How it Feels to Stay Single in A Love-Obsessed World
Not everyone wants a life that resembles an upbeat pop song
Don’t ask me to count how many times I’ve walked home, alone, the sound of The Smiths pulsing through my earphones as frontman, Morrissey, laments: “You know I’m unlovable …”
Sometimes, if it’s late evening or no one else is walking behind me, I close my eyes and imagine a world where every line of The Smiths’ lyrics is plastered on t-shirts, billboards, the front page of newspapers (who wouldn’t prefer to read I’d be more fulfilled making Christmas cards with the mentally ill instead of Just do it?)
The Smiths are, or were, the collective voice of loners world over — those whose bedroom walls drip with stinging solitude, those who wince at the sight of sunlight and retreat back to their apartment with urgency simply because they’ve had to check the letterbox. There are days when I have felt their songs caress my lips with every exhalation I take.
But I don’t listen to their music because I am lonely.
I have been single my whole life and, at 36, I accept that is unlikely to change. Of course, miracles happen every day; but when you are reticent, don’t engage with apps and haven’t let the gym steamroll your body into something socially acceptable then it is unlikely — very unlikely — that someone might just crash through the ceiling or come tapping on your window offering to fly you to Never Land.
Singledom, to me, makes sense, fits into my hands the way that some people are just naturally gifted at playing an instrument or a sport. There are those I know who drift from one relationship to the next as easily as navigating a shopping trolley down one aisle and into another, perhaps in fear they are missing out. One friend, on turning 40, even went as far as to say: “I’d rather be in a shitty relationship than be this alone.”
Really? I mean, really?
Another friend, on ending her marriage of decades, went to a psychologist who reassured her: “Honey, most of the women who come to see me would kill for the strength to do what you’ve done.”
So why don’t we hear that in any other mainstream discourse?
Pop music — at least in the traditional sense — is difficult for me to like. It’s either disgustingly upbeat (you’ve got a partner, your life is complete) or pathetically sad because of that void in your life. Rarely does it deviate from these two well-worn paths.
I understand that having no one at all to talk to, to visit, to share your life and world with in some way is a miserable existence; even book and film characters get more company than that, and they’re all fictitious. I just grow frustrated with the pop music narrative which shapes our realities: the single life is for losers, those at the bottom of the barrel. Don’t even get me started on marriage and its cage-like confines. Does this make me heartless? No, I don’t think so.
Two years ago, I fell head-first for someone I call A (the first letter of the alphabet, my first experience of knowing how it felt to fall in love, to surrender to toppling from the peak of a cliff and enjoy the vertiginous splendour of escape that A’s presence gave me).
But A, whose identity I have attempted to obscure and erase completely, was a narcissist, a monster with the grace of a swan who danced into my life and ignited a bomb. I try not to be bitter, resentful: a grenade explodes suddenly, in seconds; A at least spared me from death by one thousand cuts.
And I know not everyone in this world is an A. I have had one or two dates before and after A, though on the rare occasion that there was a third or fourth, I could never shake the feeling that this wasn’t about me, the individual, but rather the company that me the person with a voice and a heartbeat could offer them to ameliorate loneliness.
But loneliness is not always like that. Sometimes, you can weave the dark shadows into a steely strength and then it becomes something else. Something not so lonely at all. Aloneness. My friend.
When I started writing this, I downloaded Tinder, just to see if my long-suspected belief that romance is more about physical appearance than anything else still held true. Surprise! It does.
I’m not the first person to express loathing at what apps have done to us. Why stop and settle for one person when the next swipe could reveal someone even better? (Upgrade to a paid membership and you can unlock the 100-plus admirers waiting to meet you! Who says money can’t buy love?)
Swipe, I read, is perhaps a variant of the verb sweep: to brush away, to push aside, to remove swiftly, smoothly. I feel as long as I keep living this way, I am making myself impossible to sweep away no matter how industrial the broom’s force might become.
A single life by choice, rather than desperation, is still the ultimate aberration; it’s looked upon as more depressing than anything The Smiths ever sung. And that makes me feel sad. Sad that so many people are so afraid of themselves.
