Last year, when I saw Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour concert movie in theatres, half of my time was spent sobbing — every song reminded me of either a guy I was in love with or crying over at some stage of my life.
When the 10-minute version of All Too Well was released, I remember being 24, having broken up with an emotionally abusive, narcissistic guy who was a decade older than me. Our three month situationship left me with trauma and sounded similar to Taylor and Jake Gyllenhal’s (who the song is rumoured to be about, with Jake a decade senior to her and them having dated for the same length of time).
I was 25 when Taylor’s Midnights album was released and I scream-cried to You're On Your Own Kid from my apartment in Paris after breaking up with my French boyfriend.
And at 26 on that day at the cinema, I couldn’t think of an age when I wasn’t enmeshed in some kind of boy drama. Even in high school I was dating a casanova and trying to keep tabs on how many girls he was flirting with.
Then Julia Roberts’ famous Eat Pray Love line about either being with a guy or breaking up with a guy since the age of 15 ran through my head and it felt like the slap in the face that I probably needed. Did I really want to get to my 50s and describe every year of my life as one tethered to a man? Could I be a chronic love addict, as some critics describe Swift? And is there a cure to this addiction?
I came out of the cinema and made a pledge: I was going to stay single for the rest of my twenties. I wanted to travel, invest in my hobbies, invest in my friendships. I wanted to be able to look back on my twenties and remember them as the years I was fully living for myself, not crying over a man.
It feels funny to look back on that moment, 12 months on. I’m 27 and I’ve now been single for more than a year and it’s been a rollercoaster, from deleting all dating apps to people (always men) calling me neurotic for choosing not to date — but it’s not one I’m ready to get off.
I moved to Lisbon last year for three months, just because I could. I go to bars now without any expectation of meeting anyone and that’s liberating. It was so exhausting being single but always searching. I don’t feel awkward anymore eating alone at restaurants. I used to always take a book with me to seem busy, but I’m now comfortable just people-watching while I enjoy my meals. I’ve refused to give my number to men who have approached me on the tube or while I’m on a night out.
I wanted to be able to look back on my twenties and remember them as the years I was fully living for myself, not crying over a man
There’s something empowering about knowing you’re desirable, yet controlling the narrative. In the past I used to always dress for men’s approval and that never led me anywhere. I always felt so powerless. Swift’s famous lyric “Lately I’ve been dressing for revenge” comes to mind.
There have been challenges to my year-long dating detox, of course. “So why are you single? What is wrong with you? No one who looks this beautiful can be single by choice, are you depressed? Or neurotic? Are you a walking red flag?” are just some of the questions I’ve been asked by men in the months since I started my consciously single chapter. And then there’s the loneliness.
In one moment of struggle a few months ago, I made the mistake of texting someone that I ghosted — just because I was lonely and wanted attention, not because I actually wanted to date him. Of course I never heard back. You never get attention from men when you most need it, do you?
But perhaps that loneliness can be good for us, sometimes. Growing up, I always had an inconsistent and overly dependent relationship with my parents which inevitably led to an insecure attachment style that manifested as a need for constant validation and affection in adult relationships. In other words, I was a love addict.
‘Love addiction’ isn't a formal diagnosis, of course. It simply describes people who constantly seek out the exciting feelings of new love, fuelled by the irrational fear of being alone or being rejected. I first read about it almost a decade ago, when a 2015 piece in The Week titled ‘Swift's addiction to love’ resonated with me.
Years later during my cinema epiphany, it was comforting to realise that Swift may well share my addiction — but also worrying. How many of us live our lives totally consumed by love or the search for it?
I didn’t want to look back and see that I’ve spent my whole twenties dedicated to men’s judgements, their insincere compliments, their half-assed romance. Nor did I want to become what TikTokers have been calling a placeholder girlfriend — the partner a man holds onto for years, despite not seeing a lasting future for the relationship, believing they can upgrade to a new partner in the future.
Far too many of my female friends have broken up with their partners of five or six years in their thirties, only for their ex to marry someone else within a year. The friends who’ve gone through this have been left feeling bitter, like they gave their youth away for free in a relationship that was leading nowhere.
I’d take being single over being that kind of placeholder any day.
In fact, I’ve asked those same friends to hold me accountable if I do find myself in that position later on. If I’m dating a guy for more than a year, and we haven’t moved in together, I’ll cut my losses and break up. If we have been living together for a few months and he hasn’t proposed? Boy bye! If we’ve been engaged but aren’t setting a date to get married in the following year? I’ve asked my friends to send me email reminders to break the engagement.
Even the fact that I am obsessing over an imaginary relationship, putting rules in place before it’s even begun, shows me I’m a long way off curing my love addiction. There’s a part of me that’s still searching, still thinking about men or the lack of them, even when I’m single.
I wonder if it’s my genes: I come from a long line of women who have never been able to survive without a man. My mother, grandmother, great grandmother, all of them had to depend on a man to live and to feel validated, even if that meant staying in unhealthy relationships. It feels like I’m the first woman in our ancestral line who is doing things differently.
I haven’t told my mother or my grandmother yet that I’m staying single because I don’t want to be reminded about my biological clock by them. I also don’t want them to guilt-trip me into finding a man just so that my grandmother can attend the wedding of her first grandchild, which is something they’ve mentioned in the past.
Even the fact that I am obsessing over an imaginary relationship, putting rules in place before it’s even begun, shows me I’m a long way off curing my love addiction
It goes something like this: my grandmother sighs, “Oh I don’t know how long am I going to live,” to which my mother replies, “Come on, surely you’ll live to see Meehika’s wedding.” No pressure, then.
Perhaps it’s a generational thing. I’m far from the only one in my friendship circle making an active choice to stay single in my twenties. Another friend, aged 29, insists she’s been ‘boy sober’ — that’s abstaining from any kind of romantic or sexual relationships with men — for an entire year and has no plans to stop. She wants to detox from toxic relationships, people, and the dating scene completely and instead focus on self-love and self-care to heal. “I hate all men” was her last text message.
Do I want to meet someone eventually? Of course. I want to get married and settle down — whatever that means — one day. Which is exactly why it’s so much more imperative for me to be able to claim the freedom of singlehood now and run wild while I can.
These years — the rest of my twenties — may well be the only time I’ll ever get just for myself, where I don’t have the responsibilities of a relationship, kids or ageing parents. During my three months in Lisbon, I didn’t use any dating apps, nor did I go on any dates with men who asked me out in person. I’m going to Barcelona for three months at the end of this year and I plan to be just as strict there. I’ve seen far too many friends travel with the primary aim being a holiday romance. But isn’t there so much more to the world than men?
I know at some point I will meet someone and build a much more stable life. But I also don’t want to be constantly waiting for that to happen and doing things solely for that reason. I want to be unapologetically selfish with my time and investment. I don’t want to spend precious years of my twenties searching for a relationship.
The opportunity to stand alone, travel alone, eat and dance alone, just for a while, is a rare gift. Why wouldn’t I take it?
