I’m happy being single—except when I’m not.
I’m visiting the nursing home in Indiana where my mom works, listening to her sing during their chapel service. Next to me, a couple of residents sit side-by-side in wheelchairs, hands clasped together, resting atop the blanket draped over their laps. Their paper-thin skin is nearly translucent, bones and veins clearly visible underneath a map of old age spots, sturdy gold wedding bands circling fragile fingers. I look up at their faces; the man is beaming at the woman, whose pink cheeks and sparkling eyes bear traces of the beauty she must have been.
Suddenly I’m crying, imagining the life they must have lived together. I’ll never have that, I think. Even if I find someone who wants to hold my hand when I’m an old lady, they won’t have known me when I was young. They won’t have been with me through all the things that made me who I am—the births of my children, moving across the country, my father’s death, my career triumphs and disappointments. I’ll never have a 50th wedding anniversary.
I once heard an elderly woman say she gets manicures every week just so someone will hold her hand for a little while. Ever since, it’s been one of my deepest fears: that I’ll end up with no one to hold my hand unless I pay them to do it. At 48, with a divorce and a string of failed romantic relationships behind me, it seems like a solid bet. Sitting in that nursing home chapel, tears silently running down my face, I feel as lonely as I ever have in my life.
By the time I’m on a plane home to New York a few days later, my tears have long since dried, and another couple comes to my attention. They’re sitting behind me, and he’s asking her if she brought anything to eat. “I packed sandwiches,” she says. I hear the rustling of a plastic bag, and then the man’s voice, plaintive as a toddler.
“I don’t like turkey. Didn’t you bring anything else? When are we going to eat a real meal, anyway? What are we doing when we land? I want to go straight to the hotel, but we’re going to be hungry if that’s all you packed.” My eyes widen in horror, and I say a silent prayer of thanks that I’m traveling alone. Maybe there are worse things than paying someone to hold my hand, I think.
Since my marriage ended more than a decade ago, I’ve gone on plenty of dates. Mostly, I’ve met people the way we all do these days: on dating apps. These relationships, whether they lasted one night or several years, were all disasters to varying degrees. After a season of frolicking with younger men, I decided I was done with dating, and deleted all my dating profiles. (Not just deactivated—deleted.) It’s been over a year now, and I have zero regrets. No more energy spent crafting the perfect profile, no more hours lost to scrolling and swiping, no more sharing my location with friends in case a date with a new guy turns into an episode of Dateline.
Am I sometimes lonely? Yes. Do I wonder why the majority of my friends seem to be contentedly coupled up, while I’m perpetually single? Yes and no. For one thing, I don’t want to be content. I want bliss. I want to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, how I want to do it, without anyone questioning or judging me. That, to me, is bliss. So far, I’ve only ever felt it when I’m alone.
As a single person, I’m highly attuned to the couple dynamics that play out around me. When a friend says she’d like to come out dancing, but can’t because her partner is complaining that she hasn’t been home enough lately, I make a mental note, filing it under the “thank God I’m single” tab in my brain. In a bookstore, I hear a customer telling the clerk that she wishes she had more time to read, but her husband needs her to watch TV with him at night so he can decompress from his stressful job. Duly noted.
I don’t want someone questioning my desire to take a road trip for no reason (the reason is that I want to), or rolling their eyes while I make a 37-point turn on a dead-end street because I was singing along to Taylor Swift and missed the GPS directions. I don’t want someone telling me it’s not a good idea to start a 10-mile hike at noon (it isn’t), or grimacing when dinner is a tin of sardines and some gluten-free crackers. I don’t want someone trying to tell me about their day when I’m lost in thought. I don’t want to hear someone breathing when I’m trying to write.
For all those reasons—along with the fact that dating, specifically online dating, is a hellscape of compulsive liars, serial cheaters, and men with mommy issues—I’m done dating. But even as I type that, I wonder… am I, really? My therapist worked with me for over a year before she got me to say this sentence out loud: “I want a committed, intimate, romantic, monogamous partnership.” Once I said it, I felt like I’d let Pandora out of her box. Oh, no. What now?
True as it may be (I want a committed, intimate, romantic, monogamous partnership—I’ve gotten so good at saying it!), I’m not tempted to start dating again. Is it because of the aforementioned someone-breathing-while-I’m-thinking issue? Or have I been so burned by men I’ve met on the apps and jaded by witnessing dysfunctional couples around me that I’ve given up?
I reached out to writer Shani Silver, an outspoken advocate for single women feeling good about their singlehood, to get her take on giving up dating. She lays the blame squarely on the apps. “The dating industry gave birth to the reason we don’t want to date anymore at all, and it’s very heartbreaking to see,” she tells me. “It’s this vicious cycle of hope and desperation and genuine loneliness. It’s not criminal legally, but it feels criminal ethically to me, to take advantage of single people in this way. It’s a whole industry that is feeding single people’s inferiority and charging them money for it.”
Silver affirms my decision to quit the apps, saying she actively recommends not dating. “Connections that bloom during the regular course of just being a person, meeting whenever you happen to meet, offer a much firmer foundation for the types of relationships that we know work,” she says. “When you leave the dating space, I’m thrilled, because that means you’re going to go live your life. And somewhere along the course of living your life, you are going to find a partner.”
So far, it hasn’t happened. Then again, it hasn’t been that long since I shuttered my dating profiles and started living life on my own terms. Just the other night, I was supposed to have dinner with a man I met online a few years ago—one of the handful who are still saved in my phone—but I canceled and went to a Zumba class in the park instead. I was smiling ear to ear the whole time, stepping on the wrong beat and shimmying in the wrong direction without a care in the world.
When I feel sad about my solitary existence, I open up Instagram and watch one of comedian Jared Freid’s pep talks for single people. “You’re doing fantastic. You’ve got friends and family who love you, you look great. You don’t even want to be in a relationship,” he says, before launching into a story about a man policing the number of coffees his partner has had. “You could be that woman, dating that guy who’s counting her coffees… Thank the Lord above for your single life.” Hallelujah.
When I look back wistfully on a promising relationship that fizzled, thinking about how much fun we had in the beginning, I remember Instagram therapist—I mean comedian—Brenna Berg explaining why “it’s so hard to date when you’re a fun, cute gal.” (That’s me!) She says that because we’re good at conversation, have great personalities, and have fun everywhere we go, it’s easy to project that onto our dates and think we’re having a great time. “You need to start asking yourself, did I have fun, or am I the fun?” she says.
Remember when I said I didn’t want someone to tell me not to start a 10-mile hike at noon? I went on that hike, and it was glorious. Yes, it ended up being more like 13 or 14 miles, because I missed a trail marker. And yes, I don’t know exactly how far I hiked, because I didn’t bring a map and my phone died halfway through. Also, I didn’t have a flashlight and I navigated the last few miles in the dark, banging my walking stick and singing at the top of my lungs to ward off wildlife. Still, it was a million times better than the time I went hiking with a boyfriend, who snapped at me for taking too many pictures and then got angry when I marched ahead of him. “Remember when you abandoned me on the side of a mountain?” he used to say—and probably would still be saying, if I hadn’t broken up with him.
Maybe that couple at my mom’s nursing home met in the nursing home. I never asked her. Maybe everything I assumed about them was wrong. Maybe they were newlyweds! And maybe it’s not too late for me to find that committed, intimate, romantic, monogamous partnership my therapist and I talk about. But I’m not going to find it on a dating app, that’s for sure. Because I’m done with dating. If there’s someone out there for me, he (or she?) is going to have to find me another way. And I just might be on a mountaintop with a dead phone, making my own fun. Good luck, fellas!
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Elizabeth Laura Nelson has been airing her dirty laundry online since she wrote an “It Happened To Me” story for the late, great xoJane. Since then she’s worked at websites including YourTango, Elite Daily, Woman’s World, and Best Life. When she was 12, she kissed the George Michael poster above her bed every night before she went to sleep.
