When I was young and naive and didn’t know how to be alone and content on my own, I structured my whole life around this glittery, shiny lovely boy I had just met.

 Life seemed much easier when I was distracting myself with the idea of love and relationship. At the time, I didn’t know what it meant to love myself or how to be alone with myself.

 I didn’t like the idea of spending any time in solitude. It was scary. As a result, I wasn’t nurturing myself or growing as a person.

It took me a while to realize I wasn’t happy with myself and my life, and I believed a relationship would change that, even when I knew in my gut that this wasn’t the right person or relationship for me. 

I still couldn’t get myself to leave. I made up excuses to stay. It didn’t feel healthy at all. I compromised my values and romantic ideals just to have someone in my life. 

On the surface, I was a strong, independent woman full of energy and opinions. But deep down, I cared only to be loved because I was so tired of being lonely. I just wanted to be loved. 

 The relationship was doomed to fail. People need a little space. I knew that. Yet, we spent day and night together, giving each other no room to breathe. I started to feel suffocated. As a result, I started to resent him and eventually made a move to escape.

After that relationship ended, I took a break from dating and focused on becoming happier and stronger. 

I took the time to build a life that I love and develop a relationship with myself, which meant doing hard things even when I didn’t feel like it, such as learning how to enjoy my company without needing to surround myself with people constantly. I discovered my likes and dislikes, took up new hobbies, and set boundaries to protect myself. 

In the past four years, I truly valued being happily single and loving myself. Taking steps to improve myself and prioritizing my progress made me realize that: we cannot choose wisely when being single feels unbearable. 

We have to be at peace with solitude if we are to have any real chance of starting a healthy and fulfilling relationship. 

If we don’t know how to be alone, we end up with the wrong people because we choose them out of the need for love and attention. That’s why many people find themselves in a relationship that makes them feel empty and drained. 

Being single isn’t always as sweet as a piece of cake—especially when all the movies push the concept that you aren’t truly “complete” until you’ve found “the one .” 

Having spent the past few years utterly single made me realize I am happy to be alone. It’s only when I am reminded by society that being alone is unbearable that I ever feel lonely.

Until we are sure that being single can be just as secure, warm and fulfilling as being in a relationship, how will we know we choose to couple up for the right reasons?

Now that I am in a healthy, fulfilling relationship, I genuinely feel that when I did meet my current partner, it wasn’t out of boredom, distraction, or to fill a void; because it added new value to my already complete and fulfilled life.

xx

Yachna

Picture Credits: Pinterest