How to find love (when all your friends are coupled up)
We find ourselves deep in the party season, when even those who are antisocial the rest of the year feel obliged to enter the fray. Now, if at no other moment, one is compelled to meet people, commune, converse – meaning the suggestion of sex hovers alluringly in the air as surely as the mull and the pine. Christmas is a time for encounters: social, sexual, romantic.
And I know of what I speak. Three years ago, at the age of 43, I met my beloved at a Christmas party, after years of living the solo dream, including writing a column about being single. (I still think of myself as ‘professionally single’, despite my loved one’s protestations.)
‘How,’ people constantly ask me, ‘did you pull it off?’ – given that I defied conventional platitudes by relishing my lone life, having a ball, not being particularly bent on its ending, then meeting a chap so perfect that other women refer to him as the ‘illusion’, ‘dream’, and ‘unicorn’.
To my mind, the answer is not only luck, but by avoiding these platitudes in the first place. Smug I most certainly am not. My relationship could end tomorrow, and I hope I would embrace my new circumstances with the gusto I’m recommending. Neither do I believe that coupledom is for everyone. Cue my first tip…
Work out whether finding someone is what you actually want
It’s not always self-evident, this one. A lot of people assume that, merely because they are single, they must thus desire a partner. However, the message of their behaviour may be entirely the opposite. A friend once informed me that I was ‘ideologically single’ – and she was right. My relationship status wasn’t going to change until this did.
Relationships are hard work – a different sort of hard work to keeping the show on the road on one’s tod. There can be an ease to single living: a briskness and knowing where one is with it. And, despite their ability to act as a salve to loneliness, one is never more lonely than in a difficult, or flailing, relationship.
There are many ways of having love, companionship, and/or sex in your life, and different approaches may be appropriate to different stages of that existence. Consider whether it is a partner that you want, and – if it is – act on it.
Cultivate a dazzling social life
This one’s a no-brainer, whether you are determined to stay solo or become conjoined. If you’re single, your social life is your life; if seeking a relationship, then socialising will be the only means of achieving it. In either case, new blood is all. Plus, it’s terrific fun.
The majority of my closest alliances were forged when I became single in my mid-30s and I would take a bullet for each and every one of those friends. They are far more involved in my life than friends of yesteryear; what a pal refers to as ‘heritage friends’ (like ‘heritage tomatoes’, only frequently less palatable).
A lawyer I know, who has been unhappily single for 15 years, invariably barks, ‘I don’t need friends. I have enough friends. What I need is a boyfriend,’ then wonders why she never meets someone, while spending her time boring about with the same two couples from her university days.
The One, or even merely A.N. Other, is not going to appear on your doorstep by way of some benevolent deus ex machina. You’re going to have to put the work in: meet people, risk vulnerability, put yourself out there. Falling back on the argument that you ‘never meet anyone’ means you have only yourself to blame. What are you doing about it? Now? Tonight?
I get it. I’m a (closet) introvert myself, but even introverts tend to want to have sex. Take some responsibility, and get off your arse.
Embrace change
Not only do you have to work at it, you also have to work on yourself – as we all do, single or enmeshed, at every age. In the main, the single individuals I know and love are the best of people, and considerably saner than coupled specimens: being active, self-sufficient, and forced to stay on their toes, without an ounce of co-dependency in them. However, in respect of a few situations, it is immediately obvious why someone is alone, despite repeated attempts to be otherwise.
Personally, I needed to stop drinking after a lifetime of raucous carousing. I was 90 days sober the night I met my beloved, and he would have run a mile had this not been the case – as would I, in the direction of the next inveterate party animal.
Removing my drink blinkers allowed our eyes to meet (mine in focus). Finding myself non-plastered while all about me were revelling, I thought, ‘I’m going to talk to the most handsome man in the room,’ and proceeded to do so.
A friend said I was 'ideologically single' – my relationship status wasn’t going to change until this did
It turned out that, as well as being hot as Hades, he was clever, kind, witty, generous, entirely sans baggage, and shared my interest in literary theory. When another chap (my usual type, a lewd and lovable drunk) endeavoured to go home with me, I had the wits to decline and to secure Dashing Boy’s number. Only by altering the habits of a lifetime could this fateful encounter take place.
The three chief single bleaters of my acquaintance are – to put it frankly – an exhausting maniac, a swivel-eyed neurotic, and a carping bitch. It’s difficult to be around them, period, let alone as a lover. All badly need therapy; all refuse to countenance it.
As Albert Einstein probably didn’t say, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.’ See yourself as others see you and consider doing things differently.
Don’t settle
As a woman, one is constantly being fed that bullshit about being more likely to be blown up in a terrorist attack than meet your partner over the age of 40 etc etc. And that’s what it is: bullshit.
Moreover, later life has the potential for far more satisfying relationships: you’ve been around the block, know who you are, and you’re 4,000 times more fascinating than you were at 25. Plus, 400,000 times better at sex.
My ex-boyfriend and I could have settled rather than separated in my 30s. Having the guts to call it a day meant we both met people we are more compatible with. He got together with the love of his life shortly afterwards. Meanwhile, I got to have the time of my life. By way of a bonus, we didn’t kill each other.
When I was 40, some bore at a party (fat, wine-fugged, unfaithful to his wife) informed me that I would ‘only ever find someone broken now – a divorcé, or some sort of failure’. I refer him to the hot Disney prince I scored three fun-filled years later.
Enjoy!
For legions, going solo is the dream. Even those less enamoured will be forced to admit that it has its moments. However, the trouble with single life – for those who aim to be out of it – is that one never knows when it might end. If only it were akin to gardening leave: a few months’ dazzling hedonistic licence before getting stuck back into the old routine.
I say ‘trouble’, but it is also its brilliance. For, really, there is nothing like setting forth on a glacial December evening, not knowing where the night’s adventures will lead you, or with whom they will be hazarded. So, put your back into it, to be sure, but also relax, uncoil, enjoy. If you do happen to end up entwined, these are the days you will look back on with nostalgia.
