Originally published in March 2022.
What if being single wasn’t a failing grade? What if it wasn’t a characteristic of a person, but instead just a thing they happened to be? What if we looked at singlehood as a valid season of life? Would we still treat single women like sad, pathetic, unwanted human leftovers who just can’t seem to get it right? Probably not. But then…if we did that, how would we celebrate and cherish couples the way we do and allow a full industry of dating products and services to continue to thrive? Come on, Shani — don’t be stupid.
You’re not an idiot. You’re not losing a game. You’re not lacking any secret special information that unlocks the current location of your future spouse. You’re not “self-sabotaging,” or somehow preventing yourself from finding love by existing as comes naturally to you. But the world is going to tell you something different, because the world looks at your singlehood as a failure, and if someone is failing at something, they’re not good at it — they’re doing it wrong. The space where that wrongness lives is also the space where opportunity lives. Opportunity to create services to “help,” opportunity to feel superior, and opportunity to assume something about a whole human being simply because they haven’t found another human being yet. Never mind what that failure narrative does to the person who’s being looked down upon.
I challenge the assumption that being single is wrong, but further I’d like to demolish the idea that those who are single, even when we don’t want to be, are somehow lacking in knowledge. Because you can’t learn to be better at luck, fate, chance, or timing. But we don’t want to acknowledge that the only things responsible for people “finding someone” and falling in love are luck, fate, chance, or timing. There’s too little control there, too little opportunity for profit there, and far too much acceptance of singlehood there than anyone’s comfortable with.
No one, literally no one on earth knows or knew the exact time and location to position themselves in order to meet their partner. They weren’t following coordinates or even instincts. They were just in a place, their partner was also in that place, and they connected. That wasn’t intelligence, that was just something that happened, through no genius whatsoever. And yet we have an entire culture and an industry centered around the assumption that single people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.
“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.”
That one’s my favorite, “getting in your own way.” What the fuck does that even mean? I’ve rarely met a sentence so degrading. “Here, little girl, is this the thing you want? Well, the reason you don’t have it is that you’re not wanting it correctly, and while you think you’re pursuing it, you’re actually preventing yourself from having it. Make sense?” Getting in your own way is what you say to people when you yourself don’t understand why something’s happening and you want to sound smart.
Single people aren’t bad at dating, or bad at life itself. We aren’t inherently worse at something than people who found partners, certainly not with how some of y’all met. We’re also not late just because someone else fell in love before we did. This bullshit notion of being behind, doing it wrong — these things paint us with a negative coating, one that we often internalize. If the world looks at us like we’re morons who don’t know what we’re doing while we pursue the thing we want, we’re likely to believe it and develop some pretty shit self worth along the way.
Have you met married people? Do they seem inherently smarter than everyone else to you? No, they don’t. Because couplehood isn’t a success, it’s an attribute. It’s just a thing about you that’s true, no better or worse than any other thing, no more special than any other reality like having a job or enjoying a hobby. But we can’t talk about marriage like that, because that’s not nice, right? We have to talk about people who “find love” as those who won, those who are special and winning and crowned. Never mind that like…basically everyone on earth does this super common thing — sure Linda, you’re a special special princess, don’t worry. And if you don’t like the way I’m talking about married people right now, good — you have an understanding of how I feel every time someone assumes a single woman is a pathetic, sad failure. If the world can assume we don’t know how to “find someone,” I can talk about how married people are a dime a dozen.
No one knows you better than you. No one knows your singlehood better than you. No one knows what you want or what is “best for you” more than you do, but they’ll use your singlehood as an indicator of incompetence all the same. They start referring to your potential partners as “another one,” often with a knowing eye roll that I want to shove down a well.
If you’re single past the age of partnership that’s celebrated, and treated more like a massive sigh of relief as though someone’s just prevented you from falling off a building, you know what I’m talking about. Singles are bucketed into a designation we don’t deserve, one that places blame, fault, and wrongness on us without ever daring to look into the world at large. If there’s singlehood, there’s a problem, and that problem is definitely the single person’s fault. It can’t be a foul, festering, entitled dating culture, heavens no! They’ve made dating so tech now, surely it’s even better than it’s ever been!
I won’t allow the degradation of single people because I don’t believe what we are is wrong, and further, I don’t believe that singlehood — even when we’d rather be partnered — is an indicator of failure in any way. Those of us who actually know how difficult modern dating culture has become would never look down upon someone struggling through it, assuming something she didn’t want was all her fault. Honestly, how cruel.
You aren’t missing information, there is no spouse-finding secret that the world is hiding from you, certainly no secret that someone’s hiding behind a bunch of money they want you to pay them. Human beings connecting and falling in love is free, and it’s also un-plannable. You can’t orchestrate this, you can’t set it up to happen, there’s no morsel of wisdom that you’re missing that’s going to suddenly explain the “reason” you’ve been single and struggling this whole time. I know we want or even need a reason sometimes, because this shit feels overwhelmingly difficult and disappointing, but there is never a reason anyone can give you apart from: you haven’t met your partner. That’s it. There’s nothing more complicated or calculated than that. It isn’t a secret, it’s a fact. And even if a simple fact stings, it’s better than living a life grasping at every straw, endlessly, thinking each one is smarter than you.
We’ve been conditioned to doubt our own ability, intelligence, intuition, you name it. Whatever we have or use in the dating space is deemed faulty, based on lack of “success,” with a time window for societally approved success the size of a doggie door.
Your singlehood doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong, their partnered status doesn’t mean they’re doing it “right.” Relationships begin and end perpetually. It’s not a straight line, it’s a circle. And no spot on that circle is more worthy than any other. No one wants me to say it, because brains that haven’t entertained the idea of singlehood as a valid life think I’m shitting on love, rather than just giving up the stubborn iron grip the world has on single bad/couple good. Love is incredible, but so are single seasons of life, and I’m tired of our single status saying things to us, about us, that are incredibly disheartening, and entirely untrue.
Your choices aren’t wrong because a single person made them. Your instincts aren’t broken because they belong to you. No one knows your future, no one can fix something that isn’t broken. You aren’t broken. You aren’t “doing it wrong.” You aren’t uninformed, lacking strategy, or stupid. You’re just single, and understanding that difference is how we not only rise above the way the world sees us, it’s how we start to change it, too.