Why – and How – We Need to Make Our Peace With Being Single

Among the many skills required to have a good relationship, one stands out above any other: the capacity to live without a relationship. 

Only those who have fully made their peace with the prospect of being single can have the calm, steadiness and courage to face down the problems in love with the necessary conviction or, outside of relationships, to endure the many months, even years or decades, that it might take for the right person to appear. 

Only if we know we can survive alone can we ever have the confidence to ask for changes from a partner and be known to mean it. Our ultimatums can’t be faked. Our partners have a sixth sense of how far they can push us before we walk away – and if we never can, if we dread solitude more than we do mistreatment, we can be toyed with without end. We must always be aware that we might need to get out – only in order to foster the conditions that mean we will never need to. We must be like a nation that every year practices a military drill, not because it knows it will be attacked but in order to reduce the chances it ever will be. Even in the midst of the greatest cosiness, wise lovers know that they might yet need to make use of a metaphoric get-away bag they keep under the bed.

Likewise, while dating, we must make peace with ongoing singlehood in order to have the clarity to turn down person after person, date after date, who doesn’t attract or interest us sufficiently. Only if we can bear our own company will we avoid having to persuade ourselves of the rightness of the wrong people – and avoid letting the fear of dying alone spoil our lives.

At the same time, we will never be able to make peace with singlehood unless we move beyond one of the cardinal sentimental rallying cries of our age: that being single might be fun, fulfilling or interesting. So long as we continue with such bromides, we’ll suffer far more than we need to. Not only will we be alone, but we’ll feel ashamed at how awful it is to be so. We need to accept the truth unflinchingly: being single is horrible. Of course it is – boring, frightening, dispiriting and alienating.

Yet our very best chance of accepting and dealing adequately with singlehood is not to keep harbouring any illusions about it. There’s nothing interesting about having the whole bed to ourselves or being able to play music loudly at 3 a.m. The dating rigmarole is a fast route to mental exhaustion. But once we accept the bleakness, it will stop surprising or humiliating us at every turn. 

For all its awfulness, singlehood is always better than the alternative: a bad relationship with an immature, shapeshifting, unself-aware, borderline person. It is better to be crying – yet again – on the living room floor, bemoaning our fate, than trying to get a recalcitrant, cheating, vain partner to come on board and love us properly. At least solitude doesn’t rob us of a future; at least, at all moments, it contains the possibility of something better. 

We should hate being single very much – but we should also understand the extent to which enduring it soberly and steadily is the ultimate guarantor of the future we deserve.