Middle school. One of your friends gets their first boyfriend. You scoff. You think, I would never get a boyfriend in middle school, it won’t last long. I’ll just wait until high school. I’ll find my high school sweetheart and live happily ever after. What do middle schoolers know about love anyway? High School. Everyone gets asked to prom. Or gets their first “real” boyfriend. Or brags about their first kiss or even their first time. Once again, you scoff. High school relationships never work out. I’m just saving myself from the heartbreak. People always find their true loves in college, so I will too. College. Everyone around you seems to be settling down. Your roommates have found their true love and are already planning their life together. At this point, if you haven’t had a boyfriend or your first kiss, what have you been doing? This time, you don’t scoff. Instead, you cry. Did I do something wrong? I thought my time would come and now that it’s finally here, I’m still alone. What about all those movies? And books? And my friends? Everything around me is saying I should have found love by now. Why? Why haven’t I? Am I…am I broken? Is this what it’s come to? Society has screwed me up so much that I think I am broken when I can’t find my own happiness from someone else’s love for me. I feel like I need someone else to show some kind of romantic interest in me in order to see my own worth. Instead of telling me I’m wrong, society tries to encourage me by saying “You’ll find your special someone one day” or “Maybe you should do this and then boys will go after you”. They’re correcting the wrong issue! I shouldn’t have to feel shame about not being in a relationship. In one of her articles, Zita Fontaine highlights this harmful notion and states, “there was an underlying concept of somehow being incomplete if you are single”. Why do people associate singleness with such incompleteness? I, for one, am not incomplete. I do not need a guy in my life to deliver my self-worth to me. For me, singleness has given me a huge sense of independence, one that I’m greatly proud of. I’ve been able to find myself and gain the confidence I needed. I was so distracted by society’s notions that I could only do these things with the help of a romantic partner and I sunk into this sadness and slump. I thought I was helpless because I didn’t have a boyfriend, but I am far from that. Of course, there’s still days where I fantasize about being in a relationship or days where I get super sad when I see all my friends and their significant others, but I’m trying to better myself. It’s hard to throw out society’s standards overnight, it takes a lot of time to overcome stereotypes, but it’s not impossible.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Indy chapter.