Relationships • Finding Love • Perspective
Six Reasons Why Being Single is So Awful
Modern culture can be particularly insistent on this point: mature people shouldn’t mind their own company. Mature people should understand that the precondition of any decent future relationship is deep calm about the prospect of being single for a long time, possibly for ever. Mature people should be profoundly unbothered about dying alone.
It sounds so wise that truly wise people should probably silently suspect that something is up. Telling the lonely that they have no right to feel as they do will only ever deepen their sense of isolation. Of course singlehood can be awful. There are scenes of solitude in our apartment and thoughts in our head that we wouldn’t ever want to be recorded and broadcast. But the less we are able to admit to our despair, the more intense it will be, just as part of a solution has to be to know that we have ample right occasionally (or even constantly) to lose our minds about being by ourselves.
What then might be so bad? What exactly are those optimists who laud the joys of having a whole bed to themselves and singing in the bathroom at 3 a.m. missing? Here are some of the low points that deserve lamentation:
1. The pity of coupled friends; the feeling that those phone calls to us on a Saturday evening are substantially driven by a sense of duty and charity for the sop who has washed up on their own at this advanced age. ‘Poor them,’ the friends will say to themselves as they hang up with a sense of quiet superiority (ultimately driven not by any particular accomplishment on their part besides a greater capacity to put up with the flaws of their substandard partners – a vain defensive idea which isn’t ultimately even that reassuring as we turn on the light of our cold empty bedroom once again).
2. The realisation, as we look around yet another art gallery, that we don’t give a damn about any of the activities we try so hard to put into our diaries months in advance to prevent a breakdown and in the vain hope that we might meet someone poetic and thoughtful in the cafe; the realisation that we would permanently forego any further acquaintance with Abstract Expressionism, Brazilian Modernism or Melanie Klein’s influence on Psychoanalysis in exchange for someone who could just hold us close and love us.
3. The moments of exhaustion with all the effort we have to make to maintain discipline and order; a stifled rage that we’re yet again having to cook up a piece of cod and some spinach and changing the sheets of our empty bed when we might as well be eating five cinnamon buns and sleeping on the floor in our day clothes – for all we care about the demented idiot we have to look after who should never have been born.
4. A sense that we are not in this state by accident, whatever all the nice people tell us: that our isolation in fact reflects something corrupt, ugly, mean-minded and deficient in us that we’ve known about from the start and that doesn’t exist in all those lovely couples who gather in parks in the summer and huddle in cosy restaurants in the winter – and who laugh as we walk past them with that unbudgeable sign over our head that reads ‘Pervert.’
5. Then there is the awareness that, on top of everything else, we are in this state not just because we’re unlucky but – as our friends artfully hint – because we are also too choosy, too difficult and too stupidly exigent given the qualities we bring to the table. There are people around; like that one with the high-pitched laugh we were introduced to five months ago by our married university friends. Or that one we matched with online who droned on about politics in the professorial voice. But we can’t. On top of everything else, it seems we have standards (that no one else agrees with). We entirely hate our own company, we’re going out of our minds with isolation; and yet still we manage to hate the company of the wrong person even more.
6. Then, to really dig the knife in, there’s the sweetheart we loved and lost and who enters our minds all the time as we empty the bins and clean the toilet and try to sleep after fantasising about them on the beach holiday we went on. The person who started to drift away from us because we were stupid, too poor and bad in bed – unlike their new partner X, that amazing suitor whose progress we track assiduously on social media when we are not busy writing our love lengthy begging letters (‘I know I was short tempered but…’) that we have at times come to within seconds of sending.
All this belongs to the charm of the single state, about which we’re meant to be so proud and so strong. We cannot have a culture that both celebrates love and seeks to create a cult of sagely contented aloneness. Better to admit that in so far as we celebrate love as a summit of achievement, then being alone is also going to feel awful. Not a little bad, but at times very bad indeed. The good news is that, like most ills, it will feel a lot less terrible once we’ve been courageous enough, and kind enough to ourselves, to laugh very darkly for a long time and amply admit that it is so.
