Over the summer I jokingly tweeted that my roommate and I were going to start our own matchmaking service. We heard many conversations from people wanting to go on dates but being scared to ask someone out. We laughed as we thought about who we would match up with our friends and how we would get people to sign up to willingly go on blind dates. We never thought it would get anything but a passing giggle and maybe a retweet. To our surprise, the idea got quite a bit of attention from our little college community. Our close friends were asking if we could set them up on dates and people we barely knew were inquiring about how much we charged for a matchmaking consultation. We haven't cashed in on this idea yet but the fact that so many people are desiring help in the relationship department has definitely sparked my interest.
With this incidence as evidence, you could easily say that relationships are a big topic among the college-aged crowd. I don't think this is a bad thing, in theory. College is a time that we are almost required to intentionally think about our futures. In that, it is only natural to think about whom you desire to spend that future with. At this point in life, in an environment where relationships are valued so highly, living as a single person can be difficult.
I have come to observe that this causes a lot of the single population to make a goal out of securing a significant other. If the end result is being with someone, then being single makes you a failure, right? Wrong. This mentality is detrimental to our friendships, our future relationships and our overall outlook on life. But the area that I see this over-emphasis on relationships taking the biggest impact on is our self-esteem, but I don't think we even realize what we're doing.
Last week I was acting like a fool while hanging out in the Student Center on campus. I was uncontrollably giggling and falling over and being very silly. I looked at my friends and jokingly said, "this is why I don't have a boyfriend". They laughed along with me, not thinking about the implications of the statement. This very innocent sentence, intended to be a joke, may have gotten laughs but incidentally cut to the core of my insecurities. Although I didn't realize it at the time, I was blaming my singleness on what I considered my faults.
By saying that I'm not in a relationship because of certain behaviors, I'm implying that part of me is unlovable. By categorizing a trait as a justification for someone not to date me, I am convincing myself that who I am isn't good enough. When I say that my actions are the reason that I don’t have a Valentine, I am placing the power to determine my self-worth into the hands of someone that might love me one day. This line of thinking is turning self-love into something that you can only achieve when someone else loves you.
The act of blaming singleness on my faults has had a huge impact on my views of relationships. For me, the fault that is easiest to blame is my weight. For the longest time, I believed that because I was fat, I wasn't good enough to be in a relationship. I never wanted guys to find out that I had crushes on them because I thought they would be disgusted by affection from a fat girl. When I actually landed a relationship, I was extremely self-conscious that one day the guy would wake up and think about how big that I was and eventually break up with me after coming to his senses. Despite my supposed dignity, l began to accept any level of attention from the opposite sex just to convince myself that I was desirable. I genuinely believed that for as long as I was overweight, I would never find love.
Over the past 9 months, I have lost 70 pounds. But despite this huge accomplishment, I am still single. Contrary to the mindset that my insecurities allowed me to have, I did not magically get a boyfriend when I started dropping weight. The loss of my biggest insecurity did not result in the addition of companionship. This was a huge wake up call for me because if my weight wasn't the reason that I was single, what was? My first instinct was to start blaming my singleness on another one of my faults, attempting to isolate further things that I could "fix" to get the love I so desperately wanted. But instead of making a laundry list of unappealing qualities about myself, I realized that instead I needed to do something that I had been avoiding for a long time. I was waiting for someone else to realize that I was worthy of love when I was ignoring the person that needed to love me the most: me.
I don't know why you're single. There are probably a lot of complicated reasons, most of which are probably out of your control. But I am confident when I say that it's not because you're too fat or too skinny, too tall or too short, too quiet or too loud. If someone doesn't love you because of your faults, then they don't deserve you. But if you don't love yourself because of your faults, then you aren't ready for someone else to love you. Stop blaming your singleness on what you don't like about yourself and start loving yourself more than anyone else can. When you love the person that you are, the status of your relationship doesn't seem to matter as much. Place the power of self-worth back in your own hands so when the time is right, you can confidently take the hands of someone else, never questioning that you are worthy of love.
