Why am I still single?’ I’ve lost count of the times I’ve asked myself this question. Often accompanied with the following, ‘Am I not a nice person, not deserving of love? Have I not endured and suffered enough frogs? Am I too bossy? Too confident? Should I be less opinionated? Is it the way I look? Where I live? Am I not pretty enough? Perhaps I should be more amenable? Maybe tone down my personality? Try harder? Try less? Am I not open minded enough? Could I be terrible at dating? Am I too busy? Giving off the wrong vibes? Setting too high expectations?’
And so on, and so on …
If you are asking yourself the same, this blog is for you
If you Google the question, you’ll get no end of reasons. Too independent. Too needy. You don’t love yourself enough. Your standards are too high. You aren’t showing up for yourself in the right way. But the answer isn’t that complex.
The reason why you’re still single? You haven’t met your partner yet.
It really is that simple.
Frustrating, annoying AF and somewhat cliched I know. But also true.
I wish I could tell you it’s more complicated than that. That hard work, grafting at those dates, doing a ten step program in becoming the best version of you is 100% going to result in partnership with someone incredible. That searching is going to lead to find. That becoming the most fabulous version of you in the meantime, is going to see that person instantly swoop into your life as if they’ve just been waiting for you to find self-love. But it wouldn’t be true, because no-one has or knows that answer.
No-one, not even a dating coach, online app or a fairy-tale godmother can accurately predict when that moment will come for you. Because there is no magical way to know when we’ll meet that someone. But I can tell you this with certainty, there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. And you don’t need to adjust yourself, lower your standards or accept something less in the meantime.
For someone out there, you will be just right
The reason you are single, is quite simply because that someone hasn’t made an appearance yet.
Trust me, I get it. Because that unknown in itself was a catalyst for my own single survival mode. It’s so disappointing and quite frankly annoying, to accept that I had no control over love. But I would be remiss to suggest that it operates in any other way.
Although we do have choice here, we do have some control. It lies in the way we choose to spend our single time.
In whether we choose to be okay with being single for as long as that lasts. Commit to concentrating on what we do have, rather than what we have not. Because you can go out there and live your life and remove yourself from a waiting room of your own creating. Or, you can choose to do it how I did for seven years of my life, by attempting to rid myself of single by any which way possible. Loathing it. Feeling more and more miserable as another day passed by spent as a singleton. Self-analysing, criticising and slowly depleting my own self-worth just because I wasn’t partnered.
If you’ve taken a peek at any of my other blogs, you’ll have read how that turned out and I wouldn’t recommend it
I spent a phase chameleon dating believing it would better my chances at finding a relationship. Been determined to confuse lust and love. Whiled away late nights in a swipe doom fest that negatively impacted my mental health. Grown ever more frustrated at being single, to the point I lost any ability to see the good in it.
I can tell you that these reactions, did not help me to find a relationship and they were also not the cause of me still being single, or why you are single if you can relate. Because even if I’d met the right person in the depths of single survive, they would have stuck.
Every prospective partner I’ve met over the past seven years has been entirely wrong for me
And rightly, those wrong people didn’t stick. So they are not the reason I am still single. I, am not even the reason I am still single. It’s simply a case of timing.
Those in relationships right now, I can guarantee weren’t complete, perfect, or possibly even a decent fully functional human being before Dierdre met Joe. Dierdre was not faultless or flawless. Joe, wasn’t either. Whilst people in relationships might feel they have a few handy tactics for helping you to find a partner, the truth is they don’t know squat. They only know how it happened for them. And how it will happen for you, will be entirely different.
Becoming okay with single isn’t going to better your odds at finding partnership either
Moving from single survive to single thrive was life changing, but it didn’t strengthen my odds. However, for me it entirely affected how I spent my time in that single zone. Whether I viewed that single time as opportunity or a prison sentence. Whether I enjoyed my time as a single person, or detested it.
My point here is that no matter how much we search, that person is going to show up whenever they damn well show up. And so the reason you are still single is not because of anything you are doing or not doing, it is simply timing. Frustrating and perhaps a little cliched I know, but also entirely true.
You can read a lot of stuff out there citing how self-love and embracing singledom will lead you to partnership one day, but I don’t believe it will. I don’t believe that these things make a damn bit of difference to finding a relationship or not. However, I do believe that enjoying being single whilst you are single, can change you immeasurably in ways you might not have expected. It did for me, and so I hope it might do the same for you if you are feeling in a shitty place and wondering why you’re still single.
When I first considered viewing single differently to the way I had almost my entire life
I’ll admit it was spawn from the exhaustion of modern dating and a repeated cycle of dating woes that caused me to question how and why I was persistently replicating the same events with different people again and again with no results to show for all that effort. And a kind of half-hope that becoming a better version of myself would fix my future relationship problems.
It’s true, that inadvertently it did resolve some of them, such as no longer tolerating relationships that didn’t align with my value, or seeing a relationship as the only way I could be happy and refusing to alter myself to create a more appealing option. These were certainly benefits, and would absolutely result in less of my time taken up in situations I ought not to be in.
However, these things wouldn’t manifest a right relationship. They would only stop me from pursuing and entering wrong ones. Totally important, but still not the result I suppose I was hoping for when I first went into aiming for single thrive. But it did alter my view of the previously nagging ‘Why am I still single’ question that manifested regularly and caused me to spiral further into ‘I hate this solo shit’.
I no longer felt a need to ask myself ‘Why am I still single?’ as if I were a problem that had a fixable solution. There wasn’t anything wrong with me per se. And it’s simplicity was in fact reality. I just hadn’t found that person. Nothing more, nothing less.
That truth gave me permission to stop questioning why I was single, and instead concentrate on how I was going to continue my singledom
Would I fall back into my die hard habits of dating with vigor, without boundaries, prioritising searching in the hopes that it would therefore lead to finding? Or could I stop searching for a time, and focus on myself instead?
I chose the latter. Because I wanted better for me than what I’d given myself for the past seven years.
I wanted to be happy with no partnership in sight. I wanted to stop living in an exhausting state of fear, shame and resentment, and start holding myself accountable for my own happiness and state of being.
Sure, relationships are wonderful
Relationships can be incredibly joyful, fulfilling and there is a lot of good things to be said about being in a relationship with someone. But falling in love won’t be a magical solution to all your problems and you don’t need a partner to live a fulfilling, joyful, amazing life. Loneliness isn’t as simple as just being without a romantic partner, as there are so many elements that cause loneliness to manifest. Being single is not a lesser situation to being partnered, and it is not something that requires survival tactics.
So, Why am I still single? Because I am.
Because the right person hasn’t come along yet.
Because I haven’t crossed paths with them, but sooner or later, I will.
In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy riding this shit solo.
Amy Roullier
Amy Roullier is a British writer and author of Silent Reflections of a Fragile Heart. For her, writing began as personal therapy and has evolved into a way to connect with others, posing questions and offering reflections that might help readers find clarity. Based in Lincolnshire, Amy is an occasional vegetarian and a dedicated lover of carbs—her true soulmate. She’s currently navigating a mid-life crisis through running, and mornings are simply impossible without coffee.
