Why Staying Single Might Be Good for You

I have always been the single friend. The character that you see in movies and television shows, the girl who can never find a boyfriend, never seems to have her act together, often portrayed as the partier, the drinker, the girl who is always coming home in the morning from a one night stand because she can’t get any real dates. Except I’m the single friend who likes it and chooses it.

I am here to tell you that as the girl who has been the single friend almost her entire life, I may be doing better things with my time than the people in my life who are in relationships.

Now before all the committed women out there start getting angry and stop reading, let me explain what I mean by “better things.” I will explain this with a brief history of my experiences with dating.

I didn’t have my first boyfriend until I got to high school and my first ended up being the worst. I put three years of my life, freshman year to junior year, obsessing and chasing after an emotionally unavailable, serial cheater. Those three years took a serious toll on my self-esteem, as I became convinced that I was not good enough for men because that first boyfriend consistently chose other girls over me.

I’m sure that the majority of women out there went through something like this at some point in their young adult lives, whether in high school or college. They dated an emotionally unavailable guy or worse and collected emotional and sometimes physical damage from it. This damage, this emotional trauma, is a bigger deal than we think. Even just one relationship like this can completely shift your way of thinking and how you view men, how you view relationships, and how you view yourself.

So checking back in with end of junior year me, I was a total wreck. I had spent so much time with an emotionally abusive boyfriend, someone who once responded to my declaration of love with, “Sometimes I love you, sometimes I don’t.” That was the line, literally the exact words that made me snap. I got out of his car and walked away. And I thought I was walking away from him forever but the damage he caused followed. Cue my next relationship. I had terrible self-esteem, I was used to being cheated on, and I was desperate for love. So what did I attract next? Just another version of my first boyfriend but worse. This guy was a well-known player, a womanizer who had everything going for him. He was handsome, athletic, exotic looking, smart, and his family was rich. All the girls in my high school loved him. And when he chose me, I didn’t care that people felt the need to warn me about him, I didn’t care if girls that I knew liked him too and would be angry with me. In my mind, I had been good enough to be chosen by someone that many others wanted.

I was hooked, instantly, and fell back into the young version of love, which is just unhealthy obsession. And this guy was a total pro. He took me out to fancy restaurants, I met his parents, though not at his house, he met my friends and impressed them, and he finally won me over enough for me to decide that he was the one that I wanted to lose my virginity to.

Though I don’t regret losing my virginity at that time in my life, because I knew in my body and mind that I was ready for sex and had made sure to wait until I was 100% comfortable, I do regret choosing him to be my first. He handled it very sweetly and treated me with respect but it wasn’t soon after we began to have sex regularly and I thought we were officially dating, that it ended and I found out he had been seeing two other girls at the same time.

Why does this story matter? Because it was these first two relationships in my life, and short flings that ended very badly in between, that shaped who I was at the time and shaped how I viewed men and what to expect from them. I became a young woman with the belief that all men cheat, that all they wanted from me was sex, and that I was only a sexual object, and not a woman worth getting to know. So from my freshman year of high school until my freshman year of college, I made terrible decisions based on those beliefs. I chased after men who were not available, I hooked up with guys to make my first boyfriend jealous after yet another act of him choosing another girl, and I always chose men over friendships, because girls couldn’t give me the same feeling that the attention from men did.

I began to notice a pattern. Despite trying to move on from high school and the terrible relationships I had had, I found myself only attracting men that reminded me of the others, men who were so nice at first but would show signs of being unavailable and only wanting one thing. So I made the decision that a lot of women should, that a lot of women are too afraid to try.

I cut out men from my life and stopped dating altogether, including sex. And I continued to do this while I put the pieces of myself back together for as long as it took. And it took years.

That’s right, I didn’t go on a date or have sex with anyone for over 4 years. And it was the best decision I ever made.

The media portrays being single as bad, as something abnormal. If you are single, then you are doing something wrong and you don’t have your act together. If you are in a relationship, then all of your decisions in life have been right and your life is all sorted out. I am here to say that this is NOT true.

For those 4 years of being single, I watched the people around me continue to date. My friends would make the same mistakes I did, chasing after unavailable men, staying in bad relationships, sleeping with men they thought they could trust and then feeling devastated when the guy bailed. It was easy to see patterns, mistakes that all women seemed to be making. And while they did this, I was devoting my precious time to something much more important... myself.

I highly suggest taking time to be single and I mean actually single, not casually dating single. This is the time to get to know who you really are, what makes you happy, what makes you amazing. This is the time to fall in love with yourself, not another person. All I see are women chasing after men for love and attention instead of giving it to themselves. The reason why I chased and attracted men who were emotionally unavailable is because I didn’t think I deserved the best, I didn’t think I was good enough to wait out for the man who wanted me for my mind, my personality, and not just my body. Why do women do this?

BECAUSE WE ATTRACT THE LOVE WE THINK WE DESERVE.

There is no statement more important to keep in mind than this one. If you aren’t happy with your life, if you don’t love yourself, then how can you expect someone else to fully be able to love you and make your life meaningful? If you are dating because you are unhappy with your life and with yourself, then you will attract the person who will mirror those beliefs back to you, who will only prove your story right, that you aren’t good enough, that you aren’t lovable, and that you don’t deserve to be happy. You will only continue this destructive cycle until you stop and take the time to love being on your own before sharing your life with someone else.

It isn’t always easy. In my own life, everyone around me is dating or has been dating for years and I am often the only single person that I know, in my family and in my group of friends. So occasionally, my mind starts to believe that I am out of the ordinary, that I am somehow different because I am alone. But whenever I begin to think that I should be searching for a boyfriend, that I should be in a relationship just like everyone else, I remind myself that I should only do it for the right reasons. Jumping into dating because I feel lonely or inadequate would only attract the wrong man. I want to attract the kind of man who loves a happy, confident woman who doesn’t need him, but wants him and chooses to devote time to him.

Dating someone should never be out of necessity. You should never start dating because you are desperately lonely or unhappy. Your future significant other should only be in your life because you think that he or she enriches it, not makes it happy in the first place.

It took me a long time and a lot of work to realize that I was my own problem and my own answer. If I don’t love myself, if I’m not content staying in for a night on my own, or if I can’t be at peace with myself and my life, then no one else will be able to make me feel that way.

So I am here to tell women everywhere that choosing to be single might just be the best thing you ever do. Fall in love with your life, fall in love with your body, and fall in love with yourself, before wasting your time seeking out someone else to do the loving for you. I promise you, men will come running after a woman who doesn’t need them to know she is the sexiest thing on the planet.