Adventures in Being Single

[Originally published on Quora, in response to the question, "What is the brutal truth about being single?"]

The brutal truth is that your partnered friends tend to forget about you until they're single again.

Your single friends find a partner and forget about you.

And the circle goes around.

Your social circle keeps shifting, because people with partners rarely spend time with single people. They don't invite you to things unless they're trying to set you up with someone, because they see your singleness as something to fix instead of seeing you as a valuable friend in your own right.

When you're young, this isn't that big of a deal, because there are still lots of other single people to hang out with. But as the decades go by, it gets much harder. Even a few years ago, I spent a lot of time with people in their 30s, but they all found partners and now I'm too old to even want to form new friendships with people under 35. We just don't have much in common.

I have friends, of course. People haven't stopped caring for me. But I rarely ever see them.

I haven't been to the movies since I broke up with my last boyfriend, back in July. The last three or four times I made plans with my closest friends, they canceled on me. I get it, of course, you get busy. But those friends have partners to talk to, to sit and hold hands with, to actually physically be in the same room with. If my three best friends cancel on me three weeks in a row, I have gone three weeks without a face-to-face talk with anyone who really knows and cares for me, who knows the story of my life or where my comfort zone is or what makes me laugh. I can go weeks at a time with absolutely no physical contact with another human being.

I don't mind being single. I don't mind spending time alone. But when you are middle-aged and single, you are never anyone else's priority. You have to work harder at all your relationships. If you don't put in a lot of extra effort, they'll exclude you. Even if you do put in that extra effort, they may cancel on you at the last minute. It's only right that they prioritize their partners and families, but it leaves you in the lurch, over and over, and it gets harder every year.

The other thing is that you don't have any automatic person that you tell your troubles to. We had a close death in the family over the weekend and two days later, a dear friend of mine died. I've mentioned it to a few people--mostly people at work who needed to know why I'd miss work, or people who my son needed me to tell. I haven't really talked about it much because, you know, you have to actually figure out who you should call and when you sit down to figure it out, you realize that you haven't actually seen most of your friends for months. So you have to decide how to approach the conversation in the first place. “I know we haven't seen each other in months but people have died" just seems a weird thing to impose on a friend.

If you're in a relationship, though, you just tell your partner immediately. You don't have to think about who you're going to call, because you have someone for that. You have someone who you know you're going to see, because you would see them anyway. You have someone you can talk to, because you were going to talk to them, anyway. You have someone for those moments when, no matter how much you love solitude, you absolutely need real human contact.

The hardest thing about being single, for me, isn’t just not having a partner. It's about how not having a partner can alienate you from other people, too. Even my family spends less time with me now that I'm no longer married. How's that for a kick in the teeth?