Embrace Loneliness

Just before my wife and I started dating I made a decision, “I’m done being sad about being single!”

I had been a single man at this point for about 13 years and I decided to do a thought experiment.  I asked myself, “So, What if you do spend the rest of your life alone?!”  My answer to myself was a realization that all the things I was doing at the time like writing, exercising, martial arts, etc. All these were things that I was going to keep doing, single or not.  Essentially, I realized how much I was wasting time being sad when I could be enjoying life.  

Being single is tough, I get it.  And yes, it’s easy for me to tell single people that they should embrace their singleness when I am now married.  I think the mistake that we all make (single or in a relationship) is that we think the other has it easier:  People in relationships often don’t recognize how difficult it is to battle loneliness.  Single people often don’t recognize the difficulty of not losing yourself in a relationship.

With relationships in particular, what I’ve seen over the years is that people have an incredibly hard time engaging in hard conversations with their partners.  Conversations about money, health habits, alcohol/drug use, sex, etc. may come with lots of heavy implications for the relationship.  I’ve seen people repeatedly avoid these topics because they don’t want to deal with the frustration and/or they don’t want to risk damaging the relationship.    

Even though I had my struggles as a single man, I was never tempted to pretend to be something else for the sake of being in a relationship.  This meant that in dating I wasn’t afraid of hard conversations or transparency.  I’m an open book.  Always have been and I would rather live alone than live another way.  Fortunately for me, my wife is similar in that regard and I think that’s a huge part of what has helped us in our relationship.  

I think the biggest issue with being afraid to be by yourself is the temptation to pretend to be someone else in order to have friendship and/or romance.  Conversely, when you learn to enjoy being on your own, I think you become much more free in an honest expression of yourself.  I suspect that many people pretend so as to avoid isolation and end up feeling isolated anyway.