on singleness in college
i am surrounded by love but have yet to experience it
there were a lot of things that made me excited for college: new friends, newfound independence, a change in environment. but there was one aspect that transcended these, that lingered in the back of my brain when i’d respond to people asking if i was excited for this new chapter of my life: meeting someone.
i remember my peers and i chirping about the prospects in senior year of high school. we were going to schools that were innumerably larger in population than our graduating class (for some, even our towns’ populations) and for myself and my queer friends, we were headed to areas that championed progressive values and had gay communities rich in history and uniqueness.
most of my friends received just that: safe spaces to express themselves, people to fall in love with and gay bars to tear up on saturdays. there’s no bitterness here—as long as one gay person’s winning, i’m winning too. but i’d be lying if i said that through the happiness i feel for all my cuffed queer friends, there wasn’t a thin mist of envy.
in less than three weeks i graduate from college. while this experience was—without a doubt in my mind—the best three years of my life, it will also mark three more years without ever having brought someone home; a feat that remarkably few people in my life can also say they’ve yet to achieve.
that isn’t to say i didn’t try. i dated around, even got close to something a few times, but nothing worked out—and that’s okay. there’s no way to say this without sounding cringe, but being single is nothing new for me. i entered college having been single the last two and a half years, but being single in college is a whole other beast than being single in high school.
the walls of social cliques disintegrate in an instant. dating apps sing to you like sirens. you and the other first-years pack yourselves onto the sweaty dance floors of the local bars and inside the frat basements like sardines, drunkenly hurling compliments at each other.
it was beautiful, and i don’t think i’ll be able to experience anything quite like it again. but my brain can’t help but pick apart when the people around me started finding the love they were (or sometimes weren’t1) seeking, and how i thought it was right around the corner for me, too.
for some of my peers, it was on those slick, hardwood dance floors that the heavy taps of thumbs typing in a phone number turned into a happy-six-month. for others, it was on their first, second or umpteenth rounds of hinge or tinder that a match truly lived up to its name.
regardless of the reason, everyone around me was finding love effortlessly, and it stung. i can say now that this definitely affected my dating life; dating is supposed to be fun, explorative and exciting. my desperation for a connection turned it into life-or-death, and led to one too many avoidable crash-outs and crawl-backs even as recent as this year.
as i write this now from my house of six, i am the only single resident. does it consciously bother me? do i lose sleep over it? no. but on a day like valentine’s day, or when the weekend rolls around and everyone is with their lovers, does it remind me of the undesirable circumstance? yes.
i shouldn’t call it that. there is a lot of joy to being single, and also, the absence of a person in my life is not…an absence. to treat being single like missing something is just not the way to think about it at all. there shouldn’t even really be a “way” to think about being single. it just is. you’re with you, and the more you can learn to enjoy that, the better.
i also want to emphasize that i am surrounded by endless love in other ways. i have a strong social circle, a loving family and an incredibly supportive community in my school, career, college and home towns. love is everywhere, and that is a fact i can attest to.
yet i can’t help but worry that my lack of dating experience will come back to bite me. in some ways, it already has; the last person i talked to ended things in part because i’ve never been in a relationship. it didn’t scare me too bad in the moment, but i’ve been thinking about it more and wondering if it’s doomed to befall me again.
some people may desire my non-existent relationship experience, although that desire may not come from the most innocent or healthy of places. others may view it as a negative, a red flag, even.
i do know, however, i am not the only one. and it may be more common than i think that others my age are also dealing with zero relationship experience as they traverse their early twenties.
as much as i worry, i feel that i’m losing sight of the fact that it’s so early in my life. i think that’s something that also can be attributed to social media—feeling like everything has to happen fast and soon, or we’re never going to have it.
in a way, i’m kind of glad i’ve been single for this long. it’s given me a lot of time to figure out things about myself, my needs, and how i should healthily go about dating, spending time with myself and more.
there have been times where a relationship is genuinely the only thing i could think about. but as i head into the summer, i know i’ll have plenty of other things to be occupied with and worry about than whether or not i meet someone.
it’ll happen when it’s supposed to happen. i don’t know when that’ll be, but all i need to know is it’ll be someday.
and maybe that’s my issue—that i’m constantly looking for love. but that’s a can of worms for another piece!
as far as i know, all the bad bitches are the odd ones out! <333