When your parents’ love story starts in eighth grade, it is easy to think yours should follow a similar timeline. Here’s what I learned when mine didn’t. Even more so, here’s how being single ended up helping me build a fuller life of my own.
I grew up thinking love was supposed to happen early.
My parents met in sixth grade. They first dated two years later, then all through high school, then broke up sophomore year of college and eventually found their way back to each other about six months before graduation.
It was the kind of on-again, off-again love story that still ended the way people want love stories to end.
When you grow up around such a fairytale ending, their story starts to sound a lot less like their story and more like a model for how yours should go, too. So for a long time, I think I believed love was supposed to arrive sooner than later.
And if it did not, something had gone wrong. Or, more so, I had done something wrong.
Even though nobody ever said it, I always felt like being in a relationship was a sign you were moving forward, and being single was a sign you were somehow still waiting.
That feeling got worse as I was heading into my 20s. Friends started getting into serious relationships. Some even got engaged. Proposal posts flooded my feed on social media more than ever.
I felt that pressure at home, too. My mom sometimes put pressure on me without meaning to. She meant the best with her small comments, questions and expectations about when she was going to meet a boy.
However, she never realized that her caring about me turned into a deeper spiral for me.
A spiral deep enough to make me wonder whether I was now the one behind. The more I thought about it, the more I began to think I needed to find someone to complete me.
For a while, I let that idea live in my head.
I thought I was looking for love, but really I was looking for someone to fill a hole I had convinced myself was there.
What I have learned since then is that the hole was never real. The pressure was.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans are also marrying later than they used to, with the median age at first marriage now 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women.
So even though being single in your 20s can feel like you are the only one, the reality is that people are building relationships on very different timelines than they did decades ago.
This is where I learned to stop believing everything social media was showing me. Still, that does not always stop the fear that being single is a bad thing. A lot of that pressure is psychological.
According to the American Psychological Association’s explanation of self-determination theory, people thrive when three basic needs are met: autonomy, competence and relatedness.
That means independence, self-trust and meaningful connection. Fun fact: none of those require a romantic relationship.
You can build autonomy by making decisions for yourself. You can build competence by chasing and accomplishing goals, no matter the size. You can build relatedness through friends and family who choose you back. Even pets.
A 2018 paper in The Journal of Positive Psychology found that these three aspects are key predictors of finding meaning in life.
In simpler words, a happy, fuller life is not built by finding one person to complete you, but by becoming your own person first.
That changed how I started thinking about being single.
Instead of treating this phase like an empty space that needed someone else in it, I started seeing it as a space to become more of myself. And honestly, that is exactly what it has been.
The more I stopped obsessing over whether someone would choose me, the more I started putting myself first for once.
I focused more on the people who were already there, the treasures I had nearly overlooked while searching for something I thought I needed.
My friendships grew deeper because I became more present in them. I reached out more, listened more and stopped treating those relationships like they mattered less than romance.
I paid more attention to my family too, appreciating their steady love and support in a way I had not before.
When I stopped treating romance like the missing piece, I started noticing how full my life already was. I turned my attention away from the chase and toward the people who had been there all along.
That shift is backed by research, too.
According to a 2024 study highlighted by ScienceDaily, satisfying friendships were especially important to happiness among young single adults. For many single young adults, friendship quality was one of the strongest factors linked to happiness.
Researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad found that a strong social connection is one of the clearest predictors of better mental and physical health. That does not mean romantic relationships do not matter.
In simple terms, the studies she conducted reported that feeling supported and having a mutual connection is bigger than candlelit dinners and couple labels. A partner is one form of closeness, not the only kind that counts.
That realization made me happier, too.
Not because I suddenly stopped wanting romance, but because I stopped acting like finding a relationship would solve all my problems.
Psychologist Bella DePaulo found that single people often live meaningful, fulfilling and psychologically rich lives.
According to the APA’s interview with DePaulo, one of the biggest misconceptions about singlehood is the idea that unattached people are automatically less complete or satisfied.
Her research suggests the opposite: many single people thrive because they have more freedom to shape a life that actually fits them.
That word matters. Freedom.
Being single has given me room to become my own person. I have been able to dive into the difference between wanting companionship and wanting validation. Those are not the same thing, even if they can look similar from far away. Let’s just say, validation often won in the past.
This time has forced me to figure out what I actually want vs what I think I want.
I think that is one of the greatest psychological gifts of being single in your 20s: you find out whether you actually know how to be with yourself. Once you do, you stop treating romance like a rescue mission.
Research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that younger adults today report greater satisfaction with being single than similar age groups did about a decade earlier.
According to the researchers, younger people may be less inclined to see a romantic relationship as the only path to fulfillment.
That does not mean love has lost its spark. It means more people may be realizing that being single is not a dead end, just a different direction.
Further research from the “Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal” confirmed this idea.
The studies confirmed that single adults spent more time than married adults on activities like socializing and traveling for social reasons.
In other words, being single can open up more space on your calendar to wander, wonder and follow your own plans.
That kind of breathing room can make it easier to go after the things you have always wanted to do, whether it is a dream you have always had, a new experience you have been waiting to try or a small goal you finally can stop leaving on the back burner.
For women especially, that freedom feels important now more than ever.
We are still fed a cultural script that treats being chosen like an achievement. Staying single for “too long” is something that needs an explanation, especially at family events. If you know, you know.
Maybe the real shift is learning to read the story differently. Being chosen is not the ending that proves everything worked out. Learning how to choose yourself first matters more.
Not in a selfish way, but in a steady, grounded way. In a way that lets you build a life that already feels whole, so that any future relationship adds to it instead of carrying all of its weight.
The older I get, the more that idea keeps rising to the surface.
I used to think I needed a man to feel full. What I know now is this: if a relationship comes, I want it to add to what I have already built within myself. I do not need someone to complete me because I was never half a person to begin with.
The truth is, what I thought was missing was never another person. It was learning how to see myself as whole on my own. I do not need to rush love and treat being single like a flaw just because it does not match the timeline I grew up around.
What I need is to keep building a life that feels fully, unapologetically mine.
If I am being honest, the real gift of being single is that it has helped me do exactly that.
I have learned to clear out the noise in my head and come back to what is real: the people who truly choose me, the life already in front of me and the version of myself I was too distracted to fully see before.
More than that, being single has taught me that choosing myself first is not some worn-out slogan dressed up as wisdom. It is useful. It is steadying. It is the difference between seeing future love as sunlight and mistaking it for oxygen.
No, I am not saying I need to swear off relationships to choose myself. The point is learning to stop acting like romance is the moment the curtains rise.
My story did not begin when I started looking for someone and it will not begin when someone finally arrives.
The chapters have been unfolding for 21 years, but I am done waiting for someone else to make it feel meaningful. This chapter is mine to write, and now is the time to live it.
At the end of the day, this is what feels most true: the point of your 20s is not to race toward the right person like love is the last train leaving the station. It is to become your own person first, so you know exactly what kind of company belongs on the ride.