I Spent My Life Yearning for Something

The last six years of my life have seen me go on numerous dates. Some dates progressed into 4 or 5 dates, and some didn’t go beyond the first one. Regardless of whether things didn’t proceed further, I found myself mop around for a week or two and then jump back into the dating pool.

If you want something, you work for it. Right?

I have only recently paused and started asking myself, is this really what I want? I do believe in love, and it is indeed a beautiful feeling. However, lately, I realized that I never really questioned my quest for finding the one. As if it’s just something I am supposed to be doing. As a feminist, it was even harder for me to accept the amount of importance I attached to being in a relationship and never questioning where that attachment came from.

Adults above mid-twenties in my part of the world, especially women have this societal expectation and pressure that they should have found someone before their 30s. As soon as you graduate, you start seeing people getting married front right, and center. Naturally, you assume that’s what you should be doing too since everyone is doing that.

More than a year back, my dating experience had me meet a guy who wasn’t a good fit for me, and I saw it from day one yet I continued dating him. I was never myself around him, I had a tugging feeling that I shouldn’t be dating him, and yet I did. I have pretty good gut instincts but I silenced them too. Eventually, he ended up ghosting me, and guess what, I breathed a sigh of relief. I was happy to be free of the nagging gut feeling.

I found myself moping over being ghosted for the next few days, which was weird because I was relieved just a couple of days earlier. I didn’t even see a future with that person, yet I was mourning what could’ve been had he been this or that, why? That’s pretty weird. I was mourning what I never had.

I finally started to see patterns in my dating experiences and paused dating altogether. Then the pandemic hit so there wasn’t much scope anyway and guess what I was glad about not dating anymore.

It was as if now I had a valid excuse to quit dating — even though you don’t really need any excuse to quit dating to focus on yourself.

I remember a friend forwarded me a meme in that time on the lines of ‘Don’t worry, the pandemic will leave just as that person who you thought you’d marry did.’ and at that moment I realized I never met the person I thought I’d marry. Not even once in these past six years had I come across a person I saw a future with. I saw a ‘potential’ future with many though, and that’s what I had always been mourning after every experience, ‘The what could have beens’

. . .

The past year all by myself in quarantine had me spend so much time with myself and I truly got to know myself in that time. I realized with overwhelming sadness that I spent so many years of my life mourning for something I never had, longing for something that society made me feel I should long for. What made me most sad was that I lost time, the time I could have spent on self-growth and improvement and being happy.

Date after date, only to find a reasonable person, because that’s what is expected of me. I am not even sure if this was something I even wanted.

I have come to the realization that society conditions us to look down on single status. Whenever you introduce yourself to someone, the third/fourth question is about your relationship status as if that defines you. We watch movies where single people are shown to be miserable or don’t have their shit together, and happy endings always include finding someone.

But what about finding ourselves?

Last year I finally let go of the pressures I had put myself under all these years. I realized I genuinely enjoyed being single, it was so freeing not having to analyze why a person isn’t treating me right, not having that tugging feeling that I am not standing in my worth by letting things slide, not worrying if I should have perhaps kept my mouth shut to seem easygoing.

It was freeing to just be by myself.

When I shifted focus away from dating, let’s be honest it wasn’t doing me any good, and focused on my life I saw tremendous growth in many areas of my life.

It’s as if those parts of my life were waiting for me to serve them attention and some love, I switched my job which had been making me unhappy for the past two years, I developed healthy and close relationships with friends and family, I got fit — physically and mentally.

I had always been a fairly positive person, but my experiences had seen my positivity wane too. It was good to embrace uplifting habits such as meditation and yoga, in doing that I embraced an abundant mindset.

My self-reflections made me aware that the lack of an abundant mindset and self-imposed societal pressures were perhaps the two main reasons why I let things slide in dating experiences. It was good and freeing to regain that sense of self-worth and self-respect back.

I do date off and on now, but now I approach it from a more empowered mindset. When things don’t add up or make me question my mental space I take a step back. I no longer wait around for potential, and I definitely do not hold on out of fear that this has to work out. Since I have finally learned that a relationship is an extension of my sense of self and not the whole of me, I no longer seek it to make me happy or fulfilled.

Hope this serves as a reminder to myself and other singles, we decide what we allow to affect us. There’s much more to what defines us than our relationship status and the power to stand in our worth resides in ourselves.

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This post was previously published on Hello, Love.

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