s.i.n.g.l.e.

I have been single 25 of my 27 years of life. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. And yet, everything around me tells me that I should not be so content with my solitude. The movies, the wedding channels, the tv shows centered around relationships, every person I know engaged/married/pregnant… these things all point to our predilection to pair off in twos and go forth and prosper. Some days, I log onto Facebook, look at the most recent engagements, pregnancies, marriages, relationships, wedding planning, etc, and I want to delete every single person. It is not a malicious deleting that would occur. I think of it more as self-preservation.

What is a girl supposed to do while she is inundated with couples and procreation? It is particularly obnoxious when you have not seen a person in multiple years and their first question for you is, “So are you seeing anyone?” Now, when you are asked this question as their opening line, it intrinsically implies that nothing else going on in your life, if you are in fact single, matters at all. It does not matter that you are about to finish your Master’s degree and start a career and life you’ve dreamed about for as long as you can remember. It does not matter that you have wonderful friends and family and are the happiest and healthiest you have been in a long time. These things are nothing and mean nothing because you have no one to latch onto and be paired up with in the grand parade of life.

Now... with that all said, I want to point out that I am the supreme believer in marriage. I am.  I am that starry-eyed, butterflies in your stomach, til-death-do-you-part believer. That story about boy meets girl, suffocating love that leaves you weak in the knees and makes you want to never sleep so you don’t miss a second of life with that other person – I want that story. I deserve that story. However, at the same time, that story does not dictate my daily being.

I am still working on reconciling the desire to delete happy people from my Facebook friends… but I think that will all come with personal growth (haha). I try to not let the romantic disappointments in my life that I both personally experience and see happen to those close to me change my approach to life and love. I am a firm believer that Happily Ever After really happens…. Someday.