What if this is forever?

The solitude vs. loneliness knife-edge of being single

I should preface this by saying that I am not single.

If you are single (and hate it as much as I did), then I do understand if me musing about the struggles of solitude from the comfort of my long-term relationship makes you want to roll your eyes so hard they fall out of your skull.

I was single for about three years, between the ages of 27-31—which I know isn’t that long in the grand scheme of things. It felt interminable though, partially because almost all of my friends had found partners by then. Partners, and stability, and dual-incomes.

And before those single years, I had spent more than ten years in a relationship with someone who wasn’t so much a partner as they were an anchor. Always dragging me down to the bottom.

I spent so long feeling lonely in that relationship that, by the time I was single as an adult, the loneliness had spread, seeping like an inky blackness into all my ideas about the future.

I rely a lot on mental fantasy to survive difficult situations. All throughout grad school poverty, I fantasied about the day I would live in a stylish pied-à-terre in Paris. In any given moment of childhood boredom I could sweep myself away, on a horse, on the arm of a strong, rebellious sort of hero.

But when I tried to imagine a relationship that made me happy, I hit a wall. Sometimes, I could imagine waking up on a Sunday, drinking coffee in bed, making blueberry pancakes. But when I tried to play out a conversation, an engaging dinner date, it all went blank. I had no frame of reference for real romantic companionship.

“Do you run out of things to talk about?” I asked my friend once, after she mentioned taking a long roadtrip with her husband. I remembered the anxiety I had felt about just getting through a dinner with my ex—a person I had known for TEN YEARS—unsure what we would have to talk about.

“No,” she replied, “we’re best friends! We always find things to talk about.”
Can’t relate!

There was something about the inability for me to picture it that made me feel convinced that it did not actually exist in my future.

Photo by Kim Ilinon Photography

Of course, all of my friends were so sure, so smugly confident that there was someone out there for me.

“Do you see you?” they would say. “Funny, smart, beautiful.” They would count my assets on their fingers while I fluttered an obligatory hand in their faces.

Were these things assets? As a human being, sure. But as a human woman? Looking for a male partner? My complexity often felt more like a liability, as if I were a puzzle piece with too many weird sides. The chances of finding a match growing slimmer with every jagged edge.

When people weren’t loudly assuring me that I was a catch, then they were telling me to relax, to enjoy the single years I would never get back when I met “The One.”

“In some ways its actually easier to be single,” people would say. “Like, you can just do whatever you want, you know?”

But it never felt easy to write down a parent for my emergency contact as a 30-year-old, or play through which of my married friends I would decide to call if I ever broke my leg and needed to go to the hospital. Which one would least mind? Who was most likely to be available? Would I just pay for the most depressing Uber ride ever?

It was not easy to listen to my dog’s heartbeat at night, ticking down. Not a clock, the unrelenting passage of time terrifying enough. But a bomb. At the end of the ticking comes the worst ordeal of all time.

“I just feel like, I have to meet someone,” I told my best friend, all that existential terror bubbling out of me. We had met up for a weekend in Chicago and were watching her three-year-old run around a playground. “You know, before he gets too old…”

Before I am Alone-Alone.

“Listen,” she said, filling the silence as I choked on my final words. “Here is what you are going to do. In the next couple of years you are going to get a second dog. You have to have the overlap, it’s what is going to get you through.”

She had lost her own elderly dog a few years before, so I knew she knew about that tar pit of grief.

“Oh my god,” I said, grabbing the idea like a life raft. “Oh my god, that’s it.”

“And the thing is,” she went on. “You are going to meet someone. And chances are, they will have a dog too. So for a while you’ll have three dogs. Which will be too much. But it will be ok.”

Unbeknownst to either of us, I was just three months away from meeting that boy + dog combo. But her obvious suggestion rescued me from a fear we both knew I couldn’t outrun forever.

Her plan to soften the heartbreak, formed in the sun on that playground, gave me one piece I could control in the otherwise terrifying game of chance I was at the mercy of. And, as is often the case, one life raft leads to another.

That spring, I began to notice that I didn’t actually hate being single. I liked the long, quiet Saturdays when I walked to the coffee shop with Murph, and then wandered around the neighborhood in the sun, listening to a podcast, dropping croissant crumbs all over the sidewalk.

I liked not having anywhere to be or anyone to answer to. I was obsessed with my sunny little apartment, hanging whatever art I wanted, rearranging it when I needed a change. I was creating a life for myself that I loved, and the day-to-day experience of being single wasn’t really that bad.

What was bad was my fear that the singleness would go on forever.

“If your future self came to you today and told you that, at thirty-four, you were going to meet the love of your life, would you be obsessing over your loneliness the way you are now?” I asked myself once.

I thought about my life, all my farmer’s market weekends and cheery apartment vignettes. Probably not.

But that forever-dread clung to me. I couldn’t picture it! I couldn’t time travel my way out of the loneliness into a future with someone warm, and solid, and real. I couldn’t believe in it.

But I could believe that a lot can happen in five years. So I started with that. And every time I felt that existential fear, that loud heartbeat clock ticking, I would ask myself the one question that seemed to help.

“If you knew you were going to meet someone at thirty-four, would you be scared right now?”

No, I would think.

Probably not.