Should We Be Afraid to Be Alone?
Or are we just falling prey to societal pressure?
I’ve been single for all of my 20’s. And I’m turning 28 this year.
I never felt a strong enough connection with someone for it to go past a friendship. But to be completely honest I never really dated or put myself out there either.
While being single for 8 years has allowed me to figure out what I want, I still desire a romantic connection like most people. But I am also in no rush to find someone. I’ve gone through the back and forth between feeling the pressure to be in a relationship and not seeking for one, especially for the wrong reasons.
The amount of time I’ve been single doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers other people. Sure, I want to have an intimate connection with someone but I also have come to understand that being in a relationship isn’t the key to a more fulfilling life. With so much stigma around being single, it did take some time for me to realize that a relationship wouldn’t be the solution I was searching for. I was searching for purpose, not for a person to be that purpose.
The endless expectation that is put on people in their 20’s to find someone to spend the rest of their lives with is both unrealistic and limiting. Spending this part of my life single has also made me start to question why being single is not normalized or embraced in our culture.
Is There Really Something Missing?
Romantic relationships bring a new kind of intimacy into your life. It’s not the same as your relationships with your friends and family.
But when we spend our lives searching for something we think is missing, we start to believe everyone else’s narrative that we need someone in our life. This can cause us to settle for less than what we deserve because we feel this is the circumstance we need to be in.
While human connection is important, when we focus on what we don’t have, we forget what we do have. We forget to live in the moment rather than waiting for something better to happen to us. When we get into a romantic relationship and we don’t feel the fullness we are told we would, it confuses us about what it really means to be in a relationship. It takes work and commitment. It doesn’t flip on a magical switch that will make you feel content.
We tell everyone that their missing piece will be found with someone else. That you need someone else to truly be happy. Everyone says you should always be searching for that special someone. But why? To feel complete? To feel happy? When we believe another person will achieve this for us, we stop trying to seek what we need from ourselves such as self-love. These are the things only we can fulfill. Expecting another person to change your life will only prevent you from evolving into a better version of yourself.
So the question is, what scares us from being alone? We search for fulfillment in our romantic relationships because that’s where people tell us it comes from. But what happens when we find someone but still feel a void?
What’s Really Going On?
What factor of being alone scares us the most? Is it the aspect of being alone physically? Emotionally? Are we afraid of dying alone? Are we afraid of not being able to love ourselves enough? Do we feel something is missing in our lives? Are we scared we will feel no purpose in life if we can’t build a life with someone we love? Is our clock ticking on building a family?
These are the thoughts many of us have. Yes, even those of us who are in relationships. Nowadays, it’s never been easier to fill our daily lives with constant distractions and instant gratification.
When you take away outside distractions like TV and our phones, we are forced to deal with our thoughts. We are forced to face our trauma. That’s scary. We don’t know how to do that anymore because we are so used to feeding our brains information and dopamine highs all the time.
The only time our brain isn’t occupied is when we are sleeping. There’s a reason why all of our thoughts come to us when we are trying to fall asleep. The distractions are gone and phones are out of our hands. Being alone can be a scary thought but if we don’t learn how to be alone and love ourselves, how can we commit to another person. We will never be able to face the trauma and grow as a person if we constantly ignore what is going on in our heads beyond the surface.
What Does It Mean to Be Alone?
There’s a big difference between physically being alone and feeling emotionally lonely. It’s important to have a distinction between the two. We start to question ourselves when we are in a relationship but still feel lonely even if those feelings are completely valid.
The grass isn’t necessarily greener on the other side. We want what we don’t have because it becomes a fantasy. When something is not our current reality, it’s easy to build up the possibilities in our heads. And it’s not our fault. TV, music, movies, and books are overly saturated with love and fairytale endings.
There’s a common narrative going around. After hearing it all of your life, you start to believe in it even if you haven’t experienced it while being in a relationship. You might even still believe it when you are perfectly content being single.
We’ve been convinced that being in a relationship should be one of our top priorities. But we can’t force ourselves to feel something at the right age or the right time. What are the chances that most of us will find someone we will be compatible with for the rest of our lives in our 20’s when this is when we go through so much change? I don’t think the chances are that high. Do we stay with someone because we think we’re supposed to? Is this realistic when around half of marriages end up in divorce?
We continue to search for something that we don’t even know truly exists. But because we are so conditioned into believing it, we pursue it our whole lives. This can get in the way of important life choices. According to society, single equals lonely and married equals automatic happiness. But if you know people from both groups you would know that this isn’t always true.
It took me a while to accept what it meant to be single without attaching a negative stigma towards it. I now embrace being single but am also open to whatever comes my way.
When we are forced to be alone with our thoughts, we can learn a lot about ourselves yet many of us are scared to do this in fear of what we might discover. But this is the key to finding fulfillment within yourself rather than from another person. Maybe the person you are missing in your life is the real you. Don’t focus on what you may feel is lacking when you are single because being alone doesn’t have to be a bad thing. When you get to know yourself, you can finally figure out what you truly want and not what others want for you.
Don’t think about what you might be missing out on but what you do have. And what you can do to change what you think is missing, not what you think someone else can do for you.
