Being single can be a profoundly empowering experience. It can be peaceful and deeply fulfilling for those who experience it for the first time. But the thing is, while being single for protracted periods of time can be conducive for one’s growth, greater independence, and self-discovery, it also leaves them open to many dangers and detrimental effects as well. These effects manifest when a person stays single beyond the permissible and normal thresholds. At that point, these subtle risks come into play and greatly affect a person’s physical and mental capacities. Read on and learn about these hidden dangers of staying single for too long right here.
Getting Too Comfortable Being Alone
Independence is healthy but not when it distorts into resistance. With time, a person who remains single gets comfortable being alone and relies on no one else but themself. They don’t compromise, lose faith in teamwork, and eschew shared decision-making, all qualities that keep potential love and connection far away from them.
Emotional Walls Gradually Go Up
When a person doesn’t regularly engage in being vulnerable and connective emotionally, it becomes harder and harder for them to open up to anyone. They might be doing it to protect their peace but they inadvertently signal to others that they won’t let anyone in or get close to them, ensuring that they remain single for the foreseeable future.
Standards Turn Unrealistic
Having high standards isn’t a bad thing when it comes to relationships. However, a person who remains single for long periods of time tends to blur the distinction between perfectionism and standards. This makes them perceive healthy, real, yet flawed people as unworthy of their time or attention.
Loneliness Creeps in Silently
People who remain single for too long are inviting loneliness into their lives. This unique loneliness seeps into their lives without any warning and silently messes up their social connections and capacities. It makes them feel terribly alone, even when they are surrounded by friends and family members. The silence gets especially deafening and amplified at night, when even the smallest whisper makes them jump up and look around with trepidation.
Losing Practice in Conflict Resolution
Being in a relationship teaches a person to be more patient, communicative, and open to compromise. Succinctly put, it makes them more adept and capable of handling and resolving conflicts effectively. On the other hand, being single for long periods of time makes a person petulant, impatient, and utterly incapable of dealing with even the smallest inconvenience. They are easily overwhelmed by the smallest disagreement and can’t cope properly.
Fear of Losing Freedom Intensifies
The longer a person lives alone, without someone beside them who they can call their own, the more they start feeling threatened by commitment and connection. They start seeing the latter as a threat, a palpable danger to their freedom, and they actively eschew it to preserve their ersatz sense of liberty proactively.
Dating Feels Like Work
For a person who has stayed single for too long, dating begins to feel like a chore, one that is utterly bereft of excitement. It makes them feel awkward and tired, and they start perceiving the entire prospect of dating as pointless. This emotional burnout keeps these people constantly stuck in a state of vacillation, where they perpetually avoid commitment and dating while ascribing the timing as being always askew.
Romanticizing Isolation
These people start seeing solitude as a lifestyle. They don’t see it as something fleeting that needs to be fixed or escaped. Eventually, they convince themselves that being emotionally distant from any potential chance at love and connection is equivalent to peace. In truth, it is avoidance that they are practicing, obstinately adhering to a spurious sense of solitude that will lead them to isolation and profound loneliness over the years.
Social Circles Shrink with Time
These people have friends in the beginning but with time, unlike them, they all get committed to long-term relationships. They marry, have kids, and start their families. While their friends enjoy their thriving social lives, these people find themselves robbed of their time and company, greatly reducing their chances for organic connection and companionship.
Becoming Rigid
These people become less adaptable and flexible as the years go by. They get indelibly set in their routines and can’t even fathom diverging from them in the least. This makes it incredibly hard for them to get into dating and seek relationships because they demand adaptability and flexibility from them, attributes that have rusted beyond restoration within them.
Emotional Intimacy Feels Unreal
Physical closeness is vastly different from emotional. It makes a person feel seen, understood, and supported. However, for someone who has remained single for a long time, this emotional intimacy feels foreign and even unnerving. They can’t quite get accustomed to it and this greatly deteriorates their chances at surviving in a loving relationship.
Missing Out on Growth that Comes from Relationships
There are certain lessons that you can only learn from being in a relationship. These include the ability to forgive, being more patient, and developing emotional maturity. Close romantic bonds catalyze the instilling of these qualities within an individual. However, for one who actively avoids companionship and commitment, these crucial qualities for growth are never acquired properly or adequately instilled within them.
Doubting Desirability
When a person stays single for too long, then it is understandable that they might start doubting their own desirability. They might be significantly confident and self aware but being single for too long starts eroding these qualities silently and gradually till they become ambivalent about their own desirability and whether or not they are datable or lovable anymore.
Confusing Peace with Emotional Numbness
It needs to be said: a quiet life doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a fulfilling one. Sometimes what a person considers to be peace isn’t the latter at all. In reality, it is only emotional numbness and disengagement from the love and the larger society that they are misconstruing for peace in their lives.
Starting Over Feels Scarier
The longer a person stays single, the more difficult it becomes for them to engage in anything that might affect and uproot their lives. There might be a part of them that longs for connection, to be with someone who can accord them the tender affection and attention that they crave deeply. But the thought of starting over is so terrifying that they don’t follow through with it.
Final Thoughts
Staying single isn’t a sign of weakness or failure at love, nor is it a cause for celebration. Solitude that follows singlehood is good, for a time and in a controlled degree, but not when it overruns one’s life and insulates them from potential connection and commitment. There is more to relationships than finding a companion; it is also a conduit to greater growth, patience, and emotional maturity.
Ask Me Anything