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| What being single looks like to me |
As a kid, like all the girls my age, I used to excitedly calculate
how old I would be in the year 2000, that big year that represented the future,
I used to daydream about what I would become, of course I was already aware of
my potential and the fact that by the year 2000 I would probably be
happily married with someone amazing, it was simply a matter of time and that was
only part of the dream. After all that’s what grownups seem to do, they get great
jobs and get married.
Today in a grey day of the year 2015, I realise that not
all grownups have to follow the norm, so like many out there, I too remain
single, the years came and gone, love came and left my life and somehow I
remain steadfastly certain that I would one day be reunited with that promised special
person who gets me and doesn’t annoy me and if I wasn’t going to meet this rare
person who doesn’t annoy me well then I will be OK and life will still have
meaning and challenges! Of that; I am certain and have understood it very early
on.
But it seems society hasn’t made its peace with it and doesn’t
recognise my choice as valid or acceptable, to them I am a desperate damsel, a
relationship reject or a potential home wrecker. I am often looked at with puzzlement,
some friends pity my continuous single status otherwise referred to as “predicament”
and constantly try setting me up with single men (that’s it, that’s the
criteria), others secretly envy it (being single) whilst others have simply
stopped inviting me to their parties because it proved difficult trying to box
that single girl who turns up to kids parties with no kids and a bottle of
booze! Especially when that said girl answers questions like “Where’s your
little one?” with “I thought BYOB stood for bring your own booze not bring your
own baby” .
But for the most part people seem to be outraged that I
remain single yet don’t seem to suffer the consequences of it, I want to tell
them to wait a few more years but there’s no fun in that!!
They want to see you suffer the dire consequences of your terrible
ill-advised choice and suffer the harsh reality of being over 30 and single,
after all that’s the only way they could justify their mistakes choices.
So instead of letting the married friends include me into
their circles as a third or fifth wheel, I created my own circle, and believe me,
the pass mark to get in is very high! Just recently I had to make it a bit
higher based on the comments of some angry bitter unhappily married “friend”
who asked if I ever did get marriage proposals, to which I said yes sure, last
year I had 3 (poor sods).
“Three!!!” he said, “Isn’t that a too much??”
“Too much for whom exactly??” I said…
So he said “anyway, they’re just messing with you, you ARE over thirty remember!!”
POW! Double shamed, single-age-shamed with one sentence.
And this is the
crux of the problem, people don’t seem to want to accept, or simply fathom,
even in the 21st century, that a single woman might be quite happy not
conforming to societal norms; that she might simply not want to be in a
relationship or have a husband.
Singletons are
not anomalies or glitches in the matrix of your sedated married minds; they are
people with choices who simply took those choices. The End.
Dz-chick…happily single.
