SINGLE FOR THE HOLIDAYS
No S.O.? No... problem?
Idistinctly remember scribbling what was then my definitive 10-year plan on a piece of napkin one random night with my best friends. It was 2010 and I had just turned 20, fresh out of college. Get pregnant by 26, I wrote. Start a business, I continued. With my fictive checklist, item after action item, I had mapped out my perfect life on paper. It’s been almost a decade since. The checklist has been misplaced, the boxes unticked. After a failed business attempt and a failed attempt at an attempt, I put my entrepreneurial dreams on hold. I’m pushing 30 and still not with child. (Seriously though, what was I thinking?) But throughout life’s forks, U-turns, and detours—especially through the more harrowing moments—I always had someone to lean on. Of course, I had my mom and my friends, but I also had a constant partner. I believe the term for it is “serial monogamy.” People, although they would weave in and out of my orbit, made the rerouting of my life bearable. For almost a decade, I always had a pillar.
That all changed when I uprooted my life and moved to New York a year ago for grad school. Though I could count in one hand the people I knew in the city, I was newly single and exhilarated by the cliché allure of self-discovery. However, exhilaration quickly turned into despair. My grad program was so mentally challenging that I cried every week—in hallways, restrooms, on the subway, and, on multiple occasions, in my Uber Pool. When people back home expect you to be “living it up” in New York, projecting whatever movie-informed ideal they have on you, it’s difficult to explain just how isolated you feel.
For the first time in a long time I felt so…single. Not just single, but alone. No one to send updates to, no one to ring at four in the morning on the verge of a breakdown. The holiday season was especially lonely. I didn’t put up decor, I had no Christmas tree. Classmates went home for the break but I stayed in New York, a Christmas orphan. A professor graciously invited me and my friend Hannah, a fellow student and holiday orphan, to a Christmas Eve dinner. It was lovely. We were surrounded by art critics and they were extremely generous with their ideas, conversation and truffle cheese, among others.
But after the amazing food and warm goodbyes it was back to my lonely, ice-cold Christmas. I missed Noche Buena, Simbang Gabi, and puto bumbong. I even missed Jose Mari Chan. But mostly I missed the feeling of waiting for the clock to strike 12 to get a call from a significant other. My phone fell silent that night.
It was the same throughout the next string of occasions—New Year’s, Valentine’s, and, the most important of them all, my birthday. Still no midnight greetings, no special someone to celebrate with, no plus one to invite. I actually went stag to my own coupled-up birthday get-together. In these big moments, and those smaller moments in-between, there was a lot of figuring out how to be with myself. I wanted nothing more than to draw strength and power from my independence, but I also had a deepseated aversion to any form of loneliness. It was a struggle.
I will spare you the boring tirade on just how difficult it is to date in New York because it’s probably challenging everywhere, thanks to the pervading swipe-right mentality. But when people say New York is a “melting pot” where “people are cutthroat” what that actually translates to in dating is: New York is where all the creative, smart, stunning people converge, which means that New Yorkers enjoy an unparalleled selection of datable people in terms of both quality and quantity. Finding a date isn’t hard but progressing into something serious is.
Being alone and being lonely are two different things, and I’ve been doing much better at accepting both. But the holidays are rolling in and loneliness can be exacerbated by all the lovey-dovey twosomes surrounding my onesome. When I see people operate as a unit, walking hand in hand, I become spatially aware. It brings to light the unoccupied spaces in my own life—whether that’s physical or otherwise. I get flashbacks of the life my 20-year-old self envisioned—baby and all—and I question whether that life is still somewhat attainable.
My fear of being alone doesn’t stem from an unfollowed timeline. It’s not a fear of plans getting delayed, it’s a fear of them getting thwarted altogether. Life throws curveballs at us and we have been trained to maneuver around them, accommodate them, live with them. Being alone for now is fine. It’s the fear of ending up alone that’s paralyzing, the idea that our plans will be just those—a blueprint of a future never fully realized. A Pinterest wedding board never duly referenced. Baby names never brought to life.
I booked a flight home to spend the holidays with friends and loved ones this year, still single but not lonely, hopefully. Though I don’t feel like I’ve reached Emma Watson’s self-partnered Nirvana, I know I’m okay with not being in a relationship.
I will especially enjoy not having to think of a “worthy” gift for a partner. I’m also enjoying the idea of not having to swerve an SO’s family gathering. It’s uncomfortable to try to assimilate into a group and participate in idiosyncratic family traditions. Luckily, I also don’t particularly dread the hornet’s nest of titas at Christmas parties and what I can only imagine would be a series of relationship questions more intrusive than in Boy Abunda’s Fast Talk.
At times I question whether loneliness is a permanent shadow of aloneness. Sometimes hidden and therefore forgotten, but always a few steps behind, creeping in the dark. But if there’s anything I’ve learned in a year of living by and with myself, it’s that both being alone and being lonely, though uncomfortable, are feelings I need to sit with.
And if I do feel pangs of loneliness this Christmas, at least I’ll be home surrounded by loved ones. I’ll just put on a sparkly dress and try to blind my shadow away.