A Single Woman’s Manifesto: Dear God Let This Be My (First and) Last

Somehow I always knew it would end up this way.

Even as a little girl I had this threateningly ominous sense about the single thirty-something star of whatever Romantic Comedy was being imposed upon me at the moment. I feared being her – the perpetual ‘party of one’ at friend’s weddings – and yet I just knew I had no choice but to succumb to my fate. I hated the idea of having kids when I was “old” – over 35 – and at the same time I could not really see a path anywhere but there.

I wasn’t much different from other girls in the sense that I imagined a distant fantasy of happily ever after. But I was very different from those other girls in the sense that I really had no ideal of marriage, kids or family built in or superimposed upon my wiring. I simply wanted to be my own person and that was enough for the future. Kids and marriage really didn’t seem to make very many people happy around me, and in a twist of fate I happened to be born a die-hard feminist or women’s suffragist reincarnate.

Katherine Woodward Thomas, bless her heart, would probably say that when I was a little girl I had made an “agreement or promise to the universe” that this would be my future. And so it was fulfilled as I had manifested. But my less-cosmically-inclined inner-cynic says fuck that, I was totally intuitive about my path and was cursed with a “knowingness” about how things would go no matter what. I simply knew…that one day I’d be watching a Katherine Heigl film and have a panic attack in disbelief that I was indeed LIVING that reality. (Deborah Messing or Jennifer Aniston would fit here too)

One of the most hilarious things people say is, “when you stop looking for it, it will find you.” I can’t even count the number of times in my life I have “stopped looking for it.” And then I start looking again. And then I stop looking. And then again, I look. So I guess statistically the odds are in favor of that quote working out at some point but it’s certainly no great advice for anyone hoping to encounter a life partner. And it definitely doesn’t apply to the millions of people who have found their partners via online dating. Dating is looking.

Digressions and sidebars aside, I need to come from the heart for a moment. I want to tell you the truth. Perhaps if I say it out loud it will cease to be my story.

Every single wedding, bridal shower, bachelorette party and bridesmaids dress fitting in the last four years has felt like a giant chain saw ripping through my delicate skin and chattering violently into my bones. Every single post-ceremony pre-reception cocktail hour where I’ve stood there alone and uncomfortable, clutching my watered down gin and tonic while looking like a million bucks, has felt like a thousand knives stabbing my chest, blood from my heart pouring down into my perfectly matched Michael Kors heels. Every solo night in that hotel room I booked months ago for the destination wedding hoping I’d have someone to share it with has seized my jaw up so when I wake up in the morning my face feels like it was pumped full of lead shot.

Shame. Embarrassment. Inadequacy.

These three beasts have lit up the devil inside my heart during joyous celebrations of love. They take over and make me feel wretched from the bobby pins in my up-do all the way down to the French pedicure peeping beyond my waves of chiffon. Today as I write the honest truth, I seek to take the wind out of their sails.

I am not ashamed. I am not inadequate. I am not less valuable or less significant than the strangers sitting next to me at Table 5 just because I am one and not two.

The funny thing is, I love weddings. I am not a cynic. I relish in traditions and ceremonies and rites of passage. I am passionately enthusiastic about showering friends with these things and supporting them through their experiences. I am neither envious nor bitter.

The ball and chain in this scenario is undoubtedly shame. (Wouldn’t Brené Brown be so thrilled at these findings!)

In light of the fact that there’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s quite simple: I really just knew it would turn out this way. A real living breathing romcom. Here’s to my happy beginning.

Amen.