“Come to this party,” I texted a friend last week. “There will be men there.”
This rallying cry – one that carries the promise of romantic intrigue – is one I find myself invoking frequently and unthinkingly nowadays. Going to the pub? Might be men there. Perhaps I should put on a better slobby jumper for the two-minute trek to the shop, in case there are men there. Sitting in a GP’s waiting room – men? There? For me?
What’s baffling about this particular strand of recurrent romantic fretting is, in practice, I don’t give a toss if there are men there or not. I’ve never been happier being single. For the first time in my life, my singlehood offers peace; there’s no great longing to experience a life-changing romantic love – I’ve done that.
Similarly, this period isn’t marked by a drastic vow of celibacy driven by hurt and bitterness, as I have undertaken in the past. Being single is just one of many banal identifiers that make up my person, along with being 5ft 1in and having curly hair. It is, frankly, one of the least interesting aspects about me.
Yet since a breakup last year, it has become jarringly obvious just how deeply I have internalised the cultural messaging that, when single, my primary focus should be the pursuit of romance (not sex; an important difference). This is expressed via a variety of intrusive thoughts (see: “there will be men there”) such as devoting chunks of time to dissecting the behaviour of some mediocre romantic prospect, only to realise I don’t actually care, either about the person in question or the conclusions derived from hours spent poring over their actions. Yet when talking to others, I keep finding myself slipping into the register of the desperate singleton on the prowl, before coming to with a start.
At previous points in my life, it would have been impossible to extricate this performance of thirsty singlehood from how I actually felt. But this time round I am older, wiser, happier and equipped with the tools of self-interrogation. These days, when I automatically say yes to attending an event because “there will be men there”, I catch myself. No, I think, you don’t want to trek across London on a Thursday night in search of some romantic holy grail. You want to go to the local cinema with your friend and watch Cate Blanchett being a monster for two hours and 37 minutes, before slipping into bed before 11pm.
That yearning voice, the one that wants me to travel an hour from my home to the party, is not mine. It is a parasitic entity, contracted after a lifetime of being force-fed a cultural diet that focuses obsessively on the figure of the unattached woman.
What’s fascinating is its instant re-emergence the moment my relationship status changed. Overnight, what had been settled became a question mark, and brain space I had devoted to thinking about a whole host of interesting things, beyond who I was or wasn’t dating, was suddenly reassigned against my will.
When I sat down to write or send a tweet, the blinkers went back on – suddenly all I felt able to focus on was the minutiae of romance and love. Not politics, or art, or the great book I’d been reading about social housing. Just ground so well-trodden it has turned to mud.
Discussing this with a friend, he paused and asked: “Are you happy being single?” in a manner that conveyed he thought perhaps I was fooling myself. But I truly am. That’s why I can identify these errant thought patterns now, why they seem so glaringly out of place.
Through previous battles with invasive thinking, I’ve learned that to repress is to exacerbate. Rather, I am keeping my cool, trying to banish shame when I catch myself falling prey to the pantomime. Instead, I turn these behaviours over in my head, prod at them. Is that how I actually feel? Is it, to borrow a phrase, really that deep?
Like any muscle, this self-analysis gets stronger the more I exercise it, leading me to places more exciting than a stilted drink in some drab boozer: new straight male friends, the reclamation of mental territory and the tantalising glimpse of a future where perpetual singlehood is just as satisfying as partnership – maybe more so.
Either way: what will be, will be. My most pressing concern at this moment is to make being single as neutral a state as Switzerland while the second world war raged around it. I want my singlehood to become as boring to my own mind as it presumably is to everyone else. Not some overwrought source of “empowerment” nor a Bridget Jones-esque failure that inspires cartoonish laments. Just a basic fact among the many others that combine to make up a whole person. And with time, my brain will treat being single in the same manner it responds to the entreatment that there will be men there: who cares?
Moya Lothian-McLean is a contributing editor at Novara Media
