If you worry you’ll be alone forever
You want to fall in love. Of course.
We’re the Disney generation. The rom coms and the Nicholas Sparks.
Pop culture and society ram down our throats this case teaching us that the goal is to be partnered:
Every well meaning family friend who’s first question is always you’re dating anyone as if your relationship status is the most important thing about you
The basically prohibitively expensive reality of being a single person between rent, expenses, hotel rooms with nobody to split with
The simple tasks like building furniture that are either infuriating to do solo or force you to spend extra money for delivery
The loneliness that comes in the small moments when partnered people have someone to talk about their day with or someone to help carry the cardboard down to the trash so you don’t have to make two trips
The painful dating rhetoric of “you’ll find them when you least expect it” and “maybe you’re just being too picky that all seem to be helping the other person feel comfortable with having “helped” your “situation”
It all swirls into this almost unavoidable reality that feels like being single is a problem to be solved.
And it’s be one thing if you knew in your heart it was ridiculous. But deep down your heart nags at you like it really might be true.
Like as much as you are a feminist and “don’t need no man” (or woman or nonbinary person, depending on what speaks to you!), you can feel deep in your core that desire…
You do want a partner. And it hasn’t happened yet, not the one you want.
And you’re still sitting here wondering…
Why am I still alone?
And the waiting is starting to get so painful because you wonder if there’s something actually wrong with you. Or if all these forces in society, the political climate, the #girlboss movement, the loneliness epidemic and the rise of therapy changing the threshold for what we’re willing to accept in a relationship might have just shifted the tides enough that maybe it’s just not possible. Maybe our standards actually are too high and the quantity of people out there that would be a good fit for us is just empirically low enough that we actually do need to accept the possibility that it might not happen.
And that friggin’ hurts.
Because you’re smart and logical and those traits have gotten you so much in the rest of your life. You face a problem, you put your head down and figure it out. And so facing what feels like a math equation that equals you being alone forever feels like maybe something you should start accepting just so you’re not disappointed if it ends up being true.
But you’re also that Disney generation. That “I wrote you every day for a year” generation. You’ve witnessed love stories public and private. Taylor and Travis. Harry and Meghan. Kelsea and Chase. Your closest friends finding “their person” or your mom finding love again after divorce.
It seems possible. You hear stories where it’s possible even though it seems improbable. But is it possible for you?
My love, my little sister, here’s some reminders I needed for many years of my life…
Nobody has a crystal ball. You can’t see the future, neither can your mom, can your best friend, can I.
Nobody can tell you for certain whether or not it will work out for you.
And there’s no puzzle to solve or analysis to do that will answer it either. Why? Because you remember all those improbable love stories we talked about? The stories in the movies that seem too good to be true until you hear the story of the couple that met sitting next to each other on the plane or the couple that survived a year long deployment only to be reunited and live happily ever after. Those stories are proof that the world is full of improbable love stories.
It kinda makes sense when you think about it, don’t ya think? When we daydream about falling in love, being with someone who truly sees and accepts us for who we are, who doesn’t want to change us because they love our little quirks and some of our baggage too, who is willing to sign up to do life together including all the logistical, financial and emotional difficulties of just existing in this world, it sounds improbable, right? That there exists a person out there who is looking for someone exactly like us, it sounds improbable?
And yet it happens. In the public stories and the ones that are never the topic of tabloids. People come together and meet people who love them with all their strengths and flaws.
Asking love to conform to likelihoods and probabilities is to miss the magic of it. And I do think it’s magic.
Magic like the perfect design forming on that snowflake due to a completely random combination of wind, moisture and chemical makeup in that specific moment. The one in a billion chance that a set of cells with DNA exactly like yours would come together in an embryo that successfully implanted and lived to be born to bring you here. The unpredicable set of circumstances that lead to a manuscript or a song to get on the desk of the decision maker who had been looking for exactly something like that amidst a pile of equally talented authors or songwriters also with dreams and wishes and actually get made into the art that changes our lives.
Our world is filled with magical, improbable scenarios. They seem hard to believe in because of their improbability and yet they happen every day.
So I don’t need you to know for sure that you’re going to find somebody. I don’t even need you to think it’s probable.
Just that it’s possible.
That there is a scenario where the improbable scenario of someone crossing your path via a dating app or the singles table at a wedding or across the bar or next to you on an airplane that finds you attractive, interesting and intriguing and that will come to discover, the more they get to know you, that you’re exactly what they’ve been looking for. That your particular strain of pain and baggage is actually they’re completely equipped to handle and in fact, the way you have learned and grown from those experiences makes them even more attracted to you. Remember, you don’t need to believe it’s probable, just possible.
But my dear, what comes next is what do we do with that possibility.
And for that, I have a suggestion, my love, in two very important parts.
The first part is I want you to do is to pay attention to all the proof you see in the world of that possibility. It doesn’t have to be for you, but how many pieces of evidence can you collect that the possibility is real? Every romantic story you see on TikTok, every clip of Travis helping Taylor out of a Suburban, and every dinner you sit across from your best friend who’s happily in love, can you make a very conscious mental note: the improbable was possible there. And there. And there.
Because the more we train our brain to look for that proof, the more open we are to spotting it in our own life. (Personally, I actually kept a note on my phone and jotted down every example I could find. It quickly stretched to the hundreds.)
I’m not asking you to live every day like you’re in a romcom, opening up possibilities for the meet cute on the street and always looking cute in the hopes that today might be that day. No, that sounds exhausting.
For those improbable moments to feel magical, they kind of need to catch us off guard. So what do we do with that?
If you think I’m going to spout the awful, annoyingly passive advice, “it’ll happen when you think expect it,” of course not. Why would I suggest something that gives no actual practical suggestion of something to do but instead just asks you to sit back and do nothing?
How unhelpful.
No, for you, my dear, who’s out there wondering if it might not actually work out for you and it might be better to just accept that, the second part of my reminder, while you begin to collect your proof that the improbable is possible, is to focus your energy on creating an improbably great life for you.
What the universe is nudging you to do that might not make sense? Who is it nudging you to be that might not be who you’ve been? Where is it nudging you to go? To stop? To start?
I bet you have some other dreams that might not feel super probable that you can focus on. And the benefit of this is, the more that you make progress, take risks and yield rewards, the more you collect proof that it’s not just in love that the improbable is possible. By showing yourself how you can overcome challenges, how crazy things can work out for you, the more you might stop worrying quite so much about whether or not you’ll end up finding your person.
To be clear, while I don’t have a crystal ball, I’m sitting here with a life that feels like living proof that the improbable is possible. So I have no doubt that there could be an amazing love story and an amazing life story out there waiting for you to show up bravely as who you want to be.
I hope you’ll choose to believe it too.