Hi, if you're reading this, then you are either in a relationship, or you made it unscathed through cuffing season and all the lovey-dovey romance resulting from the winter holidays. For all those in the latter group of people, let this new year be one of growth as a person, partner, child, and sibling.

Relationships can be really messy with all the miscommunication and insensitivity, and you can definitely learn your fair share of lessons through them. But, you don't particularly need to learn these lessons through the experience of a romantic relationship.

Striving to stay single and resist any temptations will definitely be difficult, but going through this experience of suffering, enduring, reflecting, and learning by yourself would be much more fruitful and prevents you from hurting someone else along the way.

This year of focusing on you can be geared towards becoming more firm in your faith, finding what you're passionate about, investing in relationships that you've already established in your life, and becoming more confident in yourself as a person.

Learning these things can not only help you become a better partner in both platonic and romantic relationships, but it can also help you become a better person in general.

If you get lonely, you can just live vicariously through real-life and on-screen relationships through your friends and Netflix, respectively.

Speaking of living vicariously through other people's relationships, it's obviously going to be hard to control your feelings. If the time does come and things change, then you may be tempted to give in and date if the opportunity were to present itself.

One tip to keep yourself accountable can be to write about or document your experience as you go along. For example, you can start a bullet journal to help you become more productive and efficient with your time. This bullet journal can also serve as a way for you to document what you're appreciative of and to keep you accountable, personally, academically, emotionally, and financially.

As a writer, this method of bullet journaling may be easy, but you can choose to do whatever your heart desires, such as filming a few seconds or minutes of your life daily or making a digital journal. This way, you can see your progress as a whole.

As you go through this process, I hope that it will be a year of growth for you, and I hope that you'll be able to withstand any temptations that may come. All in all, if you are in this situation, I want to encourage you by saying that it's okay to be single. It's okay to put yourself first.