I hear a lot of my friends telling me that they fear they’ll be single forever. I get it, I really do — the idea of never getting your version of happily ever after can be depressing and terrifying all at once, and I’d be lying if I said I’d never been there. But even though being Forever Alone is far from appealing, this is why I’m way more scared of settling and ending up with the wrong guy for the rest of my life:
- I know how much a bad relationship can break you down. I’ve been in my fair share of crappy relationships in the past, and a couple of them nearly made me forget who I really was. When I’m single, I don’t have to worry about that stuff so much, but I’m terrified of getting into a long-term relationship that ends up making me lose part of myself; I know how hard it is to have to build myself up after being torn down for so long.
- I worry about wasting my life with someone who’s bad for me. Life is ridiculously short, and I can’t help but think about how easy it is to waste a large chunk of it with someone you never should have spent a minute with. At least when you’re single, you can spend as much time as you want giving yourself the love you deserve, but the last thing I want to do is realize I’ve spent the past ten years with someone who hasn’t been loving me right.
- I never want to have to wonder “what if.” There will always be missed opportunities when it comes to relationships, but when you’re in the right relationship, you won’t really care about “what might have been” with someone else. The wrong relationship, however, will make you second-guess every time you turned guys down when you were single because maybe one of them would have treated you better than what you’re getting now. Realistically, most of them would have probably made you unhappy at one point or another, but the self-questioning you do when you’re in a bad relationship can be like emotional torture.
- It’s a lot less messy to get into a relationship than it is to get out of one. Breakups are awful, and divorce is messy, expensive, and heartbreaking. It’s really no wonder that so many people stay in crappy relationships for as long as they do when you consider all the pain involved in severing that connection. I’m way more comfortable with the idea of being single forever instead of having to go through the headache and heartache of trying to exit a lousy long-term relationship.
- I can build myself up, but I don’t want to be with someone who drags me down. I have no problem being my own support system as a single woman. The issue comes in when I’m dating someone who unravels all my hard-earned progress. My worst nightmare is waking up one day and realizing that the man I’m with has been holding me back from reaching my full potential.
- I know I stick around for way too long. At this point, I know myself well enough to admit that I’m That Girl who tries way too long and way too hard to fix something that is permanently broken. I know that if a relationship goes sour, I’m going to keep trying to sweeten it rather than admitting to myself that it’s better to give up. That stubborn nature of mine is going to screw me over one of these days, and I dread trapping myself in a soul-sucking relationship just because I’ve already invested so much in it.
- I get blinded by love too easily. I’m an emotional person, and I’ll be the first to say that I often see all the good things about a guy while completely ignoring all the crappy things. Some might call it a virtue, but when it comes to relationships, it’s definitely a flaw. I make excuse after excuse for a guy when he starts treating me like garbage just because he’s sweet sometimes. I don’t want to be the woman ten years down the line stuck in a miserable marriage because she loves her terrible husband too much to leave, but I know I’m just the type of person who could fall into something like that.
- I can always rely on myself. When everyone else fails me, I know I can trust myself to get me back on my own feet. The same can’t always be said for the guys I date, though. I may end up a crazy cat lady, but I’ll also be a strong, independent cat lady who doesn’t have to worry about her man sneaking around on her. If a good, solid relationship isn’t in the cards for me, I’d much rather give up dating entirely rather than spend my life with someone who treats me worse than I treat myself.
- Being trapped is my worst nightmare. The idea of being stuck in a horrible relationship is something that has literally woken me up in the middle of the night. After seeing so many of my friends’ engagements and marriages go down the drain and watching them struggle to rebuild their lives, the last thing I want is to end up in the same position. No one ever gets married knowing that they’re getting hitched to a loser, but I worry that down the road, I’ll finally see that the Prince Charming I married was actually the evil villain all along… and that getting out is going to be much harder than a simple breakup.
- I’ll take physical loneliness over emotional loneliness any day. I’m totally fine with solitude. I’m happy enough with who I am as a person that I can keep myself company, even if it does get a bit lonely being single sometimes. What I wouldn’t be able to stand, though, is spending my life with someone who makes me feel alone even when he’s right by my side. That kind of loneliness carries a horrible, suffocating emptiness that I can’t bear, and I’ll happily be permanently single if it helps me avoid that kind of pain.
