Yes, you hate being single at times, like when there are all those annoying AF hand-holding couples around you or your younger cousin keeps posting images of her fantastic wedding on Facebook. But if you’re not generally happy when you’re single, don’t fool yourself into thinking a boyfriend will turn that frown upside-down. Here’s why.
- Your happiness is your responsibility. You can’t depend on anyone to make you happy and being single for a long time is the perfect opportunity to learn this. You’ll become a master at making yourself happy, which means you’ll be able to keep doing it no matter what relationships throw at you.
- Your relationship won’t get you out of “waiting” mode. If you’re spending most of your single time waiting for a guy to enter your life, that habit of waiting for something better won’t go away when you do get a boyfriend because it will be so ingrained in your mind. So you’ll be waiting for other things, perhaps a relationship milestone, and then another after that. You’ll be chasing happiness and totally ignoring that it’s been there all along.
- Your relationship can’t be healthy if you depend on it too much. If you’re not happy with your status quo when you’re single, you won’t be able to have a healthy relationship. This is because you’ll depend so much on your relationship to make you happy that you’ll bring loads of expectations and demands to it. This just makes you stressed out.
- You’ll be worried AF that the amazing relationship will end. It’s so much better to know that you can make yourself happy and that you’ll be fine if an amazing relationship ends. Otherwise, you’ll be gripping onto that relationship to make you feel fulfilled. That’s scary because if it ends, you’ll be left with nothing.
- You’ll make the relationship your whole life. Being single is awesome because it makes you aware of all the things you have in your life that rock, like your career, passions, dreams, friends, and the list goes on. If you aren’t happy as a single woman, you don’t realize you have all these amazing things and people. The result? When you get into a relationship, you make it your whole life, further ignoring everything that was good when you were single. It’s a guaranteed way to lose yourself.
- You’ll forget how to make yourself the best person you can be. When you’re happy as a single woman, it’s empowering because it gives you more opportunities for self-growth. You focus on making yourself the best person you can, and you learn just how amazing it is to be fully in control of who you are, what you like, what you don’t like and where you’re going.
- You won’t give yourself time to grow instead of rushing into romance. After stressful relationships and bad breakups, you need some single time all to yourself to re-focus on what you want your future to be like and to heal. If you don’t enjoy this time and make the most of it, you’re going to be dragging all that messy baggage into your next relationship, causing destruction and leaving you unhappy.
- You’ll get into toxic relationships. If you aren’t happy with who you are, how the hell are you supposed to attract guys who are well-adjusted and awesome? You’ll be trying to find guys to make your boyfriends and are more likely to put up with their toxic crap out of desperation to have someone. The fear of an unhappy, lonely single life can force you to settle in really bad or unfulfilling relationships. What a crappy waste of your life!
- Your relationship won’t change your quality of life. Sure, it’s a romantic idea to think that some amazing guy is going to enter your life and bed, spreading his endorphins around so that you’ll be so much happier — and it might happen for a while. But then once the honeymoon phase has ended, you’ll have the same challenges to deal with. If you’re not happy with your life and yourself, you can only be distracted from that for a while but it will always creep up to the surface.
- Your relationship will show you your truest self. You might think that a great relationship is all about happiness and feeling fuzzy with love, but it goes a lot deeper than that. It is really a magnifying glass, showing you what you’re really about and who you are when the masks come off. All your issues come out to play! It’s not always fun to see, especially if the person you are is really someone who’s not happy and hoping to be fulfilled by a relationship. That can only be a recipe for disaster.
- Your boyfriend should just be a bonus. Your life is the delicious ice cream. A boyfriend is the cherry on top. Without the cherry, the ice cream is still delicious. So focus on having the best life you can, with or without a boyfriend in the picture so you’ll be genuinely happy. Life’s too short for anything less than that. Besides, you don’t want to look back on your single days in the future and regret all the days and weeks you wasted on not living it up as much as you could. Now’s the time to make sure of that.
