Stop Guilting Single People Into Dating Forever

It’s not “giving up” if it’s saving your sanity.

Photo by Shani Silver

In January of 2019, I stopped dating. After ten years of being strung along by dating culture, I finally chose to stop buying the bullshit. If you’re currently single, particularly if you’re single over 30, leaving the dating space is probably something that sounds nice, but also terrifying. “If I don’t date, how will I meet someone?!” The thought echoes in our minds with a tone of terror, and yet we completely ignore all the dating we’ve already done without meeting someone so far. Dating doesn’t have to work for everyone, it’s a truth that’s hard to hear and even harder to turn into behavioral change, but your life’s happiness matters, so let’s give it a try. Four years ago I stopped dating, and today I’m exactly the same amount of single that I was when I was dating, only now I am exponentially more happy.

If you’re ready to acknowledge that your happiness matters more than whether or not you’re seeing someone, let’s go.

Leaving dating culture is about more than just deleting your dating apps (but definitely do that). It’s about changing the way you think and feel about being single so that you no longer feel compelled to redownload them. The idea of not dealing with modern dating’s bullshit anymore sounds amazing, but unless you get to the root of why you were participating in it in the first place, you’re likely to go back, because you’ve been groomed to feel like you need to.

It’s basically this: I was deeply miserable for an actual decade, then I started changing the way I think about being single. Now I’m happy — that’s it. Choosing different thoughts led to feeling different feelings, which led to making different choices and living a more abundant life that didn’t revolve around whether or not there was “something going on” in the romantic area of my life. The change was so significant that I wanted to share it in a podcast and in an actual book that I published and put on Amazon. I think this shit has legs.

Your singlehood isn’t something that’s wrong with you, it’s a valid part of your life that’s full of freedom and possibility. But if all you’ve ever been shown is how pathetic, sad, desperate, and lonely being single is, particularly as you get older, you won’t be able to see the…