I’ve been in relationships almost continuously since I wa 14. I’m 25 now, and I don’t think I’ve ever gone more than 6 months…hell, if that…without being “boo-ed” up with somebody. So of course, when my friends and family would see me at the end of a relationship, they’d tell me I need to be single. I didn’t understand the logic, and quite frankly, neither did they. Nobody has ever been able to give me a good reason why it’s valuable or necessary to be single. I always rationalized that whether in a committed relationship or single, you are always going to seek companionship. Single people have what we call “teams,” a string of individuals who they call depending on their needs at the moment, may they be sexual, intellectual, emotional or otherwise. Me, I’m too simple-minded to do all that categorizing and remembering names and phone numbers, so I just went the girlfriend route most of the time, and most of the people I know didn’t have much logic to put in opposition against my argument.
But…
I’ve been recently single…a couple months or so….and I think I’m starting to see the benefit to it. It’s a little hard to peg, but I’m going to try anyway.
For the most part, in a relationship your concerns are at least partly for the other person. When they’re up, you are up; when they’re down, you are usually down. You celebrate and mourn with them, you have someone to talk to and go out to the movies on Friday nights with, all that good, sweet shit. But your decisions are never your own, they always have to consider another person, which is a bit of a hindrance, especially in college. What happens to us after graduation? Where will I work? How serious is this relatonship? Does it merit me making the sacrifice of being closer to you? What if closer to you is farther away from my family? What are the job opportunities like there? All those tough questions. So that’s one facet.
The other thing is, and this is quite a bit more personal, I started to value my life based on who I kept around. Not as if I were worthless without a girlfriend, but sort of like I needed someone to care for…a human being that is (considering I have two dogs). Either way, this is the part that’s tough to peg, and it might be easier to put a finger on it if I explain how I feel differently now that I’m “ok” with being single. The biggest change is, that emotionally, I’ve learned not to care too much whether a woman is close to me or not. True enough I still get lonely, and sex is…rare…to say the least, we all miss those things. But in a way, I’ve become more picky. I’ll look at a nice young woman, say to myself, “that’s someone I could see myself dating” but I don’t…I wait. Maybe it goes somewhere or maybe it doesn’t, but in that in-between time, I see red flags that turn me off to the possibility of a relationship even remotely working. And it isn’t always her personality. Sometimes it’s my freedom. The ability to make the decision to move closer to my family without having to worry about that subtle expectation of closeness, or is it rather an apprehension to long distance, who the hell knows? Over and above all of that though, I find that it’s ok for me to be by myself…and being by myself has made it easier to see the type of woman who “might” compel me to get back into a relationship. Very interesting epiphany for me, because the problem with being a serial monagomous is that your standards tend to droop because the goal is not to find a good girlfriend, or a compatible girlfriend, it’s just to find a girlfriend…some accessory to your need for companionship and to fend off loneliness.
So, to all my friends who couldn’t help me figure out why it was I needed to be single…I found the answer for you. So now you can use it next time I decide to get into a stupid relationship. 
