The tug of wanting a companion is lovely, real and normal; humans were not meant to do life alone. For those of us still “waiting for the one”, we find ourselves dreading dates and attempting new hobbies as we anticipate our person rounding the corner. Yet, as the saying goes, a watched pot never boils. It takes a serious amount of waiting on the water inside to finally see it boil and in the meantime, we could have diced volumes of vegetables. If our focus is on waiting for this mystery person to show up instead of being present in the world around us and discovering ourselves within that world, we tend to live out of two extremes: fear or fantasy (or sometimes both- yikes!)
When we live in fear, we play the game of comparison; “Something must be wrong with me…why hasn’t anyone chosen me?” And it gets worse: we tell ourselves we’ll never find anyone and unintentionally settle for someone who isn’t the best for us and whom we probably aren’t the best for in return. We fear loneliness, which results in using relationships to suppress our feelings. However, in our singleness, while we may not have a significant other, we don’t have to be lonely. Whether we are single or married we still need friendships, so while we are single, what better time to find our best friends than when we have time to spend with them, support and help them? Instead of focusing on the one who isn’t here yet, we ought to focus on the ones who are.
When we live in fantasy, we do things we think our mystery person would be proud of; things we think they would like if they saw us doing them. This is often disguised under the veil of, “I’m working on myself so I can be ready for a relationship.” The danger in this is inauthenticity with ourselves because we aren’t actually interested in working to become better people, but so that we can snag a spouse. In wanting to be in a relationship but not yet being in one and by telling others we’re making the choice not to, we inevitably build walls around ourselves making it difficult to connect with others. If we’re not careful, this could potentially self-sabotage our chances with a likely candidate were they to come along. The other danger is that we are not only living for someone else; we’re living for someone we don’t even know.
Singleness is not a problem to be fixed. Our end game should not be marriage. We should instead pursue the healing of our hearts and the surrender of our spirits, for us. Whether “the one” shows up tomorrow or we never marry, we must trust that on our individual journey, in our unique story, today, we are a better version of our self for being single. If we live in this space, we discover our best self; that should be our end game.
By Bridgette Bassa