This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at DCU chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.
How many of you have had the experience of having one of your closest friends abandon you the moment she gets with a guy? Suddenly, she abandons everything else in her life. Or that one friend who, no matter how much you try to help her leave that one toxic guy or situationship, keeps going back, no matter how many times she says she won’t.
There is something quite strange about the way we talk about love and relationships. On one hand, we are told that we should love ourselves, that it is important to be independent and build a life of our own. Yet, at the same time, so much of what we see tells us that being loved by someone else is one of the clearest signs that our life is going well.
Have you ever noticed that having a relationship feels more like a milestone? Finish school, go to university, get a job, and eventually, find your person! Woo hoo! And when everyone around you seems to be moving onto the next stage, being single can sometimes feel less like a circumstance and more like a personal failure, choosing a person to tick a box rather than letting it be something that just happens.
And it’s not like social media helps either.
Open Instagram or TikTok and you are constantly surrounded by evidence of people being loved: going on romantic holidays, receiving flowers, surprise dates, engagement rings and videos of couples looking at each other as though nobody else exists. And don’t even get me started on the relationship advice, when in real life there is so much more to a relationship, including all of the context you’re missing.
Don’t get me wrong, none of these things are necessarily bad. In fact, I think they’re beautiful. But when you see enough of them, it becomes easy to associate being loved with having a successful, fulfilling life, or even to associate being single with feelings of loneliness.
We rarely see the ordinary parts, like the arguments, the uncertainty, the loneliness that can exist inside a relationship, or the days when two people simply sit beside each other and do nothing particularly romantic.
And when we are single, we compare our entire lives to someone else’s most romantic moments.
I think this can be particularly difficult for women because there is still so much value placed on being desirable. Being chosen can become a form of validation. Someone wanting you can make you feel attractive. Someone pursuing you can make you feel interesting. Someone committing to you can make you feel worthy.
But there’s a difference between being loved and needing to be loved to feel lovable.
If our sense of worth depends on whether somebody chooses us, then we give another person an enormous amount of power over how we see ourselves. A text can make us feel beautiful, but a lack of attention can make us question everything. A relationship can make us feel like we’ve finally found what was missing, the answer to all of our problems.
But what happens if the relationship ends?
If someone leaving also means losing your best friend, your social life, your plans for the future, your confidence and your sense of identity, then you haven’t just lost a relationship. You have lost a version of yourself.
And this is why having an identity outside of love matters.
Ask yourself: Who are you when you aren’t someone’s partner? What do you care about? What makes you excited? What are your own goals? What do you enjoy doing? And most importantly, what makes you feel proud of yourself that has absolutely nothing to do with whether somebody finds you attractive?
Don’t get me wrong, these questions aren’t about convincing ourselves that we don’t need anyone. At the end of the day, humans need connection, and wanting love, intimacy and companionship is completely normal. Being independent doesn’t mean acting as if no relationship mattered.
Instead, it means understanding that a relationship is supposed to be part of your life, but not the entirety of it.
I think the issue is that sometimes we unconsciously treat love as the solution to everything. “When I meet someone, I’ll feel more confident.” “When someone loves me, I’ll stop feeling lonely.” “When I have a relationship, I’ll finally feel like my life is going somewhere.” And so on.
But the truth is that love cannot give you an identity you haven’t built for yourself. It cannot permanently fix insecurities you haven’t faced. And it cannot make a life meaningful if you haven’t figured out what meaning looks like to you. It can help, but it won’t replace what is missing.
Most people will realise this within their relationship but interpret it as if it was the other person’s fault, or as a compatibility issue.
Maybe this is why being single can feel so uncomfortable. Not because we don’t know how to be alone, but because we’ve been made to think that there’s an issue if we are.
I really don’t think the answer is to stop wanting love, to stop feeling lonely once in a while or to stop admiring what other people have. I think the goal is to stop treating love as the finish line.
Your life doesn’t begin when someone chooses you. You don’t have to wait for a relationship before travelling, growing, making memories, becoming more confident or figuring yourself out.
Love can be a beautiful part of your life. But it doesn’t need to save you.
Your life is not something that starts once you find your partner. It is already happening.