Seeing Singlutionary

I've been more or less absent from blogging for over a year now. And although, during this time, I very much wanted to write, wanted to continue to participate in the happily single online community -- I also felt like I had nothing to say.

Either I had nothing to say, or I couldn't figure out what to say.

Writing stopped feeling cathartic because suddenly, being single & happy was, well, boring. I was content. My issues weren't around being single but around working out other kinks in my life.

And, for part of the past year I was not single. I was unhappily coupled, trapped in a strange relationship that I have no idea how I wound up in. It was a friendship gone awry which did teach me a few things about myself that I wasn't aware of: That I am seduceable despite my better intentions, that I am ambitious beyond my wildest beliefs and that I am incompatible with a broad range of personality traits which include heavy drinking, annoying questions and general neediness.

I tried to ride out the relationship with grace in order to save the friendship and failed.

It just wasn't something that I wanted to write about. Especially knowing that my blog would be read by said love-disaster.

A good portion of the year has transpired since that relationship came to a close and I am beginning to experience new revelatory interactions which might result in something more than a post saying "I'll be back soon".

I've also been blessed with many free books which need to be reviewed.

So, tonight, this Friday night, three months after my last post, I am finally on that long awaited date with my blog.

I could be on a date with a man. I have a few prospects, all of which are promising both physically and intellectually. But I am not. I am at home, being the homebody that I am and grateful for this time to jump back into the Singlutionary world.

Even though I suspect that I will not feel single much longer. Because, I have now at my disposal a growing community of smart, funny and interesting men.

Being without men was the only thing that was an issue before. Not in a romantic or even sexual way (although missing sex and intimacy was definitely an issue at times) -- but in some kind of yin/yang balance. I need men in my life just as I need friends with various perspectives and upbringings in my life. I need that male perspective and -- to be quite honest -- the masculine quality in general.

Some of the best times I had this year were with men who I am not romantically involved with -- I hiked to the top of Angel's Landing in Zion and spent a week in Chicago discussing Shakespeare with my Comical Cousin and a week ago today I spend the day hiking outside of Vegas to a delicious hot spring with (an admittedly sexy) Future Fed. And lately Tall Turtle has been buying me beers and generally showing me a good, laid back time (OK, so there is obviously some potential romance there).

But, in general, I think I've finally learned how to be friends with men. And it is a great experience and fills the place in my life that was made empty when my female friends all defected to marriage and babies.

And this blog, my Singlutionary life, is here on Friday nights when the best thing to do is check up with all the wonderful single people out there and their creative, interesting, engaging lives which are so full and joyful and positive despite being considered, by many of our culture, to be missing their "other half".

Date with Myself

I'm pretty sure that I've written before about friend dates and dating oneself, etc.

I've been dating lately. I've only been on a few dates though because between volunteer meetings and family home evening and scuba diving and grad school and friend's bday parties and working, I don't have a lot of nights free. This means that I often can't make a date for weeks at a time. Men either have to be willing to wait it out because they're so into me or because they have no other social prospects. I'm not sure which.

Despite only being on a few dates, I am tired of this dating thing already. Not because its been a bad experience but because I miss having nights to myself. And because after a while every man seems like the same man and I can't keep track of them unless I name them after their religion, political affiliation or profession (whichever stands out more). Apparently only atheists with PhDs ask me out these days which makes it real hard to tell them apart.

While this post might be a heck of a lot funnier if it were a dating post, it isn't.

Well. Maybe it is.

Because I am going to start dating this blog.

One thing that often falls to the wayside are my various writing projects. They don't have externally imposed deadlines and so far, writing doesn't pay the bills. So I never have time to write. But I love it, I need it, it makes me feel happy and satisfied. Just like a good date or a good meal or a good roll in the hay.

So now, my suitors will have to line up for even longer because I've just taken another date night out of circulation. My Friday nights will be spent with Singlutionary.

Of course, I still have to finish out the next two dates. Oh. It is so exhausting. And of course if a really great prospect comes along, I'll go out with him on a Friday night and skip my Singlutionary date that week. I've got to balance real life with online life.

But, once again, this raises the bar. I won't give up Singlutionary night to go out with some bozo that I know I'm not interested in.

Not that I would anyways. But there was a day when I would have.

So the point is: Check back here on Saturday morning with your cup of Singlutionary coffee.

And if there isn't anything new, well, you know there is a big story coming the next week!

Singlutionary's 30th Birthday Eve

I am writing this in the last 45 minutes of my 20s.

Over the past few years, I've gone through a wide range of emotions about turning 30, especially while single. Some of these feelings surprised me: I didn't know that certain insecurities or desires existed until I felt like the chance for them was drawing to a close.

Two years and some odd months ago, I was in a relationship which seemed like bliss for about two months and then unwound into months of turmoil. During the good times, I remember thinking: "I will be married by the time I'm 30 after all." I was surprised by how relieved and proud I felt. In marrying before 30, I would be accomplishing something that everyone could understand. Through marriage, I would prove to the world and, more importantly, to my family and friends near and far that I was worthy of undivided love, that I was attractive, sexually vital and successful in the most basic human way. I would be a good person, a good woman and by extension, a good friend, niece, daughter, cousin.

I had never realized how alienated I had felt from my friends and from most of my family because of my typically single status. I never realized how much people people worried about me, even pitied me because they felt something essential was missing in my life. I had no idea how much I had internalized this feeling.

When I thought that I would be married within the conventional timeframe, I felt, for the first time ever, that I had some kind of magic ticket to normalcy that I had always yearned for but had never been given.

At that time I was still only 27.

Since then, I have mulled over my fear of turning 30 and have come to face this new decade (now only 31 minutes away) with excitement and relief instead of fear and angst.

My late 20s were not easy. They were full of career failures, financial struggles, personal loss and general confusion. In many ways, it won't be hard to say goodbye to the consternation and frustration and grief of recent years.

And I'm not 20 anymore and I know things about the world. I have experience -- lots of it. And experience is something that can never be taken away from me. I've survived things that I never thought I would have to face.

I had a crisis just a few months ago when I first began to consider setting out on the long road towards a PhD. I realized that by choosing to commit the next 7 years to academic life, the opportunity to have biological children very well might pass me by. At the time I was slightly involved with a man who very much wanted wholesome biological children raised on milk and wheat bread. I mentioned my potential PhD aspirations to him during our last real phone conversation. Two weeks later he flippantly bowed out of our travel arrangements and said something about incompatibility. And that was it.

In the past 10 years I have learned that in choosing one thing, I am also NOT choosing so many others. Spending most of my 30s in school may very well end up being a choice against having a kid that carries my genetics although it doesn't eliminate my chance to be a parent.

And I am OK with that. If being pregnant and giving birth to my own spawn was super important to me, I would have chosen so many different ways to spend my 20s. I've always wanted to adopt older children and I've always known that by doing so, I can buy myself some time against the generation gap: If I am 40 and adopt a 7 year old, the generation gap isn't quite as huge as it would be if I gave birth at 40.

I am no longer afraid of being an old maid. I know that I will have companionship. And I know that it will be unconventional. I've lived my life out of order and upside down and I can't expect to suddenly grow up and start doing everything the typical way. The typical way has never made sense for me. Its not going to start making sense just because my looks and fertility are starting to fade.

I have a rich life and many talents. And I am going to use them. If nothing else, I am going to live life on my own terms. My 20s were about figuring out what I wanted to do. My 30s are going to be about doing it.

To actually realize my dreams instead of just dreaming them is at once exhilarating and intimidating. But that is where I'm headed.

I've got 9 minutes left. And then I'm ringing in the next decade of wonderment.

The Singlutionary Situation

I have one good friend in my city who is also single. Or WAS also single. Lately she has been going to and from another city to visit a man she recently met. Of course it is all my fault that they met and I have only myself to blame for the situation.

I have the bad habit of immediately starting to push friends away once they begin to get involved with someone. It isn't so much that I push them away but that I begin to expect less of them. And in a way, its an appropriate reaction. Having someone new in their life means that they have to make room for another person and I can't expect my friend to be as available as she once was.

By the time I was 22, all my best friends were married and very much involved in their relationships. At that time, there wasn't any space for me and my friends to have a relationship outside of their marriage. If I wanted to see my friend, I had to tolerate the husband. Since then, the husbands have become more tolerable or have been replaced with less obnoxious substitutes and my friend's have become less entangled socially and are receptive to "girl time" activities.

But for most of my early 20s, I felt like I needed to have a partner in order to enjoy my friends again. I felt that if I had a partner then we could couple date my friends. My partner would take on the horror of my friend's husbands and I would get to actually have an enjoyable visit with my friends. My friends, I think saw it the same way and provided me with healthy doses of advice on what to do to find a man so that my man could play with their man.

WHATEVER!

What partner of mine is going to want to put up with THAT crap?

"Will you be my boyfriend just so that I can take you to my friend's house and you can watch videos of my friend's husband's community theatre production and then watch him try on his costume and recite Shakespeare's sonnets?"

Eventually I gave up on finding a blow-up-doll-boyfriend-who-loves-amateur-Shakespeare and became Singlutionary.

But as people couple around me, I would like to have someone to depend on. Not that my coupled friends are undependable -- they are all very loving and wonderful and if I were to call them in any state of panic or emergency, they would be very much there for me. But their daily lives are taken up with their family, their work and other obligations. Any extra time they have, they want to spend with their spouse.

I suppose that now I would like someone to depend on socially and for the long haul. And, in the way our society is set up, with coupling being the norm, it seems that in order to find this, I might have to couple. Friendships, even the strongest ones, are secondary to spouses and families especially in the way people spend their day-to-day time.

It seems that just as soon as I find myself in a solid, lasting, stable friendship -- the friendship is altered by the presence of a romantic relationship.

Part of my situation, I think, is that I am very much a one-on-one person. If I have a good friend, it is because I enjoy our interesting conversations and her unique perspective. Even if her new partner is super cool, that doesn't mean that I'd enjoy hanging out with both of them as much as I would enjoy the one-on-one. And typically each friendship has its sacred activities -- with one of my friends it is eating good food, and another it is running. Sometimes the new partner doesn't have the same appreciation for the things my friend and I share and it kinda ruins the fun.

This is not to say that I won't stay friends with my friends who couple. I have stayed friends with ALL my friends who are coupled. I made the adjustment and learned how to be friends with both of them (sometimes more gracefully than others).

But I am tired of always looking for new available friends as others become unavailable. And maybe, the easiest thing to do would be to find a new best male friend and begin that whole monogamous endeavor called "a relationship".

Or I could just cultivate a ton of male friends so that if one of them couples, there will be 10 more waiting in the wings to share an order of yam fries and help decorate my backyard with empty toilets.

Singlutionary's Search for a Proper Peer

I have a utopian view of the world in which everyone is their own person and people love each other freely and there is no need for jealousy. In this world, new relationships broaden the worlds, not only of the people in them, but of their entire communities as well. This is a pretty hippie-like version of peace, love and understanding and all the crap that goes along with that -- like hemp pants, compost and organic farming.

And then I wake up. And I live in the real world where being single at almost-30 is frightening. Why? Because I'm alone. I'm not talking about being alone in a not-having-a-partner way. I'm talking about being alone in another way -- in the way where my communities have faded, my friends are tied up with their family or with their marriage and I don't seem to have any peers.

Where have all my peers gone? In my town, I have ONE uncoupled friend of my age.

And lets face it. There is a difference between being uncoupled in your early 20s and being uncoupled in your early 30s.

And I'm not talking about pressure to couple. I am talking about finding peers. It is more common for folks in their early 20s to be single and to be exploring the world and to have friends in the same place.

Of course, it was never common for me. My two best friends were both married by the time I turned 22 and had been coupled long before that. I've always been the sole single girl in my inner circle. But my outer circle has been full of intelligent, smart women in their early-mid 20s.

So why, after 10 years, is it suddenly so much more horrifying to be the only single in my Singlutionary world?

Peers. They're harder to come by. Supposedly there are tons of single women in their 30s on this earth but I never meet them. And just because I meet another single woman in her early 30s doesn't mean that we have anything in common! She might be divorced or have children or she might be a rabid racist chicken hater or an exercise nazi or plenty of other things which are totally acceptable but which I am not.

Or she might be might just want to talk about how she is so sad without a mate.

I get bored with that. I do it enough myself in secret moments of weakness and then am ashamed to have dishonored my Singlutionary costume in such a way (my Singlutionary costume is made of orange spandex).

I have plenty of ways to meet people. I meet people as part of my job. I've found that dog people are often single. So that is a start. I love dogs. I love singles. Single dog people = double rainbow of joyfulness.

Which brings me back to this blog. I've got peers here. Plenty of them: The folks who read this blog, the folks who comment and the folks who write their own wonderful blogs about being a happy single. And I have my one wonderful late 20s real-life single friend.

And I have my dates. Chronically single men vying for a chance to bone me who don't know that I'm really just looking for a peer.

Where do you find your Singlutionary peers -- no matter what your age or place in life? Life is about change -- and more often than not -- our best friend's lives don't change at the same exact moment and in the same exact way that ours do. So, while it is totally possible to maintain relationships with coupled parent friends, it is also good to seek out people who are in a more similar place in life.

Where do you find them? How do you identify them? And how to you form a real life community as strong as this one here online?

National Singlutionary Week

It has been an entire year since National Singles Week. And here it is all over again!

Singlutionary was recently featured on Relationship Talk in an article about six empowering single's blogs! I've been fairly inactive as a blogger for almost a year now and I am delighted to find that my words are still out there in the blog-i-verse, doing good. Please read the article and check out the 5 other fantastic blogs hi lighted.

Last year, I was honored to participate in Single Women Rule's Blog Crawl. Although I am not participating this year, I do want to spread the word. There are lots of wonderful blogs and wonderful things being written about single life and single living and lifting the single stigma. So go, read, and be inspired.

As for me, this National Singlutionary Week -- I've had a few revelations:

1. I miss my relationship with this blog and my readers and fellow bloggers. And I want to spend more time here.

2. There are lots of wonderful bloggers writing about the social & political aspects of being single. What I am good at is writing about the personal aspects. Although I care deeply about the issues that Onely and Bella DePaulo write about, that is not what this blog is about. So what IS this blog about then? I suppose it is about my life. It is a personal story.

So in the coming weeks, I will be more present here. I will also be reorganizing and revamping quite a few aspects of the blog -- including even -- maybe -- gasp -- the template. And you can expect stories and insights and humor as always.

Thank you for reading,

Singlutionary

Singlutionary Sunday

I've written twice before about the way I spend my Sundays.

I struggle between wanting to be restful, wanting to go on fun & active adventures and wanting to get all the stuff done that so desperately needs to get done but never does.

For the summer, I went with the "fun and active adventures" route. I coordinated activities and rallied the troops. It was fun. But it also left me unproductive during the week. I was either busy coordinating next Sunday's getaway or I was still recovering from the past Sunday's funday. Good times were had, new places discovered, conversations were had and new bonds were made and my horizons were broadened. It was wonderful.

But now I am broke and tired. So, for the past month, Sundays have been all about lounging around in my pjs and catching up on TV shows and doing pretty much nothing except resting so much that by the end of the day I am so ready for the week to begin again.

This week, partly out of necessity and partly because I was inspired by an insanely productive friend, I decided to have a slightly productive Sunday -- a hybrid adventure/restful/catching up day.

And it worked. Kinda. I am tired. But I did catch up which makes me feel less stressed about the week to come. I ran, I read, I gave myself a facial.

It was pretty much a day for myself.

Of course, I had to do some things that weren't tons of fun. But they were productive and made me feel relieved when finished.

Today wasn't really profound in and of itself. But it marks a sort of awesome recovery in my life. When I began this blog, I was writing in final attempt to pull myself out of the darkness that I had recently experienced. Being single and happy really was revelatory to me at that juncture.

Now, I live every day as a single and every day is just another day, another opportunity for rest or adventure or catching up. Or all of the above!