When you’ve been writing for CatholicMatch as long as I have — I believe I hit the 10 year mark recently — sometimes the thought of writing another round of “Encouraging Christmas Tips for Sad Lonely Singles” posts is enough to make me run screaming for the spiked eggnog. Not that we don’t need tips at Christmas. It can be a challenging holiday to navigate partner-less. But sometimes it feels like everything that needs to be said has already been said.
But then I remember that what was said last year and the year before is buried back in the Institute archives, and perhaps not all of you have committed it word for word to your Christmas memory banks. Perhaps some of it may need saying again.
And so, a few words on classic Christmas singles’ theme: showing up dateless at your assorted family functions and holiday parties.
I have been showing up at holidays, weddings and other festive events sans escort for years — ever since I figured out that hanging on to dead-end relationships just to ensure a New Year’s Eve date wasn’t worth the brain damage. Not that I specifically thought it out that way, but there was an element of fear of date-less-ness that probably kept me in a few relationships past their respective expiration points.
At first I hated it. I felt self-conscious. I looked around and everyone else was moving in pairs while I was alone. I thought “maybe by next year I will have found 'The One' and I will once again fit in polite society.”
But several Christmases later, with no “One” in sight, my thinking started to change. I realized that, if anyone else noticed my date-less-ness, they weren’t saying anything about it. And, whereas I’m sure having the suave and charming Man of My Dreams on my arm would have enlivened any party, I was having a lot more fun going solo than I had in the years of bringing a poor “date for the sake of a date” who didn’t know anybody and who hence required a lot of literal and figurative hand-holding that put a crimp in my merry-making.
Basically, I realized that people were used to seeing me show up alone. They weren’t saying “Oh, poor Mary Beth, alone again this year.” Actually, their thinking probably ran more along the lines of “does this dress make me look fat?” or “I hope my husband doesn’t get drunk and pass out in his hot buttered rum again like he did last year.”
As the saying goes “We would worry a lot less about what people think of us if we knew how seldom they do.”
And, moreover, I was used to showing up alone. I was happy in my own skin. I didn’t feel like I had to prove anything any more. I thought This is me, this is my life. It has ups and downs like everybody else’s, but overall it’s pretty darned good.
I hear singles complain about friends and relatives giving them the “third degree” about being single. “So when are you going to get married? Have you met anyone yet?" I don’t get a lot of that. None whatsoever from my family. And very little, outside of the occasional “are you dating anyone?” (a perfectly innocent question) from anybody else.
Here’s the thing: I think that 90% of the time, when friends or relatives are feeling sorry for someone single, that single is also feeling sorry for his or her own single self. The others are picking up on it. When we make sardonic or self-deprecating jokes about our single status, when we point our own date-less-ness, when we complain about how there’s “nobody out there,” they sense that we’re unhappy. And that’s when they start making less-than-helpful suggestions like “Why don’t you marry him? He’s Catholic.” (“Why yes! What with that being my only criterion and all.”)
And the other 10% — the intrusive relatives who just can’t let it go despite any air of confidence we may project? Well, they are doing some “projecting” of their own, I suppose. Projecting their own issues, their own discomfort. Sometimes, I have noticed, they are happily married and want that for us, too. Which is sweet, somewhere below the annoying. Or they are unhappily married, and misery loves company. Either way, it’s not your problem. You can smile sweetly, answer politely and move on.
Basically, it was never about them. It’s about you. If you don’t make an issue of it, they are less likely to make an issue of it. That, of course, doesn’t mean that you loudly proclaim the bliss of your single state, or announce how very, very secure you are in your solitude. That would just be protesteth-ing too much, and would bring you right back to the pity party.
No, you show your security by actually being secure — by working through your single issues, with God, and reaching some hard-won peace about the whole thing. This, of course, is easier said than done. But whether you are there or not, you spend your party time keeping your trap shut about it, and instead making conversation by asking others about their lives and their kids and their jobs.
Perhaps some day I will show up with Mr. Right on my arm, and surprise the you-know-what out of everybody. In the mean time, I show up alone, we have fun, and everybody seems fine with that.
You can do that too. Because being dateless at Christmas is really just a case of mind over matter.
If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
