Relationships Talk

All my friends are breaking up.

It’s the age of it, I suppose. Like balayage or hot yoga. My friends and I are all hurtling towards Saturn’s return, so sooner or later something phenomenal was bound to happen in our lives. Some of them are switching careers. One has taken up extreme long distance running with all the solemnity of a priest. But most of my friends’ Saturns are barging through their front doors with the express purpose of causing their relationships to fall spectacularly apart.

Not me. I have been single for so many years that they’ve all begun to blend into each other like a melted tub of neapolitan ice cream. It’s probably why my friends who have broken up, and there have been so many of them recently, end up sitting in my flat, cradling my wine glasses between their hands, talking to me and not to any number of our other friends.

I’m single. It’s what I do, it’s what I’ve almost always done. And over the (many) years that I’ve been doing it, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I’ve done every difficult experience, every table-for-one in foreign cities, every lonely coaster up at the bar, every single movie ticket, every countdown to midnight on New Year’s Eve, every uneven place-setting at a wedding reception on my own. At this point, I’m pretty much the Oprah of being on your own.

The other day I sat outside at a cafe with a friend of mine who had just broken up with her partner of several years, someone she had crossed the world to start a life with. Together, they had begun building something, brick-by-brick. And then, nothing. He untangled himself from her, picked apart all the frayed threads that had tied them together, and left their life behind. Not that it really matters – but also, it does – this friend of mine is an incredibly special person. She’s smart and funny and sparkly with life, so full of it that it fizzes right out of her. What’s that saying? To know her is to love her.

“What am I going to do?” she asked me, looking just over my shoulder. The sky was grey and overcast, but she was wearing her sunglasses. “What if I never meet someone again? What if I’m on my own forever?”

I know this question. It’s the question that rattles through me sometimes in the witching hours of life. I find myself drenched with the anxieties of this question when I least expect it. It will be a normal day and then this question will appear in my head, and the normal day is gone.

I’ve thought about this question a lot over the years. How could I not? If you’re single, it’s the kind of thing that’s always sitting in some corner of your mind. I’ve wondered if I would ever meet somebody again and get to know the stuff of them as they got to know mine. If somewhere on my horizon there was handing over each section of the newspaper after I was finished reading it on a Sunday morning; if there were fights about the Amazon Prime membership and who was going to buy toilet paper and whether or not someone’s colleague was a sexist idiot; if there was knowing all the idiosyncrasies of someone else as well as I know my own.

Of course I have wondered about all of that. And if I’ve learnt anything over my years of being single it is this: I want that. I hope that one day I will have it. I truly believe that I will. In those lowest, iciest points of life I remind myself how much love I have in me and how many people there are in the world who love and will love me for it.

But if there’s another thing that I’ve learnt over my years of being single it is that no matter what else happens: I am enough.

This is what I told my friend that morning. You are enough. Every part of of you is enough. Your story is enough, you are its beginning, middle and end. Your wonderful, squishy, lived-in life is enough. All your shit is enough. You, on your own, are complete, even as you are growing and changing and transforming, still, you are whole. You are everything that you need. You are enough.

A few months ago I interviewed a dating guru for a story and despite having no intention of doing so I immediately bought whatever it was that he was selling. I went in clear-headed and left muddled, he was that charming and that present.

When I spoke to him, he talked with some urgency about how women are always trying to get more out of someone who for whatever reason doesn’t want to give them more. The answer, he said, was not to keep squeezing something that would not be squeezed. We have no control over what someone gives us. What we do have control over is ourselves.

It’s a nice line. (He should print it on tee-shirts.) But there’s something in it, I think. There is so much love out there that is not mine to manipulate. But this life of mine is mine, and it is everything. It is strange and full and funny and sad, it is all my own. Its mornings and its late nights, its bookshelves, its brunches, its screens, its receipts, its dishes, its alarms, its scrapes, its fevers, its nightmares, its dreams… It’s all mine and – even on its own – it’s all enough.

Happy Singles Day, everybody. You are enough.

Read more stories like this, including How I learned to enjoy being single plus, How to detox from dating.