The Dangers Of Making Yourself The "Chronically Single" Friend

There’s an episode of Sex and the City where the girls go to an engagement party. One of the guests asks Miranda if she’s seeing “anyone special” and she says, “No, but I am seeing a whole bunch of unspecial guys.” Carrie watches in confusion as Miranda delivers a handful of one-liners about the lack of momentum in her love life while the rest of the women laugh. Later, Carrie confronts Miranda about the conversation. Miranda confesses that it’s easier to make her love life a joke than to deal with their pity. It’s an act of self-preservation.

When you’re single, it feels like there’s an onus to claim that as a key component of your personality. If you are self-aware enough about this perceived “flaw,” then your friends won’t look deeper, ask questions you don’t want to answer, or start speculating about your shortcomings. But in all likelihood, your friends are not constantly speculating on your deep-seated unlovability (and if they are, you need new friends). Continually leaning into your singleness is not only exhausting but it can negatively affect your self-worth and the quality of your friendships.

“Being single is not a disease. I hate the term ‘chronically single.’ It’s negative and harmful,” Shani Silver, TikTok creator and author of A Single Revolution: Don’t Look For A Match, Light One, tells me over Zoom. “I think referring to other people chronically single — but most often ourselves — assigns negativity to singlehood itself, and also to the length of time you’ve been single, which can create increasing feelings of devaluation and undesirability. It reinforces a lot of negative things I don’t think we deserve.”

I hadn’t thought of the term in this way. It was one that I used frequently — maybe even proudly — to describe how it felt to navigate my entire 20s into my early 30s without ever having been in a relationship. Being single felt core to my identity; it set me apart from the majority of my friends. I wrote personal essays on the topic, and even put together a Single Woman in Hollywood matrix to examine how pop culture portrays single women on screen. It was easy to write about these things and process them in my own time, positioning myself as an expert on how to be alone. But real life continued to be challenging to navigate.

I told myself that I must be so wild, so broken, so complex, and so messy that no man would ever love me.

It’s pretty difficult to answer questions about dating on the spot, or to know if I should even tell my friends that I met someone new. Chances were, the next time we spoke, Mr. Someone New would already be gone. I could even feel my friends’ hesitation when venturing a question about how dating was going. They knew it was a sensitive subject, and more and more I found myself becoming flippant and witty like Miranda, not wanting to ruin the vibe of the one opportunity we actually had to get drinks that month. There was a hollowness there, and I think we could both feel it: that we were just going through the motions. And of course, close friendships aside, any conversation with a new person, whether at a bachelorette party or a work event, the dreaded question would come up.

“Are you seeing anyone?”

Do you want me to tell you about this guy I f*cked once six months ago who keeps texting me? Or do you want me to tell you how much I genuinely love the life I’ve carved out for myself? Or do you want me to tell you that I sometimes feel so isolated and lonely that I have to take an edible to turn my brain into a big, fluffy cloud instead of a constant thunderstorm? Or that my mortgage paperwork says “UNMARRIED WOMAN,” which makes me feel immense pride and deep sadness? Or how wonderful it is that I can say yes to plans without checking in with anyone? Because they’re all true, by the way.

Why does it feel so fraught to talk about our romantic relationships (or lack thereof) with our friends, especially when we are in completely different stages of life? This was a question I asked Lisa Knisely, Ph.D., a licensed therapist who specializes in friendship therapy. “There can be a pressure to come up with an explanation of why you’re single, and a burden of thinking of your life and your choices through the lens of being single,” she says. The idea that you’re somehow in a state of arrested development until you find a partner is a bias that persists, even within the field of therapy, explains Knisely.

Continually placing yourself in the “single” box drives an unnecessary wedge between you and your friends.

When I was in my “chronically single” era, a part of me clung to that label as a security blanket. I told myself that I must be so wild, so broken, so complex, and so messy that no man would ever love me. I buried myself in the depths of my singleness, believing that I was a tragic figure unworthy of partnership. And I enjoyed putting myself into that dark place, lighting all my candles and watching the Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice and drinking prosecco with raspberries in it and feeling the deep anguish of being totally alone. I went to weddings without a plus-one, shouldering all the expenses myself. I didn’t have anyone’s hand to gently squeeze during the vows. I handed my phone over to a tipsy bridesmaid to “swipe for me” because she “never got to experience the apps!” I laid in my giant, pristine hotel bed, knowing that the next morning, I’d have to get my own coffee.

Ultimately, it doesn’t actually matter if you lean into your “spinsterhood” and go full-Bridget Jones with “vodka and Chaka Khan” or if you go on five dates every week. You’re still the single friend.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter.

Your friends are your friends, partnered or not. I think a lot about Knisely's observation that we feel burdened to filter our lives through the lens of singlehood. Continually placing yourself in the “single” box drives an unnecessary wedge between you and your friends. Referring to yourself as chronically single may seem like a reclamation of power, but it’s also dangerously reinforcing the fear that you are destined to be alone. And it reduces you to the single thing that you are not (romantically partnered) instead of what you are (a million fun, complex, exciting, annoying, and delightful little qualities).

Later in that aforementioned episode of Sex and the City, Miranda runs into a recently married friend. Without prompting, the friend starts rattling off a list of reasons why they don’t have kids yet. It’s the same pithy one-liners, adjusted for the next stage of life. Miranda laughs along, understanding that speculation about your choices never fully goes away — they just shift focus.

Sources:

Lisa C. Knisely, Ph.D., MSW, licensed associate clinical social worker

Shani Silver, author of A Single Revolution: Don’t Look For A Match, Light One