taking its time. Yes, I’m single much later in life than I was told as okay. But I have a deep need to disconnect the absence of a partner with the presence of flawed method, because if you’re single past the praised married age, you’ve likely tried countless methods. And wouldn’t you know, none of them worked. When is it time to stop trusting whatever method someone judgmental wants to throw at you and start trusting that your life has a much more unique path and timeline in mind? I think it’s now.
To stop listening, to stop casually trusting that someone’s random new idea or bit of “dating advice” is the thing that’s going to work, I believe we have to reconnect with the ways we value ourselves. I think we have to remember that we’re allowed to trust what we know, not just what other people purport to know. The idea that someone else knows what’s best for us more than we know what’s best for ourselves is, again, child-like. And we’re not children. We’re grown adults with a lifetime of earned experiences, and those experiences and moments of wisdom we’ve acquired don’t get washed away just because someone living in an antiquated mindset still associates our singlehood with having a lack of necessary information.
Your knowledge matters, too. Your perspective is a completely valid one. Nothing about being in a couple makes someone smarter about someone else finding their partner. There is nothing untrustworthy about your singlehood. The narrative of singlehood being a failure is where the notion of distrust comes from. We internalize the idea that we aren’t the best people to take care of ourselves, because we haven’t done the thing society thinks we should have done by now. (And, to be fair, in some instances it’s the thing we’d really like to have done by now, too.)
Here’s my question: What if your singlehood wasn’t somehow leading you astray, and instead was protecting you from the wrong people? What if your singlehood wanted to see you accomplish things that a partnership would have diverted focus from? What if your singlehood was actually wiser than it’s ever been given credit for?
No one knows you better than you. No one knows what you want as intimately as you do. And there is nothing that you know about yourself that is wrong, bad, or in need of correction. The world will try to make us see our singlehood as a devaluation of every other part of us, our intelligence included. But there is no secret, there is no hidden dating resource that’s hiding your spouse. You have all the information you will ever need to connect with the right partners for who you authentically are. While it might not be happening on the timeline we’ve been led to believe is ideal, maybe the timeline that is ideal for us was always something our singlehood had in mind. And isn’t that brilliant.