Originally published April 2022.
It’s not a jealousy thing. Jealousy is a child’s toy compared to singlehood anger. Anger is what sets in later, after years of watching everyone you know partner up while you become the last one standing—and you watch yourself become the thing you’ve been afraid of your entire adulthood. Anger comes after the cute little pangs of longing while you scroll through social media, after you sit on the sidelines during countless slow dances at weddings. It sets in after you’ve stopped hoping for the life everyone else got to have, and you acknowledge the fact that you have to grieve a life you assumed would be yours—because you watched as everyone else got theirs.
It’s okay to be angry about being single. It’s okay to be livid that you spent your 30s—all of them—alone. It’s fine to be on the verge of spitting fire when you think of how literally everyone you’re close to “found someone,” seemingly effortlessly, while no matter how much effort you’ve exerted, you just can’t seem to do something as basic as meeting a human being. Rage is fine. In fact, I’d say rage is warranted, if not encouraged. Because to spend endless years in search of something without finding it, while people around you who are just as beautifully imperfect as you get to stop looking, that’s not fucking fair, so be mad all you want.
I’m incensed. This isn’t something rare I’m asking for. I’m not hoping to win the lottery or sail a private, fully staffed yacht around the world. All I’m asking for is literally something that almost every adult on earth gets to have at one point or another — if not for their entire adult lives. This isn’t a longshot, this is as common as having brown eyes. It’s common, other people get to have it, other people get to stumble into it, and I’ve tried for nearly a decade and a half to no avail. Angry? Bet your ass.
You won’t find me internalizing my own terribleness, not in this house. I’m not going to blame my singlehood on some long-pondered list of personal faults. Not with the traits of these married people I see. You can’t lie to me and tell me I’m in need of “fixing” before I can be “ready for love,” because all the partnered people in the world who haven’t seen a day of therapy could fill an ocean to the brim. But we tell single people it’s their fault, don’t we? That’s because when we don’t have an actual answer, we’ll blame the thing least likely to fight back.
I am a fighter. I will box my way through the bullshit of a dating culture designed to fail that’s telling single women they’re they problem while it fires misogynistic abuse in their face in between moments of audacious ghosting. You’re not going to blame the ones going into dating hoping for love when what they’re battling against are people going into dating hoping for free sex work. Stop selling your bullshit to single women. We might not know whose “fault” this is, but I know for fucking sure it’s not ours.
So where does that leave me and my anger? Stuck between the unfairness of being a have-not and a dating space that couldn’t give less of a shit. In that moment, when you realize there’s no logical reason for you being left out of this part of life, and no actual solution to your legitimate desires, you have a choice. Either sink deeper down into the cesspit of dating, exhausting yourself, and disappointment, or choose to accept no reason as a reason itself, and forgive it all.
For me, knowing there isn’t a reason is freedom. There isn’t any logical reason why my friends “found someone” and I haven’t. There’s nothing I’m doing to “make” people in the dating space treat me like shit, the dating space itself is simply a place where horrible behavior is allowed. When there isn’t a reason, when I take in the reality and release the imagined, I am free, and I am happy. Even and maybe most especially when I’m alone.
I know we need reasons. I know they help us make sense of something nonsensical. I know if we could point to a reason then maybe we’d feel some sort of release and relief following endless years of trying with no results. I know that those years of waiting for relief cause trauma, I know how they impact our mental and emotional health. My advice is to give no reason at all a chance to be soothing. You have nothing to lose by trying.
This is reasonless. There is no reason why everyone around you gets the thing you want and you don’t. They aren’t “better” than you. You are equally good, and equally not good, that’s the point, that’s human. There’s no reason why you should subject yourself the punishment of the modern dating world, and there’s no one reason (at least not one we can hold accountable) that it’s become the beast it is. This is never going to make sense, and in acknowledging this logical fact, it is my hope we can stop needing it to. Maybe we can also stop searching for (and paying for) “fixes” to reasons why we’re single that don’t exist. Because the thing that’s “keeping us single” is the very thing that attracted someone’s spouse straight to them. Don’t lie to me.
Making the choice to accept no reason as a reason is setting yourself free from hell. It’s releasing yourself from longing, comparison, frustration, and lack. If there’s no reason for this, there’s no reason to devote so much of our time and headspace to solving it. If there’s no reason we’re single, there’s no reason they’re partnered. There are so many ways single people can use our free time, don’t let searching for logic in love be one of them. It’s your choice to stay angry, or to make a conscious decision to let go of your frustration with the nonsensical. Ask yourself how being frustrated at something that doesn’t make sense, and hasn’t for years, is serving you. If it’s not, it doesn’t deserve to stay in your life.
I won’t say that you’ll never find a partner, but I will say you’ll never find a reason that you’ve been without one all this time. That isn’t something any of us could ever know, and it’s for damn sure something we couldn’t possibly cause — not for this long, not while “flawed” humans across the globe get married every Saturday.
My anger will always be true, it will always be a part of what I’ve experienced, and it will always be valid and justified. But it won’t always control me, it won’t be what decides my mood every day and it won’t be what drives my actions. It will be a thing about me that’s true, but it won’t be what describes me. Our singlehood doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t have to. Anyone telling you to find and fix your “reason” is either selling you something, or has never lived a day in the life of someone left out. I didn’t want anger to be my life, so I chose logic and freedom instead. You can, too.