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For fifteen years my love life had been my only life. I entered into relationships with men and lost myself in them completely.
It’s not that these men I fell in love with asked me to submit to them; it was just what came naturally to me being the people pleaser that I am. For most of my life the only happiness I knew was when I was making someone else happy. Still, that kind of happiness often left me bitter when my partner fell short in providing the same attention to me.
Every time I was in a monogamous relationship I secretly felt trapped. I dreamed of fleeing so I might know what it was like to not need a man so desperately. Yet when each of my relationships ended I still found myself running toward a new man because I didn’t know how to deal with loneliness any other way.
Over time I learned there are a million different ways to cure loneliness that have nothing to do with being in a relationship, and over the past nine months I finally realized I’m extraordinarily lucky to have the freedom to explore all of them as a single woman in my thirties.
The last few years I’ve gone back and forth with myself about whether I want to date or be committed to someone again. I thought my resistance to new romantic relationships was fear so I forced myself to join okcupid and make an effort to talk to more men, but after much consideration I think it’s just because I’ve been happier as a single than I ever was in a relationship.
It’s been a struggle for me to be OK with my finding happiness without romantic love because for so much of my life I was only able to find happiness in it. I’ve also had a lot of guilt about being content alone when so many others aren’t.
I mean, there must be something wrong with a woman who doesn’t have the desire to date or get married because she likes her life sans live-in wiener right?
WRONG.
There is more than one way to feel complete.
If we’re being honest I’m a bit of a slut actually.
You know what completes me? Multiple wieners and vaginas.
That’s right. Every man and woman who comes into my life on a daily basis completes me. It’s the connections that I am open to everyday as I float along my fabulously single journey, no matter how big or small, that fulfill me.
I’m never really alone unless I choose to be.
Though I’m happy as a single, I’ll admit there are times I hear women talk about their relationships or see couples when I’m out, and I can’t help but feel tiny pangs of jealousy because “something must be missing” if I don’t have what they have.
But is something really missing? Nope.
The only missing going on is me missing out on the awesome that is my single life by getting tied up in the myth that something is missing when I’m not in a relationship.
Because that’s exactly what it is. A myth.
And I choose not to believe it anymore.
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