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“What am I going to do? Go date again?” I remember my friend’s mom, when we were in high school, lying on her bed in the middle of the day, in the middle of her divorce, and asking that question. She was really imploring us—a couple of teenagers—what she should do. I remember her saying this as if the idea of dating again was ludicrous. I didn’t know why it seemed so odd to her. I was coming from a place of recently watching many of the greatest films of divorcees like “Under The Tuscan Sun” and “The First Wives Club.” To me, getting a divorce seemed like a second chance to find oneself—or perhaps a first chance to find oneself, since many of these movies were about women who married so young they didn’t even know who they were before becoming a Mrs. Now that I’m older, I get it: there comes a time when you’ve just been out of the dating game for so long, and you’ve been so comfortable in your routines, not having to explain yourself to someone new and not having to take in information about new people, that the idea of dating sounds…foreign. Other worldly. Offensive, perhaps? Maybe it wasn’t even the idea of going on dates with new men that frightened my friend’s mom so much as it was the idea of being single—of being completely unattached, with nobody to go home to, and nobody to call your significant other. But you know what? Not only do I think it’s never too late to be totally single, it’s actually imperative that at some point, you are. In fact, some may find that their relationship problems never stop until they take a big chunk of time to just not be in a relationship.
If you think you can’t, then you must
First off, if you think you cannot be single, then it is most imperative for you that you do spend some time single. If you’re already thinking about singlehood as something you could not survive and simply cannot do, then your life already isn’t your own. You’ve built a life with the main purpose of just not being alone. That is an alarming concept because it means you have limited yourself in so many ways. Every choice you’ve made, from career to social ones, has revolved around not being alone. So, your decisions weren’t really made from a clear point of view.
