On being a spinster

I loved Zoe's recent post about why she's happy being single, and heartily agreed with all of her reasons.  In fact, many of them are precisely what I cite when I sense colleagues or relatives becoming unnecessarily sympathetic of my single state: not having to shave my legs; never having to compromise; being able to sleep in the middle of my lovely, comfy double bed.  They're all part of what makes being single so damn good. 

I've been single for almost ten years.  Yep, you heard right: a decade.  After a passionate but heart-breakingly ill-fated relationship from 16 to 18, and an even worse one from 20 to... well, it kind of dragged on until I was about 24 (even though it was utterly toxic and we spent more time apart than together), I made a decision to stay single for a while.  And, four or five short-term relationships apart, that's just what I've done, and 'a while' has turned into five, then eight, then ten years.

But as much as I'd like to pretend that I've been single for all that time because I just love having hairy legs and sleeping in a star shape, recent misadventures in internet dating have led me to further reflect on just why I'm still single.

1. I am cripplingly shy and have shitty self-esteem.  I can't talk to strangers, and I work on the assumption that everyone thinks I suck.  Bottom line is, dating (and especially internet dating, with its blind date-type situations) is something I am extraordinarily ill-suited to.

2. I am lazy.  Like, really lazy.  If the choice is between sending some messages to potential life partners or wasting 20 minutes on Songpop, the latter will always win out.

3. I am massively fussy.  It's not that the past ten years have been devoid of action: I've had lots of flirtations, plenty of people making it clear they'd like to take things further, a number of flings, even a declaration of love.  But in all that time I've only actually, genuinely, truly fallen for someone twice.  Ten years : two people is not a great ratio.  And neither of them were interested in me!  Sod's law.  I'd love to meet someone who makes giving up all the good things about my single life worthwhile, I really would.  But I need to become much less picky if that's ever going to happen.

4. The less available someone is, the more I like them.  My first love was my then-best friend, Clare.  She had an overprotective and extremely homophobic mother, and we had a jealous and threatened mutual best friend.  Not a recipe for a happy, healthy relationship, but we stuck it out for two years.  My second love - D - was attached when I met him, and for the next four years he proceeded to lie to and cheat on both me and the girl he was originally dating.  Since then, I've gravitated more towards the physically rather than emotionally unavailable: the best way to get me interested has been to live 200 miles away or be about to leave the country for a year.

5. I'm afraid of going mental again.  So just to re-cap for those not paying attention, I was in those two bad relationships pretty much from the age of 16 until I was 24.  On what I have only recently realised is probably a not-unrelated note, I was pretty much mental that entire time.  I started cutting myself not long before Clare and I started seeing each other, and I didn't stop until I was in my early twenties.  It was only when I finally made the break from D that I came off anti-depressants and out of counselling.  I'm healthy and happy now, so I'd never really linked the two concepts - relationships and poor mental health - together, until a few months ago.  I'd been emailing this guy and really started to like him, and he suddenly stopped replying.  My first instinct - literally the first, before crying, drinking or sending angry texts - was to cut.  I didn't, but it really gave me pause.  I'd never even met this bloke and had no real relationship with him, and I start to reach for the blade?  It freaked me out, to be frank, and has made me very cautious of dating again.