what i’ve learned from choosing to be single

In most people’s minds, being single is not desirable.

You’re often judged in a certain way if you are single in today’s society.

It’s got this energy attached to it of: “oh, poor you.”

You’re single. You must not want to be, right?

After I ended my last relationship, I knew that my next step was to take a break from dating.

I didn’t know how long, but I knew that I needed space to pause and reflect on how I was showing up in relationships. Because I really wanted to create something different.

I wanted to stop doing the same thing over and over again in my relationships. Having the same kind of relationship dynamics where I just ended up feeling unfulfilled, and my insecurity ran the show.

This period of my life of being intentionally single has been absolutely foundational for me. 

I’ve never really intentionally taken time away from intimate relationships and dating to invest in myself. 

Invest in what I bring to a relationship. 

It’s always been one relationship after the next, with lots of more casual things in between, and I’ve honestly just been so flooded with interactions, that my growth was always happening in this kind of half hazard, intense way. 

Slowing down. Pausing. Reflecting. 

These have all been medicines for me during this time. 

It’s given me the opportunity to get radically honest with myself and where I have not really been available for the kind of intimacy I have said I have wanted in my life. 

(Instead of pointing the finger outward and saying that it was always about my partners and how they weren’t the available ones- tehe!). 

It’s allowed me to learn that I can be okay on my own. I can enjoy being not partnered. 

That I am lovable alone. All by myself. 

In the past, I have used the presence of my partner to validate that I am lovable. 

My wounding has run on the narrative that I must be lovable because this person was here loving me, right? 

But the energy underneath that question is uncertainty. Uncertainty about my own lovability. 

When no one else was there to prop up that illusion of lovability, I was met with the pain, confusion, and fear that was hiding underneath. 

I met the pain of the story that I wasn’t actually lovable, and I had the capacity, presence, commitment, and support to release it. (Because it is sooooo not true!)

Being single has allowed me to rewrite that story. To connect to myself and my truth that I am lovable, always.

I have shown myself that I will love myself, through anything.

My lovability is now not built on lack. It is built on the wholeness that I feel within myself. 

I am becoming my own best partner, first and foremost, inside. 

I am no longer showing up to relationships dominantly from a place of lack. “I need something from you”. 

I am showing up, whole. Me. Doing my best (not perfect). 

Once you believe that you can be okay on your own, you can enter a relationship from a place of security. 

It won’t be this needy, graspy, desperate feeling that leads you to abandon yourself and your boundaries in relationship with another.

It will be solid, steady. You are able to hold yourself in the presence of connection with another. You don’t need them. You will want them.

If you subtly or unconsciously are entering relationships because you don’t want to be alone or can’t be alone, your relationships will be founded on extraction, fear, and insecurity, and that will make it hard for them to truly thrive.

Meeting myself in this period of aloneness has been the greatest gift. It has been an investment in myself. 

Investing in yourself is the foundation to build all of your other relationships upon. 

You can use your relationships as a mirror for what needs to be integrated in you, and then once you do that inner work, you can create the most satisfying and fulfilling relationships that meet you and what you desire and need. 

So what I would say to you is: Don’t be afraid to be alone. It can be the greatest gift.