I am currently at the age where slowly but surely my friends are getting married. Facebook statuses continue to update with engagements, weddings, and committed relationships (complicated and not). While it seems like everyone around me is taking their next steps toward adulthood with ease and pleasure, I’m still single. When I catch up with old friends after years apart and they hear about my professional and personal successes, their eyes light up expecting to hear exciting news about the happiness of my relationship, only to darken when they find out I’m still single. . I’m often asked if I have a boyfriend, to which I’m not sure how to answer. I hate to lie, but I don’t want them to think I’m a loser who can’t get a guy to stay. Regardless of who you’re talking to, it seems like the default is “it’s complicated.” But really, it’s not. I’m single, plain and simple.

I’m constantly dating, but I’m not exclusively with any guy. However, if I dare to say that I am dating but with no particular person I see myself as a whore or as if I choose to be single. Regardless of my marital status, I am single and this leaves me feeling left out, like a kid picked last for gym class. For me, life is this long, exciting, mysterious and sometimes dire train ride where we have a series of stops where we have to get on and off. Stop one birth, stop fifteen high school graduations, etc. As everyone gets on the train to head to the next stop, I’m stuck on the platform and can’t seem to get on and pray that my train hasn’t crashed sometime before and will catch up with me one day. early.

Whenever I ask my engaged or married friends about their matches and how they found the match and made it work, they seem to reply “when you know, you know.” I often hear that within the first month of dating someone, or even on the first date, they find themselves telling their friends or family that “he/she is the one I’m going to marry”, and fast forward two years later, she has a beautiful ring and he is whipped. Inevitably, my mind, jaded by years of love disasters and a few disappointments, jumps to the wrong conclusion that there must be something wrong with me. For a long time I convinced myself that I was single because I wasn’t pretty enough and I focused most of my energy on my aesthetics in an attempt to “fix myself”. I decided to go deeper. The reality is there’s nothing wrong with me and there’s nothing wrong with most girls who have bad dating luck, and no, there’s nothing wrong with most guys either. The real problem is that we tend to get caught up in compulsive lust and engage in physical activities and before the emotional component has time to build or we go on a few dates, we don’t feel any spark and we call it quits. Sure, we all have friends who either married someone they weren’t initially attracted to but “came to love” or are engaged to someone they slept with on the first date, but this isn’t as common as it seems. A lot of people will say that if someone is the one, then it doesn’t matter if you sleep with him on the first date or the fifteenth date because if it’s meant to be, it will be. But this is just a lie we tell ourselves to accept being dumped, endure when things don’t work out, or ease the guilt we feel when we rush into bed with a guy and he doesn’t call.

Sure, we all set limitations and rules for our love lives, like “no sex on the first date” or “don’t get attached.” However, these rules are more like goals and we try hard not to break them so we don’t do something that could later make us vulnerable or have regrets. And of course we have all broken our rules at some point and our fears have come true. This doesn’t mean that our rules aren’t meant to be broken, it just means that we know our limits and sensitivities and whether consciously or unconsciously fight to protect ourselves or at least protect our hearts.

Taking the rule of no physical intimacy until there is a strong emotional connection as a tenant of most women’s dating etiquette seems to be the most widely held and most frequently broken parameter in the book. We all slip up and have sex too soon because sometimes there seems to be a crazy physical connection with a person, like powerful magnets meant to be together. Anyone who has slept with more than a few people knows that there are some people you meet and on the first day you find yourself struggling not to break your rule; however, there are also other guys or girls that you have sex with after a respectable amount of time only to find that it’s awkward or “good but not great”. Sure we all want that crazy passion where you can’t keep your hands off the other person and the sex is phenomenal, but is this possible with love or is it just the trick of lust? How can you tell lust from love and are they mutually exclusive? I may have been on a lot of dates and know a lot of do’s and don’ts, but I’m not that wise of a guru to have a definitive answer. It really comes down to how you answer the question: what happens if you take the sex away? Is there still something there that intrigues you, excites you and keeps you coming back?

In all my years of dating, I’ve been dumped, had mutual breakups, and rejected guys I really liked, but it’s very rare for my post-breakup discomfort to last more than a few weeks. I’m usually appalled and especially insecure until I meet someone new, enough time has passed, or get physical with someone else, all of which I present as proof that those hookups were just regular dating or lust in the heat of the moment. , no love. However, it is in those very rare cases where I still keep a part of my heart open for months or years after our active relationship has ceased in the hope that it will come back, that I really wonder what went wrong and if my luck in love.

To date, there has really only been one person I haven’t given up hope on. When I look back at all the guys I’ve dated in my adult life, there are so many that at the time of our engagement I was convinced they were the one. However after time passed and the dust settled they developed a drug problem and married a stripper either they never grew up while I grew light years away or I still can’t commit or they crawled back but the spark is gone and I wonder “what was I?” thinking” while simultaneously telling myself “thank god I dodged a bullet.” Everyone has these moments when they reflect on the ghosts of past boyfriends, but the real confusion and unease hits when we think escaped” or the one that still gives us butterflies in the stomach, makes us cry and who makes us doubt ourselves because if they were they were right, what went wrong and is it fixable? Many times we continue to sleep with them hoping to change opinion or make them fall in love with us, but most guys don’t function like us. For the vast majority of them, sex and excitement are separate, at least they’re in the early stages of dating, while for a large percentage of the American female population, the two are intertwined and thus the lust/love dilemma arises.

In the case of my “the one that got away”, if you were to take away the incredible sex, the unparalleled attraction and certain “je ne sais quoi” that he possesses, is there still something that would bring me back? The answer is maybe. Sure, I can be myself with him, I feel comfortable and confident around him, “I’d take him home to mom” and I don’t have to hide my intelligence or my deepest secrets and fears. We can share common interests, like each other’s friends, and despite seeing me at my worst, he still hasn’t stopped worrying about me. But to admit that this might be love, not lust, and that my feelings for him come from my heart, not something further south, would also be to admit that he is, in fact, quite possibly “the one that got away.”

I’m not the only person I know who has a story like this. In fact, most people have experienced a similar set of circumstances where they were in an intense relationship with someone with whom they shared a consummate connection and for some indeterminate amount of time after it ceased they continued to have feelings for that person, feelings they didn’t have. . You did not fully understand and were afraid to confront. Confronting these emotions would force us to determine if this was just an instance where we mistook lust for love or if we had something real and lost it. Realizing that we may have been with the best person for us and wasted that opportunity for happiness or that, despite our unwavering perspective on things, we were not the best person for them and therefore walking away is the hardest reality to bear. . This would create a series of questions, concerns, and tears that could never be answered, relieved, or dried by anything other than being with that person or finding someone more suitable. We usually choose to desperately hope for the former because the latter seems unattainable. However, whether he or she was “the chosen one” is irrelevant and it is only our belief that he/she was the pre-eminent person who might one day be worthy of our undying devotion that makes it so impossible to move forward.

There is a saying that all the power in a relationship resides with the one who cares the least. Sadly, this leaves the carer most vulnerable and dependent on another for happiness and self-esteem. So how is lust distinguished from love? The answer lies in how you answer the two-part question of “how do you feel if you take yourself off sex and are willing to admit helplessness in your own life and risk diving into something that may very well leave you with your heart broken?” broken?”. ?” If you can articulate what you love about the other person apart from all things physical, you are willing to admit that your satisfaction is no longer in your hands alone, and you are prepared to risk heartbreak for a chance at devotion, desire, and love. lifelong friendship which is how you know you are in love Anything less than this is lust, desperation, fear of loneliness and/or settling in and no one should base a serious relationship on anything other than love because it is the only entity that it’s worth taking the risk.