To the people who ask that dreaded question that we all hate to hear, "Why are you single?" My answer is, "I don't know. It beats the hell out of me."

Honestly, there are a million ways that people bring this up and a million and one ways to answer. Everyone has their reasoning and maybe they don't see it for themselves yet. However, what many of you who ask this question seem to lack is the ability to consider that maybe we want to be single.

People have a hard time believing that this is a want or even a choice. Many of these people have already found their person in life and that's great, we are happy for you. But if you could take the time for one second to be happy for us as well, that would be sheer magic. Don't make people feel lesser for their decisions when you don't know what reasoning stands behind them, but, in case you were curious, I'll give you some reasons anyway.

Many of us who are single probably just have not found our "person" yet.

The definition of the idea of your "person," is your best friend in life who you also chose to share as a partner. This is important. We want to marry our best friend. Maybe we have met them, maybe they are unavailable, or maybe we are unavailable. Who actually knows? Emotional dependency is a lot more vital than we tend to believe in relationships, so making sure that both parties are ready for that commitment is a must to ensure long-term happiness.

There is a strong possibility that the idea of settling just isn't appealing to us.

We want to date with the future in mind, so accepting what just "is" so far probably isn't what we see for ourselves. We think that we deserve the best, so we aren't going to stop until we have found what is best for us.

Maybe we are focused on building ourselves.

This way, when we do decide to no longer be single, we are able to give that person our heart and mind completely and still love ourselves as well.

We could be focusing on more serious topics.

These topics could be things in life that keep us who we are, like career goals or our passions. Relationships don't define us as people. Your identity should be your own.

We could still be getting over someone.

Contrary to what you may believe, the best way to get over someone is not jumping into a relationship with someone else.

There are many single people who will read this and probably shake their head while thinking: "I'm single because nobody likes me."

This is probably very unlikely. Often, those who you focus all of your attention on may not be the ones who do. That's life, you don't often realize that someone adores you when it's someone who you overlook. The reason for this is that, without you even knowing, you don't want to give yourself to just anyone, you want to be with someone who you like.

It's crazy to me that people still aren't accepting of the idea that some people just want to be single. You don't stop to think that maybe we're a little weird and haven't found someone who is willing to be strange with us yet. Or you haven't considered that the idea of spontaneity scares some people when all that you want is someone who is willing to jump on a plane across the world with you on no notice.

There are also other reasons. Some fall to the fact that humanity can be awful to one another--both girls and guys. There are liars, cheaters, and people who lead you on. Although these are the people who fuel our hate fire, there are lessons to be learned in them. We learn who and how to trust and, with that, we become more indebted to ourselves and honest with our dating. Which, in fact, could be another reason for that word that you all think so negatively of.

Some of us are modern day hopeless romantics and, like I said before, believe that those who you date, you date to marry. You don't want to just marry some random person who you met at the bar last week, do you? No, you don't. So give us the time to find ourselves and the time to truly get to know someone before we jump into something that isn't steady enough yet. It's better to build a strong foundation for something that you want to last forever, rather than leave it to possibly crumble.

So for those of you who are continually asking why, although you shouldn't need an explanation at all, I just gave a small portion of a million reasons. Let us worry about ourselves for now and when someone worth sharing this crazy beautiful life with decides to comes along then we will depart from our singleness. For now, just let us embrace it.