If you’re a happily single woman, I’d recommend keeping that to yourself. Not because the information itself is so very damning, but because there’s no good way to convey it—no safe way for those words to land. Tell someone you’re genuinely “happy being single” and they’ll walk away assuming you’re either secretly sad or secretly spiteful, hiding behind a smokescreen of delusion or smugness. You either come off pitiful or bitter, a charity case or a lost cause. Either way, you sound like a liar.
The only exception, as far as I can tell, is if you make it clear that you’re only okay with being single for now—that you just haven’t met the right person yet or aren’t ready to start dating so soon after your last breakup. In some cases, this kind of temporary singlehood is even encouraged. After all, you have to learn to love yourself first, right?
Temporary is the operative word here, of course. The friend who insists you need to learn to be happy on your own rarely means that you should be happy on your own forever. Even when women are told to embrace being single, the subtext is usually that we should only do so in the interest of bettering ourselves for a future relationship. Get your “slut era” out of your system now so you’re not tempted to cheat down the line; “learn to love yourself first” so you can be worthy of being loved by someone else. And whatever you do, be careful not to learn to love yourself too much. The goal is to love yourself into a new relationship, not out of needing one altogether. If you’re single and content to be so, that’s fine. But if you’re single and content to remain so, turn back; you’ve gone too far. If you’re too happy being single, you could wind up single for life.
But...is that really a problem?
If the main risk of being too happily single is that you’ll stay single forever, that doesn’t seem like an issue for someone who is, in fact, happy being single. Personally, I don’t see the problem.
I do, however, have a few problems with the “too happy being single” narrative trying to scare women out of being alone lest they find out it’s not so bad and stop accepting the bare minimum from men.
In a society that conditions women to pursue romantic partnership as the most important capstone of a female life well-lived, embracing single womanhood to the point of actively rejecting the perks and protections of a societally sanctioned relationship isn’t something that just happens randomly; it’s a feat of conscious unlearning and subversion. Women don’t just decide they like being single one day and accidentally unlearn centuries of internalized misogyny and patriarchal conditioning. The fear that women will be too happy to get married once we get a taste of single life is as insulting as it is hilariously transparent, immediately exposing itself for the sexist attempt to scare women out of our own liberation.
That said, I’d be lying if I told you I’ve never had this exact fear. In my defense, so has Khloé Kardashian.
While literally nothing about the current state of the world is setting women up to be happy, let alone happy enough to start subverting one of the core tenets of patriarchy, I’ll admit there is some truth to the idea that if you do manage to embrace being single, you may start to realize just how genuinely great being single actually is. So great, even, that it can start to seem like a tough thing to give up.
As a recovering male-validation addict who has drastically de-prioritized my dating life in the last two years, I can confirm that if you stay single long enough to develop self-worth, it gets a lot harder to will yourself to go on a date and a lot easier to imagine a future in which you may never do so again. And with trends like de-centering men, dating sabbaticals, and boy sobriety on the rise in recent years, I suspect more women besides just Khloé and me have begun to stumble upon similar revelations.
Still, I’m not convinced that women becoming happily single to the point of forgoing romantic partnership with men is actually a problem—or rather, our problem. It’s a problem for the patriarchy, of course, which is a win in my book. But as much as I reject the idea that women can be “too happy being single” in the first place and resent the patriarchal guilt-trip that it really is, I can’t say that I’m totally immune to the Single Guilt, even as someone who’s been more or less single and more or less fine with it for most of my adult life.
Having grown up surrounded by nothing but positive models of dutifully norm-abiding relationships in a family with a shockingly low divorce rate, I have exactly zero business being this chill about my single status. But somehow, even from an early age, I had some inkling that I might like being single and some vague skepticism toward traditional relationships. Gradually, the evidence seemed to suggest that I was right. Not only did I like being single, but it seemed like I might even prefer it. From my first breakup, I’ve been keenly aware that I instantly feel more like myself once I’m out of a relationship than I ever have in one.
Over time, it’s only gotten harder to ignore the fact that I feel more complete when I’m single than when I’m one-half of a relationship, and that maybe that makes more sense than we’re led to believe. I’ve often framed my long-term “more or less single” status as something largely unintentional—not an accident but not an active choice, either. More recently, it’s occurred to me that maybe I’ve been choosing myself the whole time.
Even as I’ve grown more secure in my singleness—more aware that it is a choice and quite possibly the best one for me—I’ve always maintained that I remain open to the possibility of long-term or even life partnership in the future. But these days, I’m not sure how much I really mean it. Time and again, I’ve proven more willing to sacrifice companionship for the sake of freedom than the other way around. And the longer I’m single, the happier I am to remain so indefinitely.
I realize this may sound like proof of the “too happy being single” narrative I’ve just rejected. But to me, it only confirms my suspicion that I am perhaps innately single rather than situationally so; that my singleness is not a matter of lacking a partner but of being a self-contained entity that would be more burdened than bolstered by any full-time addition. That I may, perhaps, have been born to be single for life.
For the most part, this increasing embrace of my singleness feels like growth. But sometimes, I do wonder whether retreating from my dating life and distancing myself from the possibility of partnership is more about avoidance than evolution. I’m not worried that I’m too happy being single, per se, but I have considered that I may be getting too comfortable. People convince themselves they’re happy in relationships all the time when really they’re just too comfortable to risk rocking the boat. Am I doing the same thing with being single—just deluding myself into thinking I don’t want a relationship to avoid the risks that come with pursuing one? Is this maturity or stagnation? Am I enlightened or just exhausted? Am I really this happy being single, or am I just settling for myself?
Frankly, I can’t say for sure that any of these fears are totally invalid. If I’ve learned anything from the public exercise in self-excavation I call a career, it’s that every time I think I’ve ripped off the last Scooby-Doo mask to reveal which version of myself has been the real villain all along, it turns out I’ve only uncovered another defense mechanism. It’s entirely possible that convincing myself I’m destined to be single for life when really I’m just settling for it is the latest in a long line of lies I didn’t know I was telling myself.
But even so, I’d still rather settle for myself than anyone else.
