Originally published October 2021.
Most singlehood narratives are lies. Most of the things we think and assume about being single or about single people are full trash, and I don’t stand for it. I don’t have to, because it’s actually pretty easy to replace these lies with truth. 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 biggest lies we’ve ever heard about being single is that it sucks. Being single, at its brass tacks, 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. For now though, the first thing to do, if you have an 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, thereby never taking even a moment to ask ourselves why we’re doing the whole “dating” thing in the first damned place.
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 views us as just another item slowly warming its way to expiration under the lights of a digital human being buffet. 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 you can just ghost in the morning. 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, if you live on this planet, and perhaps an assumption that we’re somehow “flawed” in some way, 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 live long 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. 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, oh no! Don’t threaten me with a good time.
There’s an implied if/then in singlehood, one that’s been coded into us after a lifetime of taking in messages and norms and societally accepted standards. It’s what we’ve come to believe about ourselves when we don’t have a romantic partner, the “truth” we’ve allowed societal influences to bake into our brains. It’s the assumption that if we’re single, we have to actively try to find someone. If we’re single, that’s wrong, and we have to do something about it, fix it. If we’re single, there’s something missing. If we’re single, we have to date. This is code worth breaking.
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 as singles without shouldering the burden of exposing ourselves to the modern dating scene. Dating isn’t required of us, it is not a commandment or obligation. 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 stir your latte: 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, all the couples you’re related to? How many of them are together because they were actively “on the hunt?” Has that method actually worked out for the couples you really 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 fucking 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 this 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? Allowed to let go, to breathe, and to live a life free from the obligation of modern dating? It’s there for you, it’s allowed, and it doesn’t mean you’ll never find someone. Not for nothing, has all that dating resulted in you “finding someone” yet? No? Then what do you actually have to lose? Unmarry (lol) singlehood and dating. Understand that the two things aren’t bound to each other. I see what dating has done to singlehood, how it’s shit all over singlehood’s reputation. I stopped letting it get away with this grift, and I strongly suggest you do the same.