Singleness

It is often said, true happiness involves another person. Happiness starts with self-acceptance but self-acceptance is usually found with the help of someone else. All over the internet we see picture and status updates of people in relationships. They look happy, smiles as wide as their cheeks can expand, hands close with fingers intertwined. The videos they post are the cutest (or so we tell them) and we (the singles) cannot help but wish we had a hand to hold, a picture to snap and a person to look at with googly eyes.

From the time we are children, we hear and see things about being in a relationship. Mommy and daddy, auntie and uncle. We see it on television, in movies and on billboards as we are riding. It becomes ingrained in us and we feel like that is the fate for us all. We grow up, our bodies begin to change and things we never paid attention to in the opposite sex, start to grab our attention. We are now looking at Sally or Jim with a new curiosity. Something about them has intrigued us and we can not only see it but feel it. It is new and as we grow that feeling and new found sight follows us. Now we are in the point where the relationships those billboards and movies depicted are what we are in search for.

We see our friends in relationships and wonder when our turn will come. We see our family members positing engagement photos and updating their statues with lovey-dovey sentences. We cannot help but feel a little bitterness, for we have yet to find our true love or to experience love at first sight. We want to be in a relationship now more than ever. Not to gain the things the couples around us seem to have but simply to post pictures and string together the right combination of words to make our friends and followers like it. To feel as if we are in unison with everyone else around us, so we no longer feel left out and alone.

Singleness. This is become something frowned upon in society. The singles feel like something is wrong with them and the couples make it worse when they fill their snap stories with ten second videos of them and their significant other. Singleness is being viewed as a "me problem" and not as a "I bet there is someone out there for me, I just have not met them" situation. In all reality, not everyone is meant to be in a relationship that leads to marriage. Many people think they are supposed to be married but that is only true in movies. Some people also enter a relationship with no intentions of getting married.

Dating without the intent of marriage is essentially: dating with the intent of leading someone on for as along as they will allow. Why enter a relationship and dedicate time, money and shared space with someone you have no intentions of spending your life with? This logic equates to purchasing a dog but you do not walk it, feed it, play with it nor buy it a bed to lay its head on at night. It can also be compared to buying a house, but not getting furniture, not paying the water bill and always leaving the door opened for whoever to walk in whenever. No one should want to be in a "relationship" like that. If you are reading this and are wanting to be in a relationship, ask yourself if you want to be in a relationship just to say you are or so that you can spend the rest of your life with a person who makes you feel things you have never felt before.

If you are the single person surrounded by couples, look at their relationship (as much as you can without being in their business) and see if they are together for the right reasons and with the right goals in mind:

1. To marry after a certain period of time
2. To spend the rest of their life with that person
3. To share their time, thoughts, money, space and emotions with that person
4. To be committed to no longer living their life for themselves

If you are close to those couples ask them if these four things are reasons behind their dating. Ask them what it is really like to be in a relationship. When the pictures are not being taken and when the statuses are not being updated and see what they say.