The Loneliness "Cure-All" That's Actually SNAKE OIL
Plus, scheduling our LIVE book club!!
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: loneliness is the cause of most of people’s bad decisions. To avoid being alone, people will do pretty much anything! Even smart people will do something they know they will regret just to escape that empty feeling. Well, today I want to focus on the “cure-all” that’s sold to young singles as a remedy to their loneliness, but in fact makes them lonelier still.
When I was single in New York, I remember talking to my girlfriends at school. They weren’t religious and they weren’t dating for marriage, so their dating lives were often a sad list of either short-lived flings or dragged-out affairs. At the time, I didn’t feel comfortable sharing my views on dating for fear that it would alienate those friends who were living under the “empowerment” narrative that told them to have unfettered sex with no strings attached and that dating with purpose was outdated and boring.
(To be fair, my dating life at the time was not all that great. I had bought into the “empowerment” narrative myself, even while clinging in the back of my mind to the upbringing that told me dating should end in marriage. Even though in my mind, I was “dating for marriage," I was looking for marriage in the wrong men and not realizing that I needed to be more deliberate in my search for chemistry and compatibility. I dated a lot, but thank God nothing was drawn out because I still couldn’t stomach the idea of wasting my time with someone with whom I had no future. )
I started to recognize a pattern in my friends: singles were dating the wrong people in an effort to escape their loneliness and then staying with the wrong people for a long time. To them, if they were in a relationship, then they couldn’t be lonely. I’d even see this happen with my religious friends who were dating for marriage but didn’t want to wait around for the right person.
This loneliness “cure-all,” though, was snake oil. It was preventing my friends from dating intentionally until they found the right person by taking up their time and energy with the wrong person. When you spend all of your time avoiding loneliness by dating the wrong people, you are actually elongating your long-term loneliness. You aren’t going to meet the right person while you’re stuck in a dead-end relationship. You’ll have messy breakup after messy breakup, each taking up a good chunk of your time, until your heart is broken and you don’t have the energy to spend on finding “the one.”
It’s like a doing a juice cleanse. You know you want to lose weight, but you don’t actually want to have to put in the hard work of changing your diet and lifestyle. So, instead, you take the quick and easy way out. And guess what? You lose five pounds…for a week. Then you start eating as you previously had and all of a sudden you’re back to what you weighed the week before. Focusing all of your energy on fad diets so that you can momentarily feel the rush of having lost weight is actually just prolonging the amount of time until you fix the bigger issue and get down to your goal weight for good.
Is it harder to wait out the loneliness? To NOT enter a relationship that doesn’t have a future so that you can leave room for those relationships that will? In a lot of ways, yes. You aren’t taking the easy way out that will soothe the pain, if only for a moment. Instead, you are forcing yourself to stay on the straight and narrow path. And at the end of the day, you will end up with better outcomes.
If you date with purpose, with intention, then even though you might have a few years of loneliness, you’ll find the right person sooner and have the rest of your life with them. You won’t have wasted your time (and someone else’s, by the way!) with the wrong person and missed out on “the one.” If you date frivolously, looking for a dead-end relationship to deaden the pain of your loneliness, you will waste your own time. You might even miss out on the right person at an earlier time and have to wait even longer to meet them.
Instead of viewing singledom as lonely, we have to find ways to enjoy it, whilst also making a supreme effort to date and get married. That is the correct balance. That is the balance that will allow us to make good decisions. Leaning on your friends, family, community, and God will give you the strength to make the best decisions for you and keep you moving forward through intentional living.
THE JOY OF INTIMACY: Book Club Scheduling Survey!
For the first time, the Classically Abby book club will be a ZOOM call and a live discussion with you all! I am so excited to switch things up and actually get to talk to you all.
Book club is convening this THURSDAY (1/13/2022). I will send out the link for the Zoom call and it will only be available to premium subscribers. I want to choose the best time for all of you, so please take the survey below and let me know what the best time is for you! I will try to choose a time that works best based on your responses. I can’t wait!
What You Might Have Missed On Classically Abby…
Welcome to Classically Abby!
I'm a wife, mama-to-be, opera singer, entrepreneur, YouTuber, and your guide to becoming the classic woman you've always wanted to be! Follow me on YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter to see how! And together, let's be classic.
What’s helped me is to lean on family friendships and community to feel less lonely in singleness.
This would have been helpful to tell me years ago hahaha