Sometimes I reach the end of a long day and wish there were someone to tell about it. Nothing dramatic has to have happened. I might just want to share a small thing, hear about their day, or lean on someone for a while.
Then there are all the other days, when being alone feels perfectly good. I enjoy my own company. Being single doesn’t hang over everything I do, waiting to be fixed before I can get on with my life.
That’s the part I’m having trouble explaining, even to myself. I want companionship, but I don’t feel a strong urge to go looking for it. Those two things seem as though they should cancel each other out. In practice, they coexist quite comfortably.
When I think about dating, I think about the effort before anything becomes easy: figuring out mixed signals, wondering whether someone means what they say, trying to build a connection while neither person knows where it’s going. Even imagining it can feel tiring.
There could be someone wonderful on the other side of that uncertainty. I know that. But my life as it is has something going for it, too. It’s peaceful, and I like living it. Disrupting that peace for a possibility doesn’t always feel appealing.
I’m open to meeting someone naturally. I can imagine wanting to make room for a person I connect with. I just don’t feel compelled to keep searching until that person appears.
Maybe this is what being comfortable with myself looks like. Or maybe comfort can get so familiar that I stop noticing when I’m closing things off. When I wish I had someone beside me at the end of the day, I wonder: am I leaving room for that to happen?
