On Being Single for Seven Years
I want to share my story for anyone currently dating, or thinking about dating, as a way to validate that experience and perhaps offer some resources and new perspectives for the journey. I dumped my last boyfriend in June 2014. A recurring issue in our relationship was his physical and emotional absence, and I was sick of asking for scraps of his attention. I decided not to contact him to see how long it would take for him to reach out. It was five days before I finally gave up and called him to tell him we were over. I did not know it at the time, but I would be single for seven years; so for the next seven years I felt cracked myself open, struggling with vulnerability and trust as I navigated graduate school, a new city, being diagnosed with a cognitive disorder, and dating as an amoebic form of myself – changing and morphing at regular intervals as I moved through a nonlinear healing process.
Admitting I Had a Problem
My sister had accused me of being a serial monogamist before the breakup and it really hit a nerve, but I needed to hear it. One of my most intense anxieties around relationships has been a loss of self and independence, but once I didn’t have a romantic relationship to occupy myself, I had to wrangle with the issues that made me a codependent serial monogamist in the first place. I was raised codependent and enmeshed with an emotionally volatile parent, exacerbated by media and a society which teaches people socialized as women to suppress their needs in service of maintaining capitalist patriarchy. Society teaches us that the worst thing you can do is to emasculate someone by expressing your needs or an alternative opinion/method/process, creating a dynamic in which it’s safer and less work to not talk about what you really feel or need. It’s a pervasive form of societal gaslighting; layered on top of the abusive nature of race and class hierarchies, it is amazing some people make it to successful relationships at all.
Finding Therapy
One of the more difficult parts of being single for so long was learning to move beyond the 26 years of behavioral patterns and coping mechanisms that were not healthy or helpful, and learn to trust myself and articulate my feelings. My upbringing did not instill good personal boundaries, and I did not have many skills to self-soothe or communicate productively before starting cognitive processing therapy (CPT) and dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). These frameworks were helpful for my anxiety disorder, but I know that there are critiques of these methods and they will not work for everyone in all cases. I loved having “therapy homework” and doing the exercises every week so I could discuss with my therapist. I found it much more helpful than typical talk therapy because it helped me pinpoint harmful thought patterns and reframe them through a realistic lens. My favorite exercise from CPT was one where I had to identify the feeling triggered by an event from a wheel of only six feelings. It put boundaries and structure around how I relate to the world, and helped me validate feelings which had previously felt out of bounds. In this new reality I do not have to borrow emotions from other people, and I express and soothe myself rather than wandering around in a dysfunctional haze.
Living life can be so overwhelming even without all of the stressors of society, family, and capitalism. Learning to trust myself and quiet the cacophony of different dating advice made it a lot easier for me to be present with how I felt on dates. Dating is a really novel and unnatural part of modern Westernized society, which is why I think there is so much conflicting advice. Lifelong partnership was not always a romantically fraught societal ideal, and it’s really stressful to think about something so serious on a first date! How are you supposed to be present with the person in front of you with all of these ideas, opinions, and expectations flying around your consciousness? I think many people end up overwhelmed, and feeling that they have tried everything at some point and exhausted all their options:
Have no expectations
Have all the expectations
Make a list of deal breakers
Date lots of people
Go on lots of dates every week
Only go on a few dates a month
Wait till the fifth date to make a decision
Have sex on the first date
Wait until the third date to have sex
Wait until you’re official to have sex
Talk to your friends for outside perspectives
Don’t talk to anyone, it will cloud your judgment
Just meet people naturally, in the wild
Get on multiple dating apps simultaneously
Ask friends and family to set you up
Choosing and committing to a partner is incredibly personal and there may never be one right answer. There is no friend, family member, therapist, magazine, or book who can determine for sure that two (or more) people should be in a relationship, stay together, take a break, break up, or divorce (instances of abuse aside); every person will have different expectations, coping mechanisms, and tolerance levels for a range of behaviors. It’s worth noting that I am writing specifically about the Western ideal around marriage/partnership which has an intensive focus on romance. This romantic Western paradigm corners partners into codependency, as the ideal of these types of relationships is a monogamous and linearly progressive relationship in which each partner is the other’s everything (sound familiar?). This has not always been the case in Western societies, and is still not the case for many cultures. Recommended reading:
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, Cacilda Jatha & Christopher Ryan
Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, Esther Perel
The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire, Greg Thomas (discovered via Alok V. Menon on Instagram)
Expecting so much from one person – friendship, domesticity, sex, romance, parenting, care during illness, etc. – has always felt a little ridiculous to me. I cherish my autonomy and my platonic friendships because they have given me opportunities to learn and grow without the pressures staked by society onto romantic partnerships. If you have an argument with a friend – so what, talk about what happened, hug it out, and move on. If you have an argument with your partner – Are they right for you? Can you trust them? Will they be a fit parent? Obviously, this simplifies these situations for the sake of argument, but the point I’m trying to make is that friendships are not taken as seriously, or seen as intimate, by society at large. Just because one partnership involves sex or domesticity does not mean it is inherently more intimate.
Romance?
I struggled for a long time with the concept of romance and its place in my life and society. Being estranged from some of my family, my friends became that source of intimacy, comfort, and mentorship that one might associate with typical family support systems. I started seeing a new therapist a few years ago, and one of our goals was to break through this discomfort and create more ease with romantic intimacy. My therapist encouraged me to practice developing intimacy, articulating feelings, and setting boundaries with my friends. I had a lot of anxiety around my ability to advocate for myself in a relationship since I had been emotionally abandoned and pressured to move faster than I was ready in previous romantic relationships. Once I recognized my abilities to develop intimacy and communicate in these platonic friendships, I started to feel more confident in my ability to stay true to myself in a romantic relationship. I had already been working hard on my friendships, but contextualizing it in this way, helped me move beyond my own anxieties of being ready or good enough to start dating.
Lastly, and this may be both terrifying and liberating, nothing is guaranteed. No matter how much work you have done, or how well you can communicate and flex with another person, it may not work out. We cannot make another person happy, we cannot control another person’s emotions, and despite our best efforts we will never fully understand another person’s experience. We can control our feelings and reactions, and communicate our values and expectations. I fell in love last year, and we want to build a future together, but that future is not guaranteed. I know we will learn new things about ourselves and one another over time, and there may be a point at which our values no longer align, or we meet someone who is a better fit for who we are in some future place. Sometimes I feel scared that my partner might change into someone that doesn’t want to be with me, but I may also change and need to be alone or with someone else. After seven years of being extremely independent, it has been difficult to put the interdependence I practiced with friends into practice with someone I love romantically. I think of myself as a flexible and reasonable person, but compromise is hard. Waiting on someone else to do something you knew you could have done really quickly is hard (especially for a hyperactive person like me). Vocalizing expectations and being let down is hard, and I don’t expect that there will be fewer challenges in our future.
I may be single again by the time you are reading this, and if I am I know I will not be thinking of any relationship as a waste of time, but a learning opportunity. Life is too short for regrets, we make choices with the information and wisdom we have at the time, so be patient and compassionate with your past selves and good luck out there.
Other resources that helped me grow:
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, Bell Hooks; this book was extremely helpful in contextualizing masculinity and how feminism can help everyone develop healthy relationships.
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay; Gay is an incredible storyteller and her memoir is a heartwrenching exploration of how disruptive complex trauma can be and how healing is not linear.
The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts, Gary Chapman; while I think this book is extremely helpful, but I caution that it is extremely focused on cisgender heteronormative relationships so the language may be triggering or uncomfortable for some folks.
Flirting 101 Classes, Modern Therapy Seattle; my wonderful therapist recommended the Flirting 101 class offered by this Seattle-based therapist. The class helped me relax my expectations, be more present, and feel more relaxed when flirting and dating. The classes are now conducted online so people from all over the world can participate!
Best Self Intimacy Deck; my wonderful therapist also recommended this deck of cards as a way to deepen intimacy with my partner. They have really great questions and provide a framework to share in a safe way.