Originally published January 2023.
We were raised in Quitter Culture, where quitters were failures, not tough enough to finish. The destination was all that mattered, who cares how much we endured on the journey. The end result is what they’ll remember you for, right? If you quit, all they’ll remember is that you “gave up.” Self protection, self worth, and the idea that maybe suffering to make other people happy isn’t a badge of honor weren’t available to us when we hated playing the violin or soccer, when we spent our development years doing something we despised in order to satisfy others, to avoid them shaming us by calling us quitters. This is when we learned to keep going no matter what. This is one of the reasons it’s so hard for single people to simply stop chasing, searching, and dating.
I think Quitter Culture did a lot to us, but more than anything it kept us focused on what other people thought, rather than how we actually felt or what we were experiencing. Ever wonder where your (entirely understandable) focus on the opinions of others came from? I think this is one of the places. I think giving up a devotion to what other people think is a difficult thing to do because we’ve been doing it for so fucking long. If you’re single and you’ve been searching for a partner fruitlessly for years on end, enduring all the harms our modern dating culture has to offer, you might be feeling like you want to quit, but you’re scared of what that means. You learned that fear somewhere.
You can’t quit dating, right? Quitting means giving up, “choosing singlehood,” “marrying yourself,” or whatever buzzword consolation prize versions of life some major newspaper thinks singles have to settle for. There’s no other out for us, no other way to leave the dating space that leaves us with any measure of dignity or hope.
We have a narrative problem. Our modern dating narrative operates at only two societally accepted and understood speeds: You’re either trying to find someone and therefore you believe in love, or you’ve given up on dating and have therefore chosen to be alone forever. Our minds haven’t made room yet for option three, the one where you believe in love very much, but don’t believe it should be this grotesquely hard to find it.
I stayed on the grind for a decade. A full ten years of trying every method available, over and over and over again, and then over again some more, to find someone. Not one relationship resulted from all of that effort. You don’t know me, but do you know anyone who is so unworthy of love that they should have to try that hard for that long and still have nothing to show for it? I was afraid to walk away from the effort, because if I did, I was quitting. If I quit, I gave up, and I should be ashamed. If I quit, I wasn’t going to find love ever, because I was “lowering my chances” by no longer participating in the space that was harming me. This thought process ignored all of the “chances” that hadn’t amounted to a damn thing in ten full years anyway. It also ignored my mental and emotional wellbeing in favor of simply not being single anymore. You have to wonder what we’ve been taught to believe about what actually matters.
There’s an assumed ugliness in quitting dating. A spinster shock to the system that thinks if we don’t keep working on this until we find someone who wants us, we’re voluntarily labeling ourselves as undesirable crones who hate men and vow a life of solitude, perhaps in the woods somewhere. That assignment of ugliness to the rejection of a toxic and downright abusive dating culture is, in my mind, a real kick in the shins. Hey ladies, better serve yourself up for more trauma and disappointment, or we won’t think you’re pretty anymore! So I decided to bounce that ugliness back over to dating itself where it belonged, and chose to find beauty in my single, valid life instead.
I also decided that the love I was meant to have wasn’t going to cost me so much. I looked around at the couples I knew and realized how many of them didn’t have to walk across hell barefoot first in order to find each other. I wasn’t different from them, they weren’t inherently “better” than me. If other people can find someone during the normal course of being alive than goddammit so can I. Love was allowed to happen naturally and easily, and that sounded a whole lot better than all the suffering I’d been doing to no avail. I wasn’t quitting. I was developing a trust I’d been groomed to ignore.
And while I have you, let’s also lay “When you stop looking, it’ll happen” to rest. Let’s stop assigning if/thens to a space that has never had to abide by them. There’s nothing you can do, or not do, that will make your partner magically appear in front of you. Shut out bullshit advice from fools who never had to take it. If something happened once to someone they know, that isn’t a pattern, it’s an anomaly, and I’m sick of single women basing their dating strategies on a very annoying game of telephone. You don’t stop dating because you think that’s what’s going to make your partner show up. You stop dating because you’re showing up for yourself.
Too much is a valid unit of measurement. Deciding that the way you’ve been living your singlehood isn’t working, that this light at the end of the tunnel you’ve been counting on is taking too fucking long to show up — realizing that you deserve more than this, better than this, has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you believe in love. Just the opposite. In my opinion, someone who can walk away from the struggle and know that they deserve a love they didn’t have to harm themselves for has more trust and faith in love than anyone else. This is how we reframe together. We look at what’s happening through a perspective we haven’t thought of before, a perspective that is real and valid and — for once in human history — takes care of single women. What a concept.
***
A huge part of leaving the dating space is getting your time back. You start to see how much space you have for other things when you’re not spending so much of your mental energy and physical time on “finding someone.” It’s like you begin to live a totally new, extra adulthood, one that’s allowed to involve so much more than dating. That’s the thing I wish more people could see, how quickly the happiness comes when you allow it to.
Choosing to see the good parts of being single, finding value in it, is not relationship repellant. No one’s going to look at a happy single woman and think she doesn’t “need” a relationship so why bother asking her to dinner. Why are we so afraid of what happiness says about singlehood? Why do we associate coming across as though we “need” a relationship as a trait that draws one closer to us? That’s counterintuitive to me. Do you think only miserably single, desperate people find love? How has that theory been working out for you so far?
You have agency here, much more agency than the world has ever let single women believe they own. That feeling of “stuck-ness,” hopelessness, a problem without solution? It isn’t required. You don’t have to stay there, you can choose to leave. If dating isn’t delivering on its promise, you’re allowed to stop making yourself available to dating. Deciding that you matter more than a punishing space that hasn’t — perhaps for years — led you to anything other than pain and disappointment isn’t “giving up.” Walking away from something that feels bad isn’t quitting — it’s starting. It’s starting to understand that you matter more than whether or not you have a romantic partner. It’s starting to believe that life doesn’t have to feel so impossible all the time. It’s starting to trust that instead of the one way you’ve been trying, love is allowed to find you in any way imaginable.
The end of dating wasn’t the end of my love life. I think that’s actually when it began. It was the first time I had the mental space to ask myself what I was even doing by dating so hard, for so long. I could take a beat and ask myself what I even wanted in a partnership — and why. Honestly y’all, that’s luxury. These days, I not only know what I want in a partnership, but I’ve let go of the fear of singlehood by finding the joy in it, so that I will refuse to settle for anything less. If that isn’t one of the kindest things we can do for ourselves I don’t know what is.
I mean honestly, how many single people do you know whose love life isn’t a huge stressor, or a “mess” somehow? That’s what we’ve been taught to believe is common, acceptable, and “just the way things are.” The classic struggling single woman trope. Does that not feel overdone and worn out to you? My love life is one area of my existence that causes me zero stress. After a decade on the grind, with my mental health in shreds, and my self worth nonexistent, to be able to say that my love life is the easiest thing in the world simply because I let go of dating and started allowing life to happen naturally — that feels like a fucking miracle. Like, who is she? I didn’t know her before! I didn’t know the romantic part of my life was allowed to be effortless, to cause me absolutely no strife. I didn’t know that letting go and letting things happen when they were meant to was even an option. Not only is it an option, it’s the best way I’ve ever found to live single.
We often operate under the false notion that abundance in dating will lead to love. The “numbers game.” But does it work? Has it ever? Or is leaving the dating space and receiving a bit more peace in that area of your life just as likely to lead to your romantic future as anything else ever was? We’ll believe random dating advice like “all it takes is one!” while simultaneously swiping through thousands, absorbing disappointment along the way like a parched kitchen sponge. I don’t need a dating life that’s packed with activity, because that activity used to fucking suck. Now, my romantic life is peaceful, and actually hopeful in a way it never really was before. I think that’s because I’m feeding it less negativity and fewer false starts where it once lived on a steady diet of both.
Am I dating as much? No. But I’m not suffering as much — I’m not suffering at all, either. I know how I’d rather feel, and the mental and emotional state I’d rather be in, when I do meet my partner someday. Give the idea of ease a chance to take root in your mind. Things don’t have to be so hard all the time, and I want you to know that you don’t deserve for them to be.
It’s been happening since we were kids, the shame stories around quitting. And they are uniquely more harmful to women in the dating space, a space designed to make men seem like catches, women seem like burdens, and where dating itself is sold — literally — as the only path to love. I couldn’t stomach it anymore, not after all it had done to me, and walking away from it didn’t feel like I was defeated. It felt like I finally found my power.
No one can say rude, lewd, or harmful things to me privately anymore, because I no longer exist in the space where they’re allowed. No one can make me feel like they’re doing me a favor by speaking to me or meeting me anymore, because I don’t participate in a dating culture that feels like begging. No one can make me feel like a tepid option in an endless buffet of women, because I’m not a face you can swipe through. I am no longer trying, hoping, and waiting to be chosen. I am the one who makes choices. I am who another person and a relationship itself will have to demonstrate value to, and in an absence of value, I will walk confidently back to my singlehood. Tell me if that sounds like a quitter to you.
Finding a new way of looking at singlehood and dating is not quitting. It is not failure, giving up, or admitting that “it’s just never going to happen.” Because how the hell do you know? How do you know it’s never going to happen? If you believed so thoroughly that it would happen in dating that you were willing to participate in that shit for so long, why can’t there be the same amount of trust in just living your life? Why do we only believe in something that hurts? I believe that I will connect with the right relationships for me when I’m meant to. And I’ve learned, through more than ten years of information, that I’m not meant to be in the modern dating space. To me, that doesn’t feel like quitting, it feels like learning, and it feels like choosing to live a full, happy life, whatever my relationship status happens to be. That choice is yours, too.
***
Yes, we have choices, and agency, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t difficulties in deploying them. Especially not after the scars the singlehood struggle can leave us with. I won’t ask you to remember your agency or make different choices as a single person without supporting those suggestions with evidence. I know how deeply the singlehood narratives have burrowed inside our brains, and the very idea of quitting dating for the sake of your own wellbeing is slow to take root. There’s no shame in that, it’s simply what we’ve been taught. But what if I pointed out a little bit of logic that those belittling singlehood narratives don’t want you to notice?
Singlehood doesn’t suck. Dating does.
Most singlehood narratives, the things we think and assume about being single or about single people, are full trash. When you crack the shell of singlehood narratives against a bowl, their flaws are instantly exposed as nonsense, and it quickly becomes clear that we’ve been fed things we never needed to believe. One of the most accepted lies we’ve ever heard about being single is that it sucks. That’s a core lie, maybe the biggest one, even.
Being single itself, with all its freedoms and ease, is fucking fantastic. It’s dating that’s the actual worst, and it’s been letting singlehood take the blame for its bullshit for a long, long time.
There’s a reluctance to separate the two, singlehood and dating, and if you keep reading I’ll help you peel apart the velcro. The first thing to do, if you have any interest at all in not being miserable for the duration of your singlehood, is take a step back and really think about what’s going on, and what you’re choosing to participate in. Too often I think we keep our heads firmly down in a dating app throughout our singlehood, never taking even a moment to ask ourselves why we’re doing this whole “dating” thing in the first place. We just assume it’s the thing we have to do because single has always been sold as a thing that’s wrong.
What is dating? What has it actually become? In my experience, it’s become an endless treadmill of swiping our lives away, only to maybe occasionally book a date with a person who thinks they’re doing us a favor by agreeing to meet for happy hour. People we go on dates with now regard us with the same amount of value one might assign to a rapidly melting breath mint. Dating isn’t sweet, or even kind. It isn’t fun, heaven knows it isn’t romantic. That would involve the participants (and the apps facilitating participation), coming at dating with identical intentions, and identical value assigned to the activity. Instead, dating now runs a spectrum between an obligatory chore and a source of free sex work. Don’t worry about needing to have manners or human decency toward someone you’ve just seen naked, you can just ghost in the morning — sorry, at 2am who are we kidding, you aren’t sleeping there! And are there consequences for ghosting? Heavens no! In this economy?
Dating has become, perhaps unsurprisingly, mechanical — a feelings-less ritual we participate in because we think we have to. Dating, for many of us, isn’t the main perk of being single — it’s the main burden.
On the other hand, what is singlehood? What is this unattached time in our lives really all about? There’s some solitariness in there, sure, perhaps some loneliness. There’s certainly a shitload of societal shame, and perhaps an assumption that we’re somehow “flawed,” or wouldn’t someone be in love with us? This of course ignores the fact that all the people we know who are currently in love are flawed all the livelong day. No, what I think singlehood actually entails is this: Making all our decisions without needing anyone else’s buy-in or opinions. Nesting at home how we want to. Operating on whatever schedule we deem most enjoyable. Never adopting more housework than we ourselves generate or require. A life void of spats and tiffs and disagreements over everything from what city to live in right down to “I don’t know, where do you want to eat?” And you’re telling me that being single is the bad thing? All this freedom, possibility, consequence-less selfishness, the horror!
There is no inherent responsibility upon us as singles to date if we don’t have a partner. That isn’t required by anyone or the government. We are allowed to simply live and breathe without the burden of exposing ourselves to the modern dating scene. We don’t have to date, but we’ve so closely aligned singlehood and dating in our minds that we believe we have to. Have you ever asked yourself if you enjoy dating? Or have you just accepted how much it sucks with a shoulder shrug because you think it’s your job? I bet you’ve complained to yourself, if not to others, about how you hate being single. Do you? Or have you just been dating too fucking long?
Here’s what’ll really frost your cupcake: We’re allowed to not be dating, and still meet new partners anyway. Insane, I know. Or is it? Have you taken an accounting recently of all the couples you know? How many of them are together because they were actively “on the hunt?” Has that method actually worked out for the couples you admire? Or did they kind of just meet…wherever? Again, I think we’re falsely associating dating and singlehood to our detriment, and honestly I believe there’s a lot more we can do with a day’s worth of cellphone battery.
Dating isn’t your responsibility until you find a partner, and that’s never more true than when you’re not enjoying dating. If dating sucks, you don’t have to date. That’s not required of you, you are allowed to let it go. Not only is that not sentencing yourself to a lifetime of singlehood, because you can meet someone anywhere goddammit, but also…letting go of dating frees you up to start looking around at your singlehood and wondering why the hell you were supposed to hate it in the first place.
After ten years of actively participating, I stopped dating on January 26th 2019. My adulthood has been exponentially happier ever since. In fact, the only times my singlehood has genuinely caused me sadness since I stopped dating are those moments when a man has come into my life in the wild (it does happen) and then nothing ever came of that because he fizzled into the background like flat Diet Coke. I’m only ever disappointed by my singlehood when dating finds a way to worm itself back into it. And to be fair, I do think it’s worth the risk. I would like to have a relationship again someday, so I have to be open, and maybe a bit vulnerable, to being disappointed again if that’s the way things go. But the difference now is that when something disappointing happens, I know I still have a happy singlehood to return to. And the only thing that could get me to give up my happy singlehood is a relationship that doesn’t disappoint me at all.
Do you hate being single, or do you hate dating? Have you ever experienced a single life free from dating? Do you even know what that’s like? Has anyone ever told you that you’re allowed to stop trying? It’s there for you, it’s allowed, and it doesn’t mean you’ll never find someone. It also doesn’t mean that you’re a quitter. Not in the negative way we’ve been taught to think of walking away from things. We’re grown ups now, and we’re allowed to prioritize our wellbeing over a dating world that has never delivered. We don’t have to believe in bullshit forever. We can know we deserve better than the dating space, leave it—and live. That doesn’t sound like giving up, to me.