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#50, March 5th, 2024
Hey Shani,
I’m single and thriving, and sometimes worry it will be hard to open my life up to a great partner someday.
Hey You,
I am SO glad you asked this question because I absolutely fucking hate it. It comes up in my work quite frequently, and the reason it angers me is that it’s a 100% made-up narrative about single people that gives us one more thing to worry about for no reason as though we don’t have enough of that already.
We must to do away with the narrative that being happily single also means we’ve “closed our lives off” in any way. How do you open up? You recognize that you’re not closed! There is nothing, literally nothing about a happy singlehood that automatically means you don’t want a partner in your life or that you’ll have a difficult time welcoming one in. It infuriates me that we ever associated the two. I know why we did it, society loves to shame single women into unhappiness as often as possible, so that we’ll settle as often as possible. But there is nothing stopping us from recognizing, and fully rejecting, this bullshit.