CHAPTERS on Things I wish I'd known sooner
about love, relationships and the fear of being single
In four weeks from now I will be married. As time flies towards the big day I have been trying to process, the process.
With the benefit of hindsight and the privilege of a happy relationship it’s easy now for me to look back and bemoan my former self. That lost girl leap-frogging from date to date, situationship to relationship, desperate not to be single and losing more of herself along the way. I wish I could teleport back as some sort of spoiler alerting angel from the future. I’d grab my twenty-something self by the shoulders and shout, ‘CHILL OUT!’ Or otherwise wrap her up in a big, reassuring hug and whisper ‘everything is going to be okay!’ in a kind of creepy ghostly style voice. Alas, I don’t have a time machine, that all sounds sort of terrifying and she wouldn’t have listened anyway.
In our Western, love-centric society you can be made to feel like a forgotten relic or a failure for being single, as I did, even in the prime dating decades. Everything can seem pitted against single people - hotel rooms cost twice as much, ready meals are ‘for two’ and you’re never offered a +1. Being single can make finding a partner seem like a mountain you must scale every day without knowing how far it is to the top. And it’s easy to slip into a “I’ll be happy when…” mindset, pinning hopes on the fairytale ending and forgetting about living your best life in the moment. I wish I’d learned sooner that thinking this way was at the detriment of finding real love.
What’s much worse than being single though is knowing, deep down, that you’re with the wrong person. It’s discomfort at its most comfortable and, it’s most dangerous. You might not feel like the sore thumb at the party, the concert tickets you bought for two won’t go to waste and you avoid being ‘alone’ at Christmas time. But the more you try to mould to someone else’s world view or strive to make them understand yours and the more you bend yourself for them at the expense of your own authenticity, the more trouble you get yourself into. Being single can feel so rubbish that it’s tempting to call off the search and stay with a person who fits you like a round peg fits a square hole. I wish I’d known how damaging this was. If this is you, don’t do it. Be brave. Walk away. Live life on your own terms.
It took a global pandemic and legal lockdown to break my serial dating-the-wrong-person habits. It was a cold turkey rehabilitation for my heart and it turned out to be some of the hardest and happiest times I’d had in all of my twenties. I was forced into a dreaded period of being on my own and confronted with endless hours of finding out who I was. It felt like meeting a stranger who you vaguely recognise but can’t quite place. I had been so distracted with trying not to be single, trying to be someone attractive and lovable for other people, trying to find something which simply didn’t exist, that I didn’t know what I wanted, liked or loved anymore. Lockdown taught me that, being alone allows me to recharge my batteries and get comfy in my own skin. This alone time was the self-love I had been missing. I’d been so scared of other people’s judgment of my love life that I’d drowned out the idea of enjoying my own company. I now know when I’m feeling drained or burned out that it’s time to run a bath, shut the door for a while and tune into that stranger I got to know in 2020. She’s actually quite nice to hang out with.
Don’t get me wrong, I was still holding on to hope that I would find a partner one day but I realised I had been blindly searching for the wrong things, clutching at straws and ignoring big red flags. While I still didn’t want to be single forever and sometimes despaired that it was my fate, I was also finding a new level of inner peace. A feeling I’m not sure I’d experienced before. By the time the world started to open up again after Covid, I had built a mental fortress of healthier boundaries around my new sense of calm. I established a criteria list of minimum requirements which would need to be met before I would let someone disturb my equilibrium ever again. I vowed to be less adaptable and more forthright with my expectations. I so wish I had done this sooner. And ultimately I believe this is what led me to be with my husband-to-be.
No regrets. I am grateful that I spent my twenties making mistakes, experimenting with dating and meeting all sorts of characters along the way. At the very least for all the stories and laughs it brought me and my mates. I just wish I’d known sooner that despairing over the state of my love life was a waste of the time I should have been spending on being myself, by myself. Because being single isn’t failing. And as clichés are often clichés for a reason, until I learned to be happy in myself I couldn’t be happy with someone else.
Things I wish I’d known sooner about love, relationships and being single;
🌻 Being single is not failure
🌻 Stop serial dating, it’s a one way ticket to fatigue
🌻 Give yourself more time than you think you need between relationships
🌻 Keep in touch with yourself and what makes you tick
🌻 It’s good to have a set of criteria and boundaries for what you want in life and where you want to go. It helps you spot the right matches and avoid the wrong ones more quickly
🌻 Don’t ignore the big red flags. Listen to that niggling voice in your head
🌻 Who are you? Until you know the answer and are comfortable with this, you won’t be able to find the right partner
🌻 Don’t be afraid to be open about who you are and what it is you want, it’ll only save everyones time
🌻 Being single is better than being with the wrong person
🌻 If all else fails, get a dog