Originally published in December 2021.
We were raised with Quitter Culture. We were taught to view quitters as failures, weak, or not tough enough to finish. We were imbued with the idea that the destination is all that matters, who cares how much we hate the journey. Quitter Culture kept us playing sports we didn’t like, learning instruments that bored us senseless, but more than anything Quitter Culture kept us focused on what other people thought of us, rather than how we actually felt. 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 can’t quit dating, right? Quitting means giving up, “choosing singlehood,” “marrying yourself,” or whatever buzzword consolation prize versions of life people think singles have to settle for. There’s no other out for us, no way to leave a dating space that doesn’t feel good that still 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 single 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 fucking 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 failed, and I should be ashamed. If I quit, I wasn’t going to find love ever, because I was “lowering my chances.” This thought process ignored all of the “chances” that hadn’t amounted to a damn thing in ten full years of trying, by the way. It also ignored my mental and emotional wellbeing in favor of simply not being single anymore. You have to wonder what we’ve told ourselves 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 grinding it out until something sticks, we’re voluntarily labeling ourselves as undesirable crones who hate men and vow a life of solitude. That assignment of ugliness to refusing to participate in 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 all the couples I knew and realized how many of them didn’t have to walk across hell barefoot first. 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 trusting.
And while I have you, let’s also lay “When you give up, 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.
Deciding that the way you’ve been living your singlehood isn’t working, that it’s not making you happy, 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.
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 happiness 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 like we “need” a relationship as something that draws one closer to us? That’s counterintuitive to me. Do you think only miserably single people find love? How has that theory been going so far?
My singlehood happiness is allowed to demonstrate the difference between something I need, and something I want. I want a relationship, I do not need one, and anyone who needs me to seem needy isn’t someone I need.
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 doesn’t feel good isn’t quitting—it’s starting. It’s starting to understand that you matter more than whether or not you have a +1, it’s starting to believe that life doesn’t have to feel so impossible. It’s starting to believe 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 time to ask myself why I was dating so doggedly in the first place, and the first time I had the mental space to ask myself what I even wanted in a partnership—and why. Now, 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.
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 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 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 the one 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 ten years of information, that I’m not meant to be in the modern dating space. To me, that doesn’t feel like quitting. That feels like learning, and that feels like choosing to live a full, happy life, whatever my relationship status happens to be. The choice is yours, too.