I’ve always been a hopeless romantic—I am the most unfortunate mix of Kelly Kapoor from The Office, Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother, and Ross Geller from Friends. My catchphrase my first year was “I love love” and I spent the first half of that year listening to a 25 hour long playlist on Spotify titled “Songs that make your heart sing” that I made for myself that consisted of about five hundred of the most heartfelt and emotional love ballads that I could think of. But as time progressed, I grew out of it. I still love the idea of love, but I’ve realized that being single is actually really great and that I will find true love one day, but it’s totally okay that today is not that day.
I am 20 years old and I have been single for most of my life. However, a significant portion of my college life (so, from age 19 to age 20) has been spent in a relationship. Granted that this relationship only lasted about seven months, but in the context of my first year of college and the first half of my second year it was a significant portion of the beginning of my adult life. Because of this, I got used to being in the comfort zone that a relationship can provide. I was used to having that one person to talk to all the time and I was used to having someone in my corner all the time. But with the end of the relationship came self doubt. If that person isn’t in my corner anymore, that means no one else is, right? Wrong. It took me a long time to realize this, but the only person you are 100% without a doubt going to be with for your entire life is yourself, you have to make sure that you are always in your own corner. The first step in this is falling in love with yourself and recognizing the true worth that you hold, independently of if you have a significant other or not.
We all love being loved. It’s human nature, we are wired to love (which is actually pretty cool) and it’s likely that we long to be longed for, and though there’s nothing wrong with that wantonness, we can’t let it be all-consuming. We need to find our own identities regardless of who does or doesn’t love us. A lot of times, if we were given the choice to be in love, we’d probably choose to be in love 9 times out of 10. But, the 1 time out of 10 where you have to fall in love with yourself is actually so great. It sure as hell does feel awesome to be liked and cared for and losing someone you feel so much for sucks, but we all need the 1 time out of 10 to learn to love ourselves so that the other 9 times out of 10 we won’t hurt as much.
No one else is going to put you first if you don’t do that for yourself. That’s something I have wrestled with a lot. I had a skewed perception of what love is. Love is not synonymous with dependency on another human, rather it is a genuine and mutual will to do what is best for the other person: complete emotional dependency on someone is not in anyone’s best interest. So with this realization came another: I had to be able to be content with being single, and I had to realize that being alone does not make me lonely.
Being alone does not mean you are lonely. I want to emphasize that, because the absence of something does not mean that you are missing out. Not having a significant other does not define you and it certainly does not grant you a level of worth that is any different from when you are in a relationship. To be completely honest, being single has prompted the most personal growth that I have experienced in adulthood. I’ve been challenged to take a good look at myself and learn who I really am completely outside of what anyone thinks of me. Your single season holds so many valuable lessons to learn about yourself and about others and there’s a lot of fun to be had! Nothing beats going to dinner with your best friends, or spending a night in doing something you love simply because you’re free to do so. So while I still love a good romcom and I still find pleasure in listening to songs that tug at my heart strings, I’ve grown to be content on my own. I’ve grown to become more patient in waiting until I find the right person to love, and I’ve grown closer to understanding my worth and who I am because it’s who I know I am, not because it’s someone else’s perception of who I am. So if you are single, or ever find yourself to be single, know this: it’s really not so bad.