Stay Single Until You Aren’t Afraid of Being Single

Stay single until you don’t mind going out to dinner alone. The thought of being at a restaurant, and having a meal without a friend or a book or a phone as your companion isn’t horrifying — it’s exciting. Inviting. The thought of it makes you smile and may even put you at ease.

Stay single until you don’t mind going to the movies alone. You don’t have to share the popcorn or sweets, and you can pick whatever seat in the theatre you’d like, and it’s not sad. It’s quality time with your own thoughts and time to discover your personal preferences, and that’s beautiful.

Stay single until you understand what you want from your own job. Maybe you want to develop your career further. Maybe you have a side hustle that keeps your heart happy and you want to pursue it. Perhaps you’d like to go back to school. Perhaps it’s something else entirely, but you need to discover whatever “it” is on your own.

Stay single until you don’t panic when a wedding invitation comes in the mail. It’s okay if you bring a date, and it’s okay if you don’t. You don’t have to scramble to find a plus one to impress anyone or to fit in — you should bring one if you want to.

Stay single until you figure out if you believe in marriage. Marriage is more than weddings and pretty dresses and sparkly rings and registries and honeymoons. Marriage is a commitment. It’s forever. It’s learning about the darkness and the light that exists within another human. It’s patience. It’s forgiveness. It’s love that runs deep, the kind of love that fuses with your bones and swirls in your bloodstream. It’s more than a public display of affection on social media, and it’s worth it — it’s so very much worth it if you want to put the work in.

Stay single until you know how you take your eggs. There’s a movie starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, and no, it’s not Pretty Woman. It’s called The Runaway Bride, and in it, Maggie Carpenter (Julie Roberts) keeps getting engaged and then ditching her fiancé at the altar. Graham (Richard Gere) is a journalist covering the story. He discovers that with each new fiance, Maggie changes her egg order — with her first fiance, it was poached, and then it was scrambled, and then it was fried, and so on. She let each fiance suggest how to cook her eggs — she didn’t truly understand herself. Stay single until you know how to take your eggs and still maintain the possibility to discover something new, too.

Stay single until you aren’t afraid of being alone. Learn how to love and cultivate the relationship you have with yourself — learn how to discover what you need from other people, too. Then watch how the relationships that surround you unfold.