How To Be Single

Navigating codependency, being your own best friend and - shit, I think my prefrontal cortex just developed

“You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person.” - Oscar Wilde

When male and female Anglerfish mate together, they literally melt into each other and share one body, forever intertwined. The deep sea is so vast that if they manage to find one another in the dark, the male eats into her soft side and fuses into her. He loses his eyes, organs, and everything that made him a fish until eventually, they even share one bloodstream.

Naturalist William Beebe said on Anglerfish in 1938, “to live in such immense and forbidding darkness and then feel the gradually increasing transfusion of her blood through one’s veins, to become a brainless, senseless thing”. Is this not an apt description of love?

Growing up with an older sister with her own life, I spent most of my childhood watching after her, desperately waiting for mine to begin. All of my weekends were spent seeing friends, reading, and working my part-time job - yet I’d dream constantly about the future. I was comfortable alone but I was certain there had to be more to life.

Soon, I was sixteen and impatient, so I went to the furthest away college I could find. It would take me over an hour away to get there on the bus but I’d relish the freedom of it all. As divinely promised, I met a boy and it felt like I’d found the one thing I had been waiting for. All of that perfected alone time I’d saved up was traded in for my very own boyfriend. Every waking and sleeping moment was now spent together. We believed we were adults, so I moved into his bedroom at his Mum’s house, I lost my bus trips, and slowly year by year we both lost our independence.

After six years of living in each other’s hands, I’d undone those years of being a full person and we each cracked into a ‘half’ for one another. What we now know as codependency was just our normal - one flat, joint friends, shared interests - everything all melted together into one life. Then we broke up, and for the first time at 22, I had to learn to be alone again.

The worst part of it was always mealtimes. I’d been used to cooking for two and eating side by side with someone as we caught up on our day. Suddenly being single and living alone, meals suddenly felt pointless. To go to the shop, buy all of the ingredients, come home, cook it all up, eat it, and then clean it - how tiring is all of that for just me? So, I’d resort to easy meals like pasta with a store-bought sauce and sometimes skip dinner altogether to just have toast.

Teri Hatcher’s ‘Burnt Toast’ talks about how often mothers fall into this habit of giving their children the good toast and rather than making more for themselves, they eat the burnt bits themselves. This is how I treated myself when I had a boyfriend, I’d see films on Netflix and save them until we were together, and then when we broke up I didn’t see the point in cooking nice meals at all if it was just for me. Somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten that I was a whole person on my own.

There are three unmissable stages you have to go through in order to learn how to be single.

1. First, you go out all of the time to run away from yourself

Like everyone else throughout history, I coped with this newfound loneliness through varying coping mechanisms. From filling my days up with work, going out, and of course, shallow interactions. I’d do anything to avoid looking at myself for too long. I think this phase lasted around four months, and it’s by far the worst.

Don’t forget the inevitable situationship phase which you can read more about here.

2. Next, you learn good friends are everything

“Nearly everything I know about love, I've learnt from my long-term friendships with women.” - Dolly Alderton

An essential part for anyone in their early twenties has to be to read Dolly Alderton’s ‘Everything I Know About Love’, rightfully it reminds you how awful we can be. There you are sitting in a room full of people who truly love you in the most innocent way and you’re telling them with a straight face, “No one loves me”. It’s absurd, it’s cruel, and I’ve done it more times than I’d like to admit.

You see, there comes a point in every young woman’s life when she realises she is being completely insufferable. That her own conversations do not pass the Bechdel test, and she draws on and on about men who do not care if she lives or dies to the people who do.

Learning to be alone after a breakup is really just realising you’re not alone at all. You might be single, but the friends who listen to you talk all day and all night might be the only people in the world who can truly teach you selfless love. They don’t want to morph into you like an Anglerfish, they just want you to be okay.

So often humans look for this perfect storybook love, reducing their friends and family to footnotes. My friends will always be the great loves of my life, and I think it would be unfair to put the responsibility of everything they can offer into one future partner.

3. Finally, you learn you’re never alone if you have yourself

I’d heard this podcast called ‘Date Yourself First’ and it took a while to settle in but eventually I started to practice all of the things I would have saved to do with a partner, or even friends, to do with myself.

If I wanted to do something, I’d make a conscious effort to go alone and the more I spent time with myself the less lonely it felt. It’s almost like you get to know yourself and you feel so much peace when you realise you’re worth spending time with. No longer tied to your phone to keep someone updated, or trapped into only eating what they like. I learnt what meals I like to eat for myself and take pleasure in the experience of it all. Taking the scenic route to the shop I listen to my favourite music, I buy myself my favourite drink, and I take my time picking ingredients up for an elaborate meal I’d normally save for a dinner party. Coconut & lime shrimp tacos, or an expensive steak or a convoluted spicy nduja pasta.

Luckily, humans aren’t Anglerfish. We don’t live in the unhospitable underbelly of the deep sea and we don’t need to share a bloodstream with our partners in order to procreate. Not somebody’s ‘other halves’ but complete beings with friends, personalities and equal autonomy.

I think maybe, in relationships we can just be our own people that happen to like each other a lot.

-And shit, I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.