Babble
Posted August 8th, 2004 by MichelleI recently found a piece I wrote six years ago about being single. I was 26 at the time, still treading water with my long-term boyfriend but essentially I’d already been on my own for over a year. Six years ago. I know all the rhetoric; god knows I’ve spouted it myself: if I’d had a boyfriend, I wouldn’t have done all the things I’ve done, I wasn’t ready, it wasn’t time, had I been dating someone it wouldn’t have been healthy, blah blah blah fucking blah. And you could say that I’ve been unlucky, or foolish, or both, falling for my manager at work or married men or other such unavailables. But I really wish I could really know WHY. I do not understand. I do not understand why I have been entirely unable to find a partner for so many years but have still managed to feel heartache with some degree of regularity. I’ve had multiple half-relationships, some more like almost-relationships that have, without fail, ended with me feeling like shit. Even with my baker, even though I’m the one who realized we didn’t have a future. It still feels like shit, and conflicted, and sad.
I wish I could just accept it. I wish I could forget that partnership is pretty high up on the hierarchy of needs. I mean, not forgetting it is not changing the situation, so I wish I could just say to myself, “Okay, so, I am going to be single forever, and there is nothing to be done about it, so can it stop being an issue now? Can I stop being reminded of it at every turn? Can I just accept it and get to work on everything else?” And I feel like I am working on everything else but I look back on years of doing all the hard stuff on my own and why do I have to keep being reminded that I was doing these things on my own? Couldn’t I have just being doing hard stuff, and that’s the end of it?
I have so little in common with so many people. I’m with my friends and I want to steal away to write to someone who doesn’t exist, or to write just to me. I want to be in the other room during a party where I’m only hearing the dull roar of what’s going on. I feel annoying and ridiculous, and not like myself at all. These last few weeks I’ve felt like a bad person. I’ve felt inauthentic. I’ve felt like all I could remember is the shitty things I’ve done. I’ve felt I’ve had nothing to offer.
And sometimes I’m still mad. Sometimes I’m still totally fucking furious at the shit he’d pull. And the shit I put up with. And I wonder why this is still floating around my head, and then I realize it’s because it hasn’t been replaced with anything. It’s still there because it hasn’t been driven out. There has been no reprogramming, no new software installed in the hard-wiring of my brain. Just the same old shit, same old bad information.
I just keep feeling like I’m not living the life I’m supposed to be living. It’s so much more complicated that that, but it’s the simplest way to say it. I’m not doing whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing. There is something else out there, that perhaps doesn’t involve a garden and long, quiet, deeply sleepy nights. And I’m not sure I’ll ever be allowed to find it.
People tend to blame themselves when they haven’t found the right relationship by a certain age. But how easy, really, can it be to find a person who you think is great who thinks you’re equally great, with no insurmountable problems, who you are interested and fascinated with and happy to be with for hours at a time?
There’s one out there, so it’s definitely worth all of the struggles, but that doesn’t make it any easier to keep trying to kick the football – just like Charlie Brown – and have Lucy continually pulling it away.