ask jojo: i've never been in a relationship
alternatively titled, how to be single, how to love, and how to make the most of both.
dear jojo,
i hope that you are doing well! as we reach the end of valentine’s day 2022, my brain is especially focused on the topic of intimate relationships and my growing desire to be in one. over the past few years, i have watched many of my close friends enter romantic relationships while i remain the “single friend” in the group. while i know it’s a distortion of my own mind, i can’t help but look around and feel like everyone is in romantic relationships and experiencing an aspect of life that i have never known. i recognize that romantic relationships are never as perfect or ideal as they seem to the outside eye, and that romantic relationship timelines for queer folk can look different because of the unique barriers we can face in building community. yet, i yearn for a romantic relationship and have found myself feeling depressed and hopeless as i contemplate a life without a partner. i want to learn how to embrace my singlehood and give myself grace as i navigate this process. what advice do you have? thank you so much in advance—it may sound superficial but this has been the source of a great deal of pain for me over the years!
sincerely,
ceaselessly single
dear single,
i truly believe that nothing about this question sounds superficial. to begin with, we’ve been wired, evolutionarily and biologically, over the past 300,000 years of homo sapiens’ evolution and survival, to need love. and who knows what happened before that? there is evidence of our pre-human ancestors taking care of each other: people before we called ourselves people tending the wounded instead of leaving them to die, tiny children’s footprints preserved skipping in the dust next to an adult’s. if we are the result of history (and make no mistake, we are), then who are you to fight against an urge that has been circulating through the collective unconscious for over a quarter of a million years? this is to say nothing of the social conditioning we receive, or of the way romantic love is glorified into an almost transcendental experience by the poets and hollywood and everyone else in on the gag. romantic love can be transcendental - i’m a poet myself, i should know - but it can also just be abuse masquerading as love. it can also just feel ordinary, and boring, like any of the other miracles in our lives that we once begged for, sobbing and sobbing instead of putting away our laundry, and that we now take for granted.
i’m not going to tell you to cherish your friendships, or to celebrate being single, or to date yourself. that will come at the end of this. for now i’m going to tell you that it’s okay to feel bad about it. what you’re going through is objectively difficult, and it’s only made more difficult by watching what feels like everyone you know fall in love and leave you behind in the dust. i’ve been in relationships before, but i’ve also experienced similar terrain as you. i’ve only had one relationship in my life that lasted for more than a few months consecutively, and it was the most miserable, toxic time of my life. i know exactly how bad things can be on the inside of the club, because i have been in there and i barely made it out with my soul intact. and still, despite that knowledge, sometimes i watch people getting married or celebrating years together on instagram and i feel myself unraveling. i don’t even want to get married, and still if it’s the wrong day or the wrong time it feels personal, as if everyone else is settling down and buying houses and celebrating love just to spite me. what is wrong with me, i ask the universe, that i don’t get to be happy the way other people are happy? i know i have a lot of happiness and beauty and goodness in my life. but still i feel cast out, occasionally. and i know a lot of relationships are unhappy. i know a lot of the people getting married so young are settling, or just don’t know anything else. i know a lot of my friends in long-term relationships have either lost the spark or fight every day or don’t feel loved the way they want to be loved. but it can still hurt to feel like you’re missing out on something everyone else gets to have.
feeling like everyone else is in a relationship except for you might not even be a distortion. i recently explored that feeling in my own life, out of curiosity, and could only come up with one other friend who wasn’t in a relationship. there are people in my wider social net who are single, people who i even love but don’t actually communicate with frequently; but as far as “people i regularly speak to and confide in,” there was only one person not in a committed relationship. looking at her singlehood, however, forced me to consider my own. this is not a person who could be mistaken for someone who “deserves” singlehood as punishment (an idea we’ll get more into in a minute) - i.e., someone toxic or the type of hot mess we all know (and have been) who’s being given a timeout from the universe, so that they stop inflicting pain on everyone they date. this is a person who is a walking green flag. she looks like a vogue model, which i tell you because i know part of the myth of being single that we tell ourselves can become that we’re simply not hot enough or good looking enough for a relationship. my friend is proof that that’s simply not how the universe operates. she crafts handmade objects in her spare time, making everything from rugs to lighting fixtures to knitwear. she regularly gives me stomach cramps from how funny she is. she works with children, and shows up for her life with incredible courage, and is one of the most grounded, grateful humans i’ve met on this wild journey through the states and the cities and the years. she’s also been single - small flings and hookups aside - for three or four years. why? because she has high fucking standards.
my friend, who we’ll call A, could snap her fingers and be in a relationship tomorrow if she so wanted. and you probably could too. there are enough insecure and lonely people in the world that none of us, mathematically speaking, should ever have to be single. unless you live somewhere so rural that your village only consists of twenty people, or you’re a scientist working in antarctica six months out of the year, the sheer force of human loneliness and the need for connection would be enough to land you a partner. (and even in antarctica i’ve read that all the researchers fuck each other.) even these extreme scenarios don’t rule out the possibility of relationships - the internet allows us to communicate with and build relationships with people from all over the world. so what gives, then? if we could realistically be in a relationship tonight, if we were really willing to go to that length, why be single?
because a relationship and a good relationship are not the same thing. i suspect that deep down you know this, and i also suspect that you are healthy enough to set boundaries with your potential love interests and/or hookups, which usually scares off the most toxic ones right away. the longer you are single for, and the healthier a relationship you build with yourself in that time, the less likely you are to get into a shitty relationship. shitty relationships are for the desperate and the insecure; the rest of us get the fuck out of dodge the minute we realize things aren’t going to change. the desperate and the insecure can find themselves in wonderful relationships too, relationships which heal them and soothe them and give them back to the world healthier and happier, but desperation is a key that unlocks a lot of doors - doors which maybe shouldn’t be unlocked. there are people right now who are double and triple texting people who just aren’t that into them. there are people getting cheated on who know they are being cheated on and who are looking the other way, because the idea of being single again is too terrifying for them to contend with. there are people who are in relationships which cause them to cry every day, day after day after day until eventually they just go numb. and these people stay, some of them for years, some of them for the rest of their lives, because the alternative - of leaving and starting over somewhere else - feels to them like an admission of failure. they will stay until the bitter, bitter end instead of tapping out and admitting they were wrong about who they were going to spend their life with. is love worth it if it feels like that? is it even love?
i don’t think it’s a coincidence that my friend who tolerates the least bullshit from men (her preferred dating material) is also my friend who has been single the longest. and yes, queer relationships are different; we’ll get into that in a minute. but i think it’s important to remember that you could have settled, or else been so desperate that you conjured someone out of thin air to fill the void. as far as being queer goes - queerness, unfortunately and fortunately, takes intentionality in a way that heterosexuality doesn’t, at least in the current heteronormative culture. straight people are surrounded by other straight people everywhere they go. queer people have to actively seek each other out. i don’t know what your situation is in terms of having a queer community, but i promise you that the work of building one is one of the most rewarding experiences you can have. maybe you live somewhere with a gay scene or a gay bar - perfect! then you at least have somewhere to start. maybe not. then it’s time to either find queer friends who live over the internet or to download a dating app. dating apps don’t have to be exclusively for dates, just like dates don’t have to lead exclusively into romantic relationships. my best friend in boulder, where i currently live, i met on hinge in august; we are now so close we call ourselves platonic life partners. having another person like me in my corner has made a world of difference to me, even though it hasn’t changed my relationship status. we talk about the experience of being non-binary and queer and trying to date or explain ourselves to straight, cis men. we go out dancing and act as each other’s shield against leering straight men. we have long, philosophical conversations about the nature of gender and identity, conversations i can’t have with my cis & straight friends. we also hold hands and cuddle and take care of each other when one of us doesn’t feel good. in short, my queer relationships - even though they’re not romantic relationships - have consistently been the most rewarding ones.
queer friendships and queer intimacy is so beautiful and powerful precisely because it’s hard won - because we have to look for each other, but also because we, by default, have to work harder on who we are than most straight people. deconstructing your relationship to sex and relationships means deconstructing your relationship to intimacy and love and life, which is why i think most of my queer friends are much more open about their feelings and also tend to practice the most cuddly and touch-driven of the love languages. most straight people don’t have to define their relationship to gender, or sexuality, or navigate the changing tides of changing identities. they have the option to explore these things and come out the other side a much more self-aware and compassionate person. and some of them do, to be sure! but they aren’t forced into this journey the way queer people are. it’s a tragedy that more people don’t go on these journeys though, because simply going on them turns you into a more interesting being. being forced to reckon with who you are and where you stand leads to a much more nuanced understanding of yourself, and your life, and your place in the world. is it an occasionally painful journey? yes. but you can’t win self-knowledge and acceptance any other way. if it’s between self-knowledge and burying your head in the sand, i choose self-knowledge every time. as socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
my point in telling you all this being: building a queer community will help you in ways you cannot even begin to imagine yet. you can do this like i said above by going into queer spaces, if they’re available, or by searching out other queer people online. but don’t underestimate the possibility of finding queer people out in the world, either. (we all have to leave our house sometimes, after all.) maybe you attend events or workshops or concerts that you know other queer people will be at - a local midnight production of the rocky horror picture show isn’t necessarily a queer-exclusive space, but i promise you there won’t be an army of straight people there. same goes for art history talks, and political organizing meetings, and productions by dance companies. maybe you volunteer a few hours a week for a candidate who supports LGBTQIA rights or who is a member of the community themselves. maybe you block out one saturday a month to go to a nearby art museum or to a concert in the park. maybe you just commit yourself to complimenting one person every time you go into a coffee shop - saying “i like your outfit” and seeing if the conversation goes anywhere. i deeply believe that whatever you are seeking is seeking you. the road may be convoluted, or it might take a million detours, but going out into the word with the intention of making connections and building community will give you that community back tenfold. once you’ve made community, ask other people about their timelines. ask older queers who have found romantic love what it’s like. reclaim intimacy as a radical act. ask your friends to snuggle. give longer hugs. say “thank you for spending time with me. i love you.” every time you leave someone you love. listen and observe and knit yourself in deeply, because comparing yourself to straight people is not just a waste of time, it’s damaging.
you can also just go to the things you really want to go to, other queer people be damned. (this is also an excellent way to embrace your singlehood and to practice not losing yourself in a relationship when it comes along, because believe me, at a certain point in every relationship you’ll miss being able to just pick up and leave your apartment without saying a word to anyone.) expanding our lives is always a rewarding task, even if we meet no one we vibe with during that expansion. look up events in your area: your local bookstore is probably a gold mine of interesting people and events, and authors doing the rounds for book tours love seeing fresh faces in the crowd. maybe you’ve always wanted to learn violin. maybe you dream about oil painting. maybe you just deeply want to eat good food and drink good wine and listen to classical music. give yourselves these things, whether they’re alone or with established friends or with people new to your circle. it can feel scary to begin the task of building community, queer or otherwise, but it’s important to remember, especially if you have anxiety around these things, that most people in the world are simple creatures. yes, we are all an amalgamation of priceless and unrepeatable moments; but also we all just want to feel good, and make people laugh, and have time to pursue our hobbies and look after the people we love and get satisfaction from our work. people are mostly decent. if you go up to someone and compliment their shirt, they will most likely say thank you. some people will even compliment your shirt back! what i am saying is it can be terrifying to bridge the gap between ourselves and the unknown, but what an awful lot of helping hands we will meet along the way.
you have to put yourself out there in order to reap the rewards, both in terms of seeking out other people in your community and also in terms of letting people know you. like that viral new york times essay said, if we want the rewards of being loved, we must submit to the mortifying ideal of being known. are you willing to be a little bit embarrassed, or feel a little bit awkward, or have a boring or downright disastrous first date, in return for the chance to expand your life? if you are, good. if you aren’t, i don’t know what to tell you, other than the fact that everyone is mostly just thinking of themselves. even if you embarrass yourself or say something truly mortifying - even if you get blackout drunk and accidentally piss your pants - people will only really care for like five minutes. everything good comes with some risk. some people will think you’re boring. some people will hate you. (this will, 99 times out of 100, have nothing to do with you and everything to do with their own insecurities and issues, but it’s still a thing that happens.) but if you want to build a bigger life, which is what building community and falling in love are really about, this is the price you have to pay. it’s miniscule compared to the love on the other side, but it’s still there. think of yourself as being on a hero’s journey. did any protagonist you ever read about just get what they wanted without a little bit of struggle first? no. and neither will you. but nothing in this world is quite as sweet as getting what you want after having been denied it. and nothing is better than love - the romantic kind, sure, but also the friends who come out of nowhere, the people you randomly reconnect with after years of leading separate lives, the person who’s known you and seen you from one stage of your life to the next, so that they’re essentially a living history of your own past and foibles and projects. all of that love will save you. it likely already is.
now. how to give yourself grace and embrace your singlehood. i think acknowledging that you have a different timeline than straight people is an excellent way of showing yourself grace as you navigate your journey. it’s also important to remember that your timeline - romantically and otherwise - is going to look slightly different than everyone else’s, because it’s yours. my own life has not unfolded according to the trajectory that a white, middle-class, honors student is expected to follow: i got rejected from all the colleges i applied to. i went to rehab at eighteen, and then again at nineteen, while everyone else i knew was starting college and partying and having the time of their lives. i dropped out of school three times (three!). i don’t have a bachelor’s degree. i don’t have a literary agent. i still haven’t had a long-term relationship (i don’t count the abusive one). i am 25 and waiting tables and writing and reading four hours a day, all in the hopes of “making it”. could i categorize this as a failure? sure, if i wanted to make myself fucking miserable. but what good would that do?
i consciously choose to view my life as a long and winding road, one in which everything is adding up to something. i don’t know what it’s going to be, but i am determined to choose curiosity over fear and to work for what i want, regardless of if i get it or not. you have to be willing to do the same, both romantically and otherwise. you have to make the decisions you want to and need to make. you have to accept the possibility that anything can happen, that we live in a world of magic - actual, literal magic, no matter what the scientists say - and that it can all end tomorrow. immerse yourself in the things that make you feel good, in the things you’ve always wanted to do but are scared of doing. forgot about a timeline, or where you’re supposed to be. some of the most beautiful moments in my life only happened because i skipped class for the day or because instead of finishing a literature degree i decided to say fuck it and wait tables instead. who knows what beautiful things you might have missed if you were in a relationship?
in the spirit of celebrating the unknown, allow me a short aside. i got dumped by someone i did want to be dumped by right before i turned twenty-one. it was painful for a myriad of reasons, the primary ones being i was still in love with him & i hadn’t planned on being dumped. i had also behaved like an asshole, a fact which lent itself to the running narrative in my head that i am going to be alone forever (sound familiar?). what i had planned on instead of being dumped was loving this person & feeling smug about my first “successful” relationship & the continued sense of security that comes with being in a romantic relationship. instead i was unmoored. but my unmooring was one of the best things that happened to me. i started practicing the artist’s way, which is a beautiful & incredible book that will change your life, if you’re in the market for that sort of thing. i learned to surf and got spit up by the waves again and again and again, tumbling onto the beach like a shipwreck survivor. i took pottery classes. i went to the grand canyon and to oregon and started a blog. all of these enriched my life beyond words. do i still surf? no, as evidenced by the fact that i live in colorado. but it still led me to where i am now, and gave me more than i gave it, and turned me into a more interesting, well-rounded person. would i have even thought of taking improv classes or quitting my job to travel if i was in a relationship? probably not. the pain of being heartbroken, and lonely, and reckoning with what a dick i was to the people i loved, was too big for me to do nothing with. it forced me to remake my life. and my life became much bigger, and beautiful, and more rewarding because of it. that is why we have to take life as it comes, and to learn to flow with the unexpected. everything you’re going through now - the good, the bad, and the ugly - wouldn’t be happening if you were in a relationship. what you have is your life, and what i have is mine, and both your experience with romantic love and mine have led us to become more self-sufficient, interesting, and overall okay individuals. all of the things that compose your day-to-day life - what you read, who you miss, what you make yourself for dinner, where you take yourself on saturdays when it’s warm and sunny and life is as open as a doorway - all of these things are your life. what you are doing, every day, is building a life. there is no “later,” there is no “one day.” this isn’t a practice round before the real game. this is it.
there’s a quote by cheryl strayed, from one of her columns writing dear sugar for the rumpus. in it she’d been asked what she would tell her twenty-year-old self, and part of her answer is below (although i recommend reading the entire thing, as it’s excellent) -
“the useless days will add up to something. the shitty waitressing jobs. the hours writing in your journal. the long, meandering walks. the evenings reading poetry and short stories and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and god and whether you should shave your armpits or not. these things are your becoming.”
these things are your becoming. you are constantly growing into the person you will be, and it’s really only whether or not you choose to see it with grace or not that you can be given grace. there is no formula for finding love, or for eternal happiness, or any of the other things we want. all of life is just luck and talent and chance and work. things may not happen the exact way we want them to, but if we choose to view life as an opportunity, even during the shitty months, even when we can taste our own bitterness every time we bite into our breakfasts, we will have a much better time going through it.
does it suck to feel like your timeline is “wrong”? yeah. absolutely. but i also want you to consider how fragile everything is, how deeply interconnected and unfathomable all of our lives are. i don’t know who or where i’d be or what i’d be doing if my life hadn’t gone so spectacularly not according to plan. it’s like those stories about people who oversleep by five minutes and miss their train, the train that they’ve taken every day for five years, and then that morning the train crashes. none of us have any idea what we’re five minutes away from. think about the butterfly effect (the theory, not the ashton kutcher film). if you had fallen in love earlier. if you had had a high school boyfriend. if you had met the right person when you were twenty-two instead of twenty-six, or thirty, or thirty-five. you would be in a completely different place right now. sure, maybe those alternate timelines still lead to you sitting exactly where you sit now, working the same job and with the same group of friends. but you also could be living a completely different life. maybe that one is equally happy and fulfilling, maybe not. the point isn’t that this life is better; it’s that it’s yours. it’s important - imperative, even - to recognize the delicacy of our lives, of the threads that hold everything together. maybe you not falling in love with anyone else is the universe urging you to fall in love with yourself first. maybe you’re meant to establish yourself in your field or do something groundbreaking, and if you were looking forward to going home and canoodling with a partner every night you wouldn’t be working nearly as hard. maybe you’re meant to rescue a random cat off the streets, and if you were in a relationship you would be walking to dinner instead of walking home, and your path wouldn’t cross with the cat’s. i don’t know. and neither do you. and i think that sense of not knowing, if we can water it, is the foundation for a sense of wonder, and awe, and gratitude. the universe, believe it or not, has a wicked sense of humor. you will look back on all this one day and think how astoundingly grateful you are that you got to spend your twenties building yourself up, instead of throwing yourself into relationships with people who did not know how to love you. you will cherish what you have when you have it because you’ll be aware of how much it means to get there. you will marvel at the series of coincidences or seemingly random events - your shoe coming untied, the coffee shop being out of oat milk, a song on the radio - that will change the course of your life completely.
as for embracing your singlehood: romanticize your own life. ask your friends to set you up on blind dates. meet people you barely know for dinner and invite your most interesting coworker to go thrifting and ask if you can make out with the people you want to make out with. buy a bunch of shirts with rainbows or the kind of funky patterns that you know straight people aren’t going to wear. take a pottery class, even if you fucking suck at it. announce yourself to the world. this is your life. will you find love one day? yes. i promise you. you also might lose it, or you might have it forever, or you might find thirty-seven different loves, some of them for only one day, some of them for years. i don’t know what will happen to you, in terms of other people. i can’t control the other people in my life, and you can’t control the other people in yours. what you can do is continue building the relationship you have with yourself. you can gift yourself free time and playfulness and exploration. you can take yourself out on dates and go to comedy shows alone and start a book club. because whether or not you fall in love tomorrow or in ten years, this much is true: your life will only be as big or as small as you decide it’s going to be.
and as for romantic love - there’s nothing wrong with you for not having found it yet. trust me. repeat it to yourself over and over again. write it on a sticky note and stick it to your mirror, stick it to the dashboard in your car, stick it on the microwave door. buy fridge magnets and spell it out if you have to. you are worthy of love, in all its incarnations. maybe it will take you a little while to find it. maybe you will walk headfirst into the love of your life tomorrow. but think of who you’ll be, once you do find it. you’ll have already lived twenty-something years of a good life, one in which you worked hard and built a career and made lasting friends and pursued your hobbies. you will be coming to the relationship a full person already, and what’s more you’ll have the knowledge of yourself as a full person. loving someone at twenty-five is worlds apart from loving someone at seventeen. was it fun making out in the backseat of someone’s car at seventeen? yeah. but is it even better now, knowing who i am and what my limits are and what i do and do not want? absolutely. i promise you that love is out there. it just might take a minute to make itself known. but in the meantime - you have yourself. you have your friends. you have a job you’ve worked hard for, and a head full of knowledge, and the ability to read and write and belly laugh and try new take-out places. all of these things will serve you. all of these things are already serving you. allow them to do so. thank them for what they are giving you. list them out, right now. list five new ones every day. so you don’t have a romantic relationship with someone right now. but you do have a relationship with yourself. you have a relationship with life itself, with the mysterious and eternal give and take that is living. you are a part of the human family, a part of the animal kingdom, a part of the earth itself. this is your life! right here. right now. heartbreak and longing and bad days included. it’s yours. entirely yours. isn’t it a miracle?
xoxo,
jojo
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