In the troubled times that we live, anyone who is seen sitting alone at a coffee shop or at a dinner table, enjoying some food or coffee is viewed as pitiable and sad. Those around him or her make an immediate attempt to ask them to join them. It’s not acceptable to be okay and to be alone at the same time.
Many of the people we just talked about, who are happy to walk around the city by themselves and with a balloon in hand (yes, I’m talking about me), are then forced by the popular discourses to end up becoming someone’s other half. This, in many cases, tends to have disastrous effects.
Only when being single is accorded as much respect as being together, can we trust the fact that people are actually making a choice for themselves.
So, this Valentine’s Day, let’s appreciate this extreme of the spectrum as much as we adore the other. Here are a few reasons for why it’s a good idea to spend your life alone:
– The idea of two people spending their life together under the roof of romanticism is a very recent idea, 250 years old at best. Before that people did live together but under the roof of practicality, for children and survival. So it’s only been recently the case that what was an anomaly for most of the human time on this planet, has now become the normal.
– Though staying with another person does reflect some level of maturity, what reflects even a greater amount is the ability to understand that one is not capable of sharing a bed with another person just because the society has asked for it. It takes courage to walk off the main track and save not only others but also oneself from the misery of a marriage.
– One of the alternate responses to liking someone may be to care and nurture them for the time you can. What most of us might end up choosing is living with them and then developing an unnerving familiarity, grantedness and contempt.
– Being by yourself saves you from the constant nagging you might hear from someone always holding a mirror in your face. You are not asked to put your socks a certain way or fold the newspaper in a specific manner or shouted at for forgetting certain groceries. You can be whoever you want to be, without the constant nagging.
– You have hope of starting things again without any legal constraints stopping you. You have a higher scoop of hope.
After saying so much, we’d also like to say that being single has its own fair share of problems – loneliness, anger, frustration and suffocation. Both being single and together can be problematic because we humans are never happy in the state we are in. So one might as well find a few more reasons to see the hidden benefits of the state he/she is in, before moving to the other side.
