Being single is hard enough in our society for anyone. But being in a brown family and single after a certain age (which varies by family and sub-community) is the next-level of hard. Your parents ask you every time they call about whether you’re meeting anyone or whether you’ve met that nice boy they found for you on shaadi.com. In my case, it was my mum saying apocalyptic things like: “It is already too late”. You’d think she was talking about climate change, not my dating life. A friend observed that many Indian relatives have a rigid mental model which says that a person cannot be single after 25. So if you are single, you must be below 25. So in her 30s, she still gets treated as if she’s in school and her life is “about to begin” by Uncles, Aunties and others just assuming she must be in her early 20s.
Being Indian-origin and single can drive up the fear of being single even more. In this blog post, I dissect two of the main costs of the fear of being single and two of the most powerful remedies I’ve found.
Costs of the fear of being single
Ill-fitted relationships
The costs of coming under the pressure are very high. You could end up settling with the wrong person just to tick the box and achieve the coveted marriage milestone. This would be a terrible outcome. I think this is fairly rare, as most people who are single into their late 20s are actually very thoughtful about what they are looking for and the longer they hold out, the more particular they are. But it is something to watch out for. I’ve seen some people get dangerously close with matches that look great on paper, are family-approved but there is no chemistry. It can be hard for some people to reject these matches when just saying “yes” seems like the frictionless path to please your family and retire from the exhaustion of dating.
Perhaps more likely, but also damaging, is that you can end up staying in relationships for longer than you should, because you keep trying to make them work. This was me in my late 20s. Four months into a relationship it became pretty clear that the guy I was with wasn’t on the same timeline as I was and we had a very different take on the “ideal weekend” (which I consider to be an important fit factor in relationships). But it had taken so long to find a boyfriend, and I was exhausted from dating and didn’t want to get back out in the field again. Part of me hoped he would “come around” to the idea of marriage and kids at my timeline and that we could keep compromising our weekends for each other. So the relationship kept going for six months more, until I realized that all the things that had been wrong four/five months in were going to continue being wrong forever and finally called it off. He was a good person and we both deserved better than to be with someone that wasn’t right for us.
Wise friends always said “when you’re with the wrong person, you’re not able to meet the right person”. This is so true. The opportunity cost of ill-fitted relationships is very high. Every day you’re hanging out with someone who is not a good long-term fit is a day you could have run into a good match. Paradoxically, you extend and deepen your own pain by staying tied up in something that isn’t right because you are so afraid of being single.
Humdrum or overwhelming anxiety
Beyond the costs of settling with someone who isn’t that good a fit, or staying in relationships past when you know they’re not the right fit, the other costs of the pressure to get married are related to the anxiety it drives. It can be a low-level anxiety that is like a background hum in your life, or it can really start to dictate how you live your life.
Some women treated business school like a “find your husband” expedition. Each event was an opportunity to scout out who the single men were and talk to them. This was a waste of many events where they could have been networking with a diverse bunch of people on shared career interests or hobbies instead of looking at a ring on a finger and moving on. Friendships and networking are a better use of business school time, since 70% of people are coupled in most business schools and various other factors make it a tough time to date. Read more at one of my first dating blog-posts on dating in business school here.
Focusing on finding what you love to do and your personal development has a big and more certain pay-off than spending all your time and energy trying to find a partner. There is a balance here clearly. I’m not advocating devoting no time to dating — that would serve you very poorly if your goal is to eventually find a partner. BUT I am advocating for not losing yourself and your hobbies and things you do that are non-related to dating because you become singularly focused on it. Singular focus is not healthy, for most things. And sometimes very high levels of anxiety around a topic can tip you over into a singular focus life – fight that. Your life is worth fighting for. You have many ways to contribute to the world that suffer if you have a singular focus on dating.
The anxiety can also start to manifest as self-blame or low self-esteem. People start to question if there is something “wrong” or “unlovable” about them or if they are too “unique” to find love. If you have no friends, then may be it is something to do with you and you should look into that with a therapist. But if you have healthy friendships, it could be very little to do with you – dating is a numbers game, and being selective is not a flaw. Self-work and self-examination can still be helpful (as they are for people in relationships too), but don’t blame yourself for being single. It’s not even a bug, it’s a feature, and a temporary one/one that many people will cycle in and out of in a normal life, with break-ups, separations, divorces, death (just being real here folks – something will return you to a single status eventually for every person on earth).
How do you overcome the pressure to “settle down”?
You may be reading this and saying well this is all well and good but how do I actually break free of the pressure to be in a relationship when those messages of relationship superiority are oozing from my family, friends, the media. There’s no silver bullet but here’s what has helped me in the past.
Live your best life by yourself
Do whatever you want to do, don’t let being single hold you back. This means I went to the cinema and watched movies by myself. I went to a fancy gala with 4 girl-friends as my dates in place of a boyfriend. I had lots of friend-dates with girlfriends where we did something fun together. Just enjoy your life basically and note that no activity is out of bounds for you just because you are single. This attitude makes being single have less of an effect on your life so it becomes less of a focus issue.
Ask yourself what is driving the anxiety and stress-test the assumptions baked into your answer
When I was in my late 20s, the biological clock was what was stressing me out the most. I wanted to have a family and I was worried that meeting someone when I was in my mid-30s would wipe out those chances. It was not that I was lonely or didn’t know what to do on weekends. I had a fun, happening life with a lot of friends. The primary concern was that darn biological clock and my goal to have a “family”. I had an epiphany one day as I was self-examining the anxiety.
What makes a family? Are biological children necessary for a “family”? Answer: No. People with adopted children have families too. People with pets have families too. This is 2020 and whilst it sucks in many ways, it is also a progressive year to be alive. A family can be defined any way you want it to be.
Is having a particular type of family (now that we’ve established there are several types) so important to me that I would put up with being with someone I didn’t have chemistry with? Is having a particular type of family more important than my happiness? Answer: No. The end goal that is most important in my life is my happiness, not any particular material outcome.
And ultimately, the hard question that I think a lot of women are secretly stuck on: “Is my life worth something without being a mother?” Answer: Yes. It is. It always is. I had forgotten it is because of all the messaging rampant in the world that extols parents over childless people. At the end of the day, we are all humans with equal worth. Procreating or not doesn’t drive that worth.
With this new renewal and clarity around one of my core values of human equality and the value of just being a human, I felt free. I felt free to take as much time as I needed and to be as selective as I wanted to be. At 29, looking out at my 30s, I was a single brown woman, but I was unafraid and unencumbered.
