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!

Warming Up

Most of the relationships I've been in have taught me the same thing: I need a lot of time to myself. The last relationship I was in merely confirmed this fact.

There is a tension between the excitement of meeting someone and feeling that mutual attraction and knowing that I need to protect my time so that I can be happy.

It seems that whenever I've been in a relationship, or even just getting to know someone in a romantic kind of way, all the time that I usually spend on things like keeping the house/car clean and maintained, taking care of myself, reading, catching up with my friends, writing and art projects -- all that time gets eaten up by the new beaux.

And it is great at first, but after a couple months I get angry. I start wondering why I can't get anything done and I start to resent the time spent with said person. I try to draw back and start spending more time doing the things I need to do -- laundry -- for example. But the other person always sees this as a personal affront and the relationship starts to crumble.

What is the solution to this?

Always be single? That is the approach I have been taking for the past few years. But what if I am ready to be open to a functional relationship where I CAN have enough space. What if I've decided that this IS a possibility and that, now, after 2 years of going solo (and sexless) I am warming up to this option.

I've written recently about being an introvert. I think that the main thing I need to find in a potential partner -- from the get go -- is someone who can understand and respect my need for personal time and someone with their own interests and friends and passions. Someone who needs time for his own projects and interests and relationships.

And then, I need to allow things to be slow and easy instead of fast and hard -- which is my usual approach.

Singlutionary's 30by30

I'm back with a vengeance!

I'm blogging again -- all self-imposed gag orders have been lifted!

And I'm running.

And I'm going to quit eating like a teenager locked in an abandoned convenience store.

Two months ago, I went to a family reunion followed by a roadtrip with my parents followed by a childhood friend's wedding. I am not even going to touch upon the wedding on this blog (its all been said before) but what I decided on that trip is that I need to get my body back.

Get my body back from what? No, I didn't have a baby. But I feel like I did. I look like I did. But I have no excuse. There are no babies waking me up all night -- I sleep well. There are no children crying for a snack all day long -- I have a schedule where I can provide myself with nutritious meals without the temptation of grabbing something just to get through the day. I need to claim my body back from our culture of instant gratification, from two years of eating away my worries and sorrows, from the soon-to-be distant memories of struggling to become the Singlutionary that I am today.

On the trip I took my my parents, even my biggest pants were beginning to feel tight. And I realized that, as I approach 30, the time to deal with my bad habits is NOW. I want to enter my 30s in the best shape of my life. I want to be active. I want to climb mountains and forge rivers and do all sorts of Oregon Trail type activities. And I want it to be easy. So, while on this trip, I texted a Singlutionary friend and said "What about training for a marathon?" Her response was: "Sure, I need a absurd goal".

My absurd goal begins with running. I found a marathon training program online and, despite several little setbacks, I have been sticking to it. So far I've gone from not even being able to run a half a mile to being able to run over 1 mile without stopping. I've also gotten faster. I've never been a runner or an athlete of any kind. What I am really learning from this, is NOT to be intimidated by physical challenges. My body began to change right away. It tightened up. I have muscles in places that were formerly dough.

But I haven't lost any weight. This doesn't concern me at this juncture. As I keep running, I'll get more confidence and I'll be better able to keep those eating demons off my back. I don't want to diet. I don't want to deprive myself of food in the sort term because I know that I'll just end up pigging out in the long run. I want to finally overcome my horrible addiction to sweets and I want to nurture myself enough that I can create a lasting habit of cooking and eating good food at home.

So. Blogging: Check. Running: Check. Eating: I'll get back to you on that one.

The name of this project is titled: 30by30. I want to lose 30lbs by my birthday at the end of October.

But it really isn't about weight loss -- that is just the title of an absurd benchmark. This is about allowing myself to become the woman that I've always had the potential to be but never let myself become. It is about freedom -- physical freedom, freedom from my food issues, freedom from all the doubts that ganged up on me in my mid 20s.

On Halloween, I've invited my friends to run with me for 16 miles through out the city in our Halloween Outfits. And on New Years Eve, I am going to run 26 plus miles -- the length of a marathon.

Absurd goals are my new best friend.