I haven't had a boyfriend for a decade. Here's what I've learned.

2023-08-08 19:16

I was at a funeral a few months ago when something was said to me

I was at a funeral a few months ago when something was said to me that threw my status as my family's perennial singleton into sharp relief.

I was holding my cousin's new baby when a relative called out, "Get a good look at this. Because it'll be the last time you ever see Rachel holding a child."

My aunts, uncles, cousins, and even family friends turned their heads to do precisely as they'd been instructed: have a good gawp at me. Someone even took a photo to memorialise this moment.

It was the first good laugh I'd had during what had been an otherwise upsetting day.

That was the umpteenth time that day I'd had a comment about my absence of a partner. "Are you not married yet?" one relative asked me during the wake. "They haven't made the man for Rachel," someone else interjected. "Is that so?" I retorted.

This year, I'm celebrating 10 years of being single. A decade since I broke up with my last serious boyfriend and never looked back. This time has been an invaluable period of learning and personal growth.

That may well sound trite, but I've been reflecting on the knowledge this decade has brought me; the hard lessons reaped in moments of painful heartbreak, the experiences that brought with them unparalleled insights about myself. It's hard to distill 10 years of being boyfriend-free into one article, but I thought I'd share some of the most meaningful lessons I've learned during this time.

Some people are uncomfortable around single-by-choice women

The first lesson I learned is twofold.

The moment at the family funeral is one of innumerable interactions I've had the displeasure of enduring. In learning that my protracted singledom leaves some people scratching their heads, I also developed strategies for deflecting those comments and feeling decidedly unbothered by them. Need I remind these people that they were the ones instructing me to "D-U-M-P" the last time I had a boyfriend. Like seriously, what do you want from me?

It's not just my extended family. I've noticed friends attempting to explain my status as an unattached human, inserting their own narrative each time. "I think I've figured it out," one friend informed me. "You just text guys without ever going on dates with them."

"You're so weird," another friend told me. "It's just not a priority for you right now, that's all," another concluded. The latter statement is closest to the truth. But, why is my lack of boyfriend something that requires an explanation or excuse? When was the last time you heard a couple explaining why they're not single?

When was the last time you heard a couple explaining why they're not single?

I've become very skilled at deflecting the inane questions about my singledom with vaguely witty quips. "I've actually opted for a life of feminist separatism!" is my current favourite. But mostly I just laugh loudly and drink my wine.

During a recent family gathering, a younger female relative brought up the comments I get about my lack of boyfriend. "Does it not make you really angry? Because it annoys the hell out of me." The truth is, it really doesn't. "Oh I honestly couldn't give a fuck," was my reply.

Perhaps the absence of a boyfriend makes my family and friends uneasy. Perhaps they ponder how this peculiar anomaly ended up in their family. But the only opinion I care about on this particular subject is my own. And frankly, I feel chill as fuck about being single.

There is no 'if' and 'when'

For much of my teens and twenties I told myself I’d go on a date once I’ve lost weight. I'd feel good about myself once I shed a few pounds. When I'm thin, I’ll be desirable and therefore "girlfriend material".

I, like many women and girls, ingested the patriarchal idea that to be desirable means to be thin. I have battled the perilously close relationship my weight and self-worth have had since girlhood. At school, I longed to switch places with someone else. I looked at other girls in my year who carried themselves with an air of confidence. I longed to be them. I yearned to know what it felt like to like the skin you're in. But the truth is, those girls may well have been fighting their own inner battles.

Those thoughts didn't go away. They got louder, more difficult to drown out. Sometimes they quietened down, but there was always a low hum thrumming in the background. I tried to address them in the worst way possible — by limiting my food intake. But the self-worth I had promised myself never arrived. I waited for it but it never came. I realised the change didn’t need to come from outside — it wasn’t the flesh on my body that needed to change, but the thoughts within it. My relationship with food is better now. But from time to time those thoughts rear their heads.

Loving yourself is hard. But it's the most important relationship any of us will ever have.

A few months ago, I uttered some of those thoughts aloud to two of my dearest friends. That since adolescence I'd been promising myself a life that could only be unlocked if I looked a certain way. Like a video game with a level I just couldn't get to. "Man, the patriarchy has really done a number on us," one friend replied.

"One day," my other friend cut in. "You will look back at photos of yourself and realise just how hot you once were." When she said this, I started to cry. I'd already experienced the beginnings of that during one meandering down memory lane. I'd looked through photos of myself from several years ago and felt unspeakably sad that I hadn't realised how lovely I had looked.

Like Lizzo said: "It's so hard trying to love yourself in a world that doesn't love you back."

Loving yourself is hard. But it's the most important relationship any of us will ever have.

Alone time is a precious commodity

An older man once told me to make the most of my writing career while I'm young and child-free. "Because once you have kids, you won't have time." I wondered if he'd ever say that to a male journalist.

Speaking of gender and writing, a recent Guardian piece — entitled "A woman's greatest enemy? A lack of time to herself" — really crystallised everything I've felt as a woman with a desire to write.

"A few months ago, as I struggled to carve out time in my crowded days for writing, a colleague suggested I read a book about the daily rituals of great artists," writes Brigid Schulte in the piece. "But instead of offering me the inspiration I’d hoped for, what struck me most about these creative geniuses – mostly men – was not their schedules and daily routines, but those of the women in their lives." Schulte concluded that in order to create, long stretches of alone time are vital, but "that’s something women have never had the luxury to expect."

Since I started writing creatively during my childhood and adolescence, I have struggled with a feeling of antsy nervousness that someone was going to come along and tell me to get up and make myself useful. Even when you have two feminist parents, it takes decades of work to unlearn the socially imposed idea that writing time is a guilty pleasure — time you've stolen from other more deserving tasks.

I am not very good at multitasking. I am prone to distractions. I am, in short, a writer. In order to get any writing done outside of my 9-5 workday, I basically need enormous swaths of uninterrupted creative alone time. My weekends and evenings are spent writing, punctuated with coffee or drinks with friends. As a writer, I find that aloneness is key. Both in terms of having space to think and plan, as well as unbroken periods of free time to just sit and write the damn thing.

NO. TIME. Credit: vicky leta / mashable

As my friend pointed out, I have prioritised writing above all else in my life — with the exception of my immediate family. But that often feels like it has come at a cost. Broken friendships. Cancelled dates. Endless guilt and feelings of complete selfishness.

Corollary statement: I know it's possible to do both. There are women writers in loving relationships. I just haven't yet figured out how to do both.

The reality for me, at least, is that I find dating one enormous distraction. One that I tend to dip my toe in and out of when I have the time and energy. Maybe I'm selfish. Or maybe I'm just doing what male writers have been doing for centuries — maybe even millennia.

But avoiding distraction is not always easy, and it teaches you some brutal lessons.

Some people mean more to you than you do to them

A man I used to love came to stay at my flat three months ago. What ensued was probably one of the worst things I've ever put myself through.

We'd had a fling three years ago. But that fling was re-flung one or two more times after the first fling ended. I fell in love. I usually preface that sentence with "stupidly," but I know it didn't feel stupid at the time. Those feelings, it would appear, were not returned. Against the advice of my friends and family, I said yes to seeing him during a visit to London. In hindsight, I should have heeded their warnings.

As we sat drinking wine in the wee small hours, he veered the conversation in the dangerous territory of his love life. "The thing is, I'm just really difficult to love," he told me. I — a person who had, unbeknown to him, loved him once upon a time — told him he wasn't. He snapped at me: "you don't know my experience." Perhaps not, but I do know my own.

Sometimes you feel things. Sometimes other people don’t. Don’t take it personally.

What happened next sparked an epiphany. He reeled off the important romances he'd had in recent years. My name was notably absent from the list. "Before my ex, there was no one for three years."

I nodded and made all the right noises, but my head was quietly totting up the maths. In this equation, the answer was clear: I was "no one". What had been a fallow period of unromance for him had been a phase of unparalleled heartbreak and self-torture for me.

Later, I cried down the phone to a friend as he slept peacefully on the sofa downstairs. It was a moment of realisation that I had lived an alternate reality in which I'd deluded myself that I'd mattered to someone. The truth of the matter was that I didn't make the cut of memorable romances.

Realising that he'd meant a lot more to me than I had to him was a necessary realisation, albeit a painful one.

Sometimes you feel things. Sometimes other people don’t. Don’t take it personally.

When to dump him

A few days ago I was rooting through my old things at my parents' house when I found my old diary from the year I turned 21 — which coincided with my last serious relationship.

Several pages into the diary, I came across an entry dating back to 2009, around the time I decided to end things with my last boyfriend. "Had, at this stage, decided that I needed to dump Nick," I wrote. "What a bore. Don't understand why I hadn't done it already??!"

If you'll excuse the unabashedly heartless tone of the writing (I was 21), I think I might have been onto something. Not that I took that lesson remotely to heart back then, of course. Nope, it's taken me 10 years of lingering too long in toxic situationships and turbulent casual flings to finally get the hint: you should have dumped him a long time ago.

There was the guy who was so emotionally abusive that I used to throw up after I spent time with him. That same guy who would shake his head at me when I asked a question and say my name in admonishment. That same guy who would shush me and roll his eyes at me. Needless to say, I never want to see or hear from him ever again.

There was the guy in another city who invited me to come stay with him for a few days who casually dropped in one evening that he had a girlfriend — only after we'd slept together, of course! There was even a guy this summer who didn't listen when I said I wasn't free for a date that very afternoon, who promptly showed up at my house declaring "I've come to collect you, let's go!" Sorry, what?

If there's one thing you learn from a decade of dating, it's boundaries. Boy, do I have some serious boundaries now.

Being single has taught me to be kinder to myself. Credit: vicky leta

These men all outstayed their welcomes in my love life. The one blessing is that I now know what I will and will not put up with. I know the red flags. I know the things to be wary of. And crucially, I know when to utter those delicious three words: "We are done."

Life, as we all know, is brimming with lessons. Some of those lessons are harder than others.

There have been the lightning-flash epiphanies that arrived at my lowest ebbs. Moments like the time I stood crying on a New York City sidewalk, I made a promise to myself about how I should be treated by future men in my life. There have also been more gradual educational opportunities — things that have taken years to figure out, and others I'm still working on.

Most important of all, this decade of being single has taught me to be kinder to myself.

Knowing when to silence the inner critic, how I deserve to be treated, that my value lies not in whether or not I have a partner, that alone time is precious. These are the pieces of wisdom I will carry with me for decades to come.

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This article was first published in 2019 and republished in 2023.