I’m 27 years old and before I met my lovely girlfriend, I was single for about 13 years. When I let people know this, they looked at me as if I committed murder. The general response was that I was either lying, or … lying. They couldn’t seem to wrap their mind around the idea of a person not being in a relationship for that long.They have this mentality because singleness is seen as a disease and it is believed that those affected live a miserable, lonely, pitiful life.
Those who dared to hang around my infected being long enough without fear of catching my horrid sickness generally asked this one question; “why are you single?”. I would either give my [then] really long list of reasons, or just lazily shrug and ask them “why are you in a relationship?”
Most of the answers I got were along this line:
- to have fun
- for companionship,
- to have a confidante
- to pay and receive attention
- to fall in love
- to find one’s soul-mate
Is there anything on this list that can happen outside of a relationship?
Yes. EVERYTHING!
If you need a relationship for the first four reasons then you need to get out more and socialize. Go meet people. Spend more time with your friends. Talk to that person you pass in the hall everyday. You would be surprised how much fun you can have just being with other people, and how easy it is to find companionship and a confidante just among friends. Finding and making friends will get you all the attention you desire.
The first 4 things on that list can all be achieved through friendship. I didn’t feel alone because I appreciated the company of my friends.
To be fair, starting a relationship will also alleviate a boring, lonely life, but once you settle in, you would realize that you can still feel quite lonely at times and when the mushy feeling leaves, everything can start to get boring again. When one person in the relationship is bored, they tend to not want to spend time with the other person, so the companionship and attention is gone.
If you have friends then you have more opportunities to have fun, and much more companionship than you would just by being with one person.
The desire to fall in love was placed into our minds by our parents reading us those bedtime stories, and from watching disney movies. Unfortunately, falling in love is a myth and if having a soul mate was even a little possible, then almost no one would find that person. The world isn’t THAT small.
But let’s dream for a while for the sake of keeping some hearts hopeful. Lets assume that the cute little feeling you get in your chest when you meet that “special someone” is actually love. You don’t need to start a relationship to get to that point. Before I was with my girlfriend, we were friends. Our friendship developed into something a bit more intimate, but we started as friends. As common folk in this game of make believe we’re playing right now would say, we “fell in love” while being friends.
So I established that being in a relationship for things that one can get outside of a relationship would make relationships unnecessary.
But Ricky, what makes a relationship necessary? The only logical reason I could think of for a relationship is marriage. Growing up, I didn’t want to get married. It was on my “things to never do” list and those who were in any way close to me knew I was very adamant about that.
If you are in a relationship and you have no intention of getting married then chances are your relationship is doomed from the start. I never saw the need for a relationship because I always considered it a road to marriage. If you have no intention of getting married, then you’re starting something that leads to nothing and since it leads to nothing then it will more than likely end.
I observe couples and usually predict that some won’t last and I’m almost 100% correct in my predictions. In some of those relationships I could see the selfishness of one or both parties involved, while in most, they have no plans whatsoever for marriage.
SEMI-RANDOM ALERT: If a man doesn’t want to marry his girl, most of the time it’s because he doesn’t want to have to go through too much stress if he wants to leave her.
The biggest mistake I see is that people call their relationship a commitment when it’s really just a glorified friendship. If I don’t want to be your friend anymore, I could either just ignore you, or tell you that we aren’t friends anymore. If you’re my girlfriend and I want to break up with you, I could either ignore you, or tell you what we aren’t together anymore. The end is that effortless.
There’s no commitment in a relationship. Marriage is the commitment. If you want to do the whole “relationship” thing to try to satisfy certain wants, then by all means do your thing. Just be sure that you have a goal in mind or you would be wasting your time, damaging your emotions, and making it harder for the future husband/wife to have a proper COMMITMENT with you.
I want to marry my girlfriend. I want to commit fully to her. That is my goal. If I didn’t have that goal then I would still be very much single. I would still be looked at as diseased and crazy, while people throwing their emotions into a goalless relationship would be normal. I never wanted to be normal anyway.
Ricky…..
