I am pretty sure no one will end up reading this blog, but what the heck. I will write with the assumption that someone may some day read this, for all it's worth. So, let me start out by saying that I have not always been single. I was married 3 times, and I'm pretty much convinced at this point that a 4th time would be futile. However, I do some day want to find someone to be a companion with, a fellow traveler on the road of life...just not necessarily in a marriage-bond type relationship...
I have been learning the hard way this past 20 years the true meaning of the phrase, "it's always greener on the other side." Every decision we make requires a new adjustment in life, some of them are easy and some are the hardest thing you'll ever have to deal with. In my 3 marriages, I struggled immensely because for some reason I kept going after the same kind of women...the needy, clingy, obsessive women who had some kind of mental illness or problem anyway. I was talking with a coworker about this, and she mentioned that this could very well be because I AM a nice guy who likes to have someone to care for, and many women out there tend to prey on those kinds of guys as if they are the answer to their every problem. The PROBLEM with that is that when you pick up on their ploy and do not turn out to be the "Sugar Daddy" they wanted to find, they start treating you like you're the problem, and everything goes South from there.
Anyway, this past couple years, I've been going through a mindset change that involves breaking away from the notion that marriage is a necessary element of a person's life. That does not necessarily mean that it won't happen again, but I'm having to get to the point where living life to the fullest and being happy do not depend on having a ring on your finger. After all, there are, in my observations, very few truly happy marriages. There ARE workable marriages (lots of them) that require immense amounts of work to maintain, but "happy" and "marriage" are not necessarily synonymous. Therefore, I've determined that in order to be a truly happy person, you have to become a happy person in your singlehood first and foremost. Learning to experience what life has to offer and live it to the fullest depends more on our own personal choice to do so as opposed to finding the person who will "complete us." If you can't be a complete person without someone else, you will never be complete with someone. It's just common sense. We are all packaged into one body for a reason. If we needed someone to complete us, we would only have half a body, and we would find an exact match somewhere out there.
The quest now is to learn what happiness means in a real sense and to put the happiness traits to practice on a daily basis. Now, I say this with the understanding that I am not exactly sure what all of these traits are. I do, however, think that it begins with the ability to be a friend to those who are in our immediate surroundings...to practice friendship and learning to enjoy who we are and celebrate that by doing what a good friend should do. Maybe it's the traits of good friendship that make us "complete" or truly happy. I doubt that happiness has anything to do with money whatsoever. All we have to do is read the newspaper to see that money has no power to make us happy. It is a necessary evil that more often than not makes our lives more miserable than anything. I also doubt that happiness could ever come through the acquisition of things, as some of the happiest people in the world have the least amount of money.
Anyway, I think the process of learning to value our singlehood is paramount to anything else in this world. Getting married does NOT bring happiness...if that were true we would all be in major trouble...we would all be making the pharmaceutical companies richer than at present because the alternative to being happy is being depressed. Being single should not be depressing, it should be a celebrated time in our lives, as it gives a certain amount of freedom with our time and efforts. Now, having said that I have to qualify it with the understanding that those of us who are single parents are still somewhat limited in our time in a sense (our time is not ours when the kids are around). However, as the kids get older and more into other things, there are plenty of ways to invest our time in the lives of those around us in ways that a married person can't always do (that may depend on the spouse and other factors as well, of course).
Anyway, I did find that once I made a decision to enjoy my singlehood, I started enjoying the time I have with friends and coworkers more. In fact, my coworkers are my best friends, and we enjoy hanging out even after work...Life is good when you allow it to be.
