To The Girl Who Has Never Fallen In Love, You Don’t Need A Relationship To Be Complete

You may have been led to believe that your 20’s were prime time for the right person to make an appearance in your life, maybe buy you a drink, shock you with their wit, and sweep you off of your feet. Instead, your expectations have been met with walks in the park with your thoughts, days and nights spent working endlessly on doing a good job at work, bettering yourself, communicating with your family, and having a blast with your friends.

You don’t even notice that you are single or that you have yet to have fallen in love until that well-meaning person in your life brings up your relationship status with that expression of concern for your well-being *gag*, until that cute love scene happens on the big screen and you find yourself rooting for the heroine’s love story, or until that one special song comes on but at the same time you realize that there is no one that you want to share that moment with right now. Knowing that there is no one specific person that you want to share that song and all of your special moments with right now is a weird mix of affirming you in your decision to remain single and terrifying because you wonder if love will ever be for you.

It’s affirming because clearly you haven’t met someone for you yet and you are not wasting your time which, good for you for waiting for real love and just settling for some okay guy. However, you can still feel the sting from how others and how even you sometimes interpret your singleness from time to time, no matter how brief.

You love your life, your friends, your work, your current pursuits, but it still feels like you should be more bothered by your singleness. You are not afraid of being in love with the right person for you or to be loved by the right person, but truthfully, you just never have been. There were times when you tried to convince yourself that you were in love with someone, and then realized that you were more in love with the idea of being love mostly because you felt like it was a void in your life that you needed to be filled by the right significant other. But after thinking through it, you realized that you were never in love. You may not even be sure that you ever want to be in romantic love with one other person. That is perfectly okay.

Live your life at your pace, occupy your emotional space, and take your time.

While media can make it seem that relationships are the absolute most essential part of your 20-something year old life, you need to know for yourself and for your sanity that it is not. You don’t need to fall for anyone to be somebody. You don’t have to hate other people’s love and relationships in order to properly love yourself in your singleness.

Sure, it would be nice to be held from time to time, to have a partner for fun events, to yammer endlessly into the night about ideas, and to laugh at each other’s fails at attempting to be proper adults in the modern-day; you can also admit that it is pretty nice going for your dreams, learning about yourself, growing closer to your friends, learning your family differently, figuring out your place in this world.

You enjoy laughing effortlessly things that you funny, eating at a fancy restaurant if your want or ordering take out and jamming in your sweats, you enjoy spontaneous adventures that you get to have at will, and being able to change gears when you’d like as you like. You love the fact that you are fully engaged in your world and in your life. Don’t forget that because you have not met someone to kiss you and repeat this article in their voice. You are magic, you are hard-work, you are self-care, you are humor, you are not a package or “the package deal”. You are a person; a very wonderful person who is single, has not fallen in love yet, and who does not have to apologize for that. You do not have to feel sorry about having not fallen in love yet.

Release yourself from the pressure to fall in love right now or to find love sometime soon. Live your life, do the things that make your heart smile, and keep the fire of your awesome burning bright. You are enough right now, so just keep going!