You're Supposed To Be Single

I don’t know about you but I almost feel that someone writing a column specifically about being single, in a way owes it to their readers to actually be single. Sure they can date or be in unrequited lust or love etc, they can even have a string of exes as long as your leg, but to be not ‘single’? I don’t know. It sort of doesn’t seem fair really. I came to this feeling recently when one of the people I regularly read found himself in a relationship with someone he now considers his ‘girlfriend’.

In addition to making my own contribution to the amount of tripe that can be found on the internet I also read a few columns by wiser and no doubt more humorous authors than myself. I am entertained by their tales of woe and interested in their opinions and findings. I can admire their talent, identify with their plight and think somehow that they are just like me. Except that now one of them is not. He may go on to be happily married with six children and dancing a waltz on his 60th wedding anniversary which could be like me, technically, but right now he has a partner. Which isn’t like me at all.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am happy for him. I don’t actually know him from a bar of soap of course but I think everyone deserves a loving relationship and that includes him. My feelings of somehow being deserted or left behind will also not stop me reading him every week but its just not the same. Its like when married people give you advice I think. They might tell you your chance will come and you have to be open and patient but you just want to turn around and say ‘you think you know cause it happened for you but you’re just not out there any more. You don’t remember how it is!’.

Like childbirth really, in a very odd sort of way. Being in a relationship is about a new life and once you’ve brought that new life into existence, all those happy endorphins come out and make you forget just how horrible trying to find a partner can be. You remember logically that it was painful (I’m sure for men as well as women) and may have even been excruciating but then its over and you conveniently forget. Perhaps just in case you have to do it again. I’m sure that most people would argue, the best advice out there will come from someone who’s been there and done that but for those of us who would consider terminating our single state, ‘am there, doing that’ seems to hold just as much if not more sway. Trial by someone else’s error is always popular.

So now I guess I’ll go on exactly as I have been before. I’ll still read my favourite writers and I’ll still contribute to the overwhelming amount of superfluous information on the web (see above) but I think that once The Single Life finishes figuratively, it should end literally as well. Then I can torture people stupid enough to read with new crap.