I am a 30-year-old single woman. I am happily single—I have a successful career, make good money, live in a desirable neighborhood with my cute and companionable dog, and have best friends who are also single. I travel, enjoy sporting events, go to exercise classes, drink cosmos, run marathons, and spend lots of time out in the city with friends.
Yet I know that I dream of a partnership and being a parent. When I venture into the dating scene, I struggle with the ups and downs: the instant hit I get from male validation, the blow to my self-esteem when I’m ghosted, the anticipation before a date, the fixation on wondering what I did wrong, disappointment with lack of connection, and guilt when they pursue me but I’m not interested.
I don’t think I was in love with my last boyfriend, and I’m starting to worry I will never feel that transcendent feeling that so many people talk about. Am I just too cold? Too practical or realistic? Too critical? Too protective of my own world?
My mom tells me it will find me when I am not looking. I feel so fulfilled by my other relationships, but I want to experience real, all-consuming, romantic love. Do most people settle to beat a biological clock, or do you think we all get a chance to feel it?
Trying to remain optimistic,
Jenny
I don’t think I was in love with my last boyfriend, and I’m starting to worry I will never feel that transcendent feeling that so many people talk about. Am I just too cold? Too practical or realistic? Too critical? Too protective of my own world?
My mom tells me it will find me when I am not looking. I feel so fulfilled by my other relationships, but I want to experience real, all-consuming, romantic love. Do most people settle to beat a biological clock, or do you think we all get a chance to feel it?
Trying to remain optimistic,
Jenny
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Jenny,
Here is what you’ve brought me: a successful career, a good income, a little dog, weekend marathons. Uber Eats when you need it, SoulCycle when you want it. Cosmos with friends just because. Spotify cued to your bespoke playlist, set to the volume that feels right to you. Nightly hours-long FaceTime sessions with Mom.
A whole life, furnished with extensions of yourself. Nothing messy or unpleasant or personally demanding. You peer into the world on your screen like Narcissus into the pond, and think: I’m obsessed.
And I get it. You spent four years dating a guy you never loved. Now you’re experiencing a kind of singlehood euphoria. But singlehood euphoria has no natural end date in our world of engineered distractions. You could easily go on this way for another decade or more, by which time your desire to have children may have been subverted by biological fiat.
You ask me whether you should remain optimistic about getting the chance to feel in love, but lack of optimism isn’t your problem. You’re not tempted by the male offerings around you because you’re brimming with delight at your table for one.
And so, you haven’t asked the most relevant question: Why would a man want to enter your world? You’ve made no room for him in your life. You don’t seem to have one patch of bare wall on which he might hang a poster.
You enjoy your life, as you should. It’s admirable that you’re successful and self-sufficient—you can buy yourself flowers, as Miley Cyrus would have it. The deal you offer a man is essentially this: I’m awesome and totally self-sufficient, looking for a man who’s awesome and totally self-sufficient so that we can be awesome and independently self-sufficient, together. That’s the prevailing ideal today, and there’s nothing sinister about it, per se.
Except that it isn’t the stuff of love.
It is, instead, an ideal designed to eliminate dependence and inconvenience. But love, dear Jenny, is built of exactly those things.
You say you want to “experience real, all-consuming, romantic love”—but it’s the experience you say you’re after—something you hope to feel, not a man you might come to need. In your description, romantic love becomes just another bucket-list item, like Machu Picchu. You don’t mention the sort of man you’re seeking, perhaps because any man is just a vehicle for emotional rush. In so many ways, you’ve told me not only that you don’t need a man, but that you don’t particularly want one.
When Aristophanes—over 2,000 years ago—described one soul in two bodies, each half yearning for wholeness, he had it right. Love is two people who want each other very much and come to need each other—for comfort and counsel and joy and even to share pain.
Not a roommate to clean the bathroom to your satisfaction or earn half the income or even yank luggage off the baggage carousel, but someone who makes your life whole, someone you ultimately can’t bear to be without. A life of love isn’t one that minimizes dependence, but one that risks it. [...]
Your life is so full already. You’re not actually missing anything.Now that we’ve regurgitated the prevailing pablum, maybe we can clear the decks for some truth.
Being with some guy is totally not worth upending your life over.
You don’t need a man to “complete” you.
If the right partner comes along to join you in this journey, great. If not, who cares?
You’re so awesome—don’t even think about settling!
Here is what you’ve brought me: a successful career, a good income, a little dog, weekend marathons. Uber Eats when you need it, SoulCycle when you want it. Cosmos with friends just because. Spotify cued to your bespoke playlist, set to the volume that feels right to you. Nightly hours-long FaceTime sessions with Mom.
A whole life, furnished with extensions of yourself. Nothing messy or unpleasant or personally demanding. You peer into the world on your screen like Narcissus into the pond, and think: I’m obsessed.
And I get it. You spent four years dating a guy you never loved. Now you’re experiencing a kind of singlehood euphoria. But singlehood euphoria has no natural end date in our world of engineered distractions. You could easily go on this way for another decade or more, by which time your desire to have children may have been subverted by biological fiat.
You ask me whether you should remain optimistic about getting the chance to feel in love, but lack of optimism isn’t your problem. You’re not tempted by the male offerings around you because you’re brimming with delight at your table for one.
And so, you haven’t asked the most relevant question: Why would a man want to enter your world? You’ve made no room for him in your life. You don’t seem to have one patch of bare wall on which he might hang a poster.
You enjoy your life, as you should. It’s admirable that you’re successful and self-sufficient—you can buy yourself flowers, as Miley Cyrus would have it. The deal you offer a man is essentially this: I’m awesome and totally self-sufficient, looking for a man who’s awesome and totally self-sufficient so that we can be awesome and independently self-sufficient, together. That’s the prevailing ideal today, and there’s nothing sinister about it, per se.
Except that it isn’t the stuff of love.
It is, instead, an ideal designed to eliminate dependence and inconvenience. But love, dear Jenny, is built of exactly those things.
You say you want to “experience real, all-consuming, romantic love”—but it’s the experience you say you’re after—something you hope to feel, not a man you might come to need. In your description, romantic love becomes just another bucket-list item, like Machu Picchu. You don’t mention the sort of man you’re seeking, perhaps because any man is just a vehicle for emotional rush. In so many ways, you’ve told me not only that you don’t need a man, but that you don’t particularly want one.
When Aristophanes—over 2,000 years ago—described one soul in two bodies, each half yearning for wholeness, he had it right. Love is two people who want each other very much and come to need each other—for comfort and counsel and joy and even to share pain.
Not a roommate to clean the bathroom to your satisfaction or earn half the income or even yank luggage off the baggage carousel, but someone who makes your life whole, someone you ultimately can’t bear to be without. A life of love isn’t one that minimizes dependence, but one that risks it. [...]
We found a guy we thought was cute who made us laugh. We gave him a shot and let him surprise us. We fell in love and let our hearts get pummeled and stretched. We had all kinds of great sex with him and got married (in either order), had a bunch of kids, and built a home.
And it never once occurred to us that we were “settling.” Half the time, we look over at our boyfriends-turned-husbands, with their graying hair and gorgeous eyes, the reassuring heft of them, which deters intruders and quiets our fears and calms the kids, and wonder what they’re still doing with us.
Any time you give blood, you offer up a vein and suffer the pinch. Only then can you attempt something truly extraordinary: saving someone else’s life. Love entails this sort of reckless surrender.
You’ve been chasing a feeling. But needing and being needed—the bottomless empathy and vulnerability they require—are exquisite not because the feeling of love is so special but because the person you love is, to you.
by Abigail Shrier, Free Press | Read more:
Image: uncredited; Los Angeles Examiner/USC Libraries/Corbis via Getty Images
[ed. The feeling of someone knowing you completely, even more than you know yourself.]
