Why Is Everyone So Afraid Of Ending Up Alone?

With all the turning 30 business that I have coming up next month, a lot of conversations with friends lately have skewed around life plans and the next decade and all of that kind of stuff.  A common thread I’ve noticed to speaking to a lot of people has been this preoccupation with finding a life partner and how directly their own feelings of success are so closely tied to achieving said goal.  Like seriously?  Am I the only one out there who doesn’t feel that way at all?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not one of those gays that is a slave to the single life or anything like that.  I really, truly would love to find someone who I could spend the rest of my life with one day.  But the idea of not finding that doesn’t bother me in the slightest.  If you ask me, the thought of spending the rest of my life with someone who is not quite the one just for the sake of it is an infinitely more petrifying thought.

I went to a friends birthday party the other day and he had a Fortune Teller there.  Now, the guy did the whole Tarot Card reading thing and, funnily enough, of the thirteen cards I picked, not a single one was a romance related card at all.  In fact, evidently the primary card I pulled had to do with the fact that I’m “Independent, Intelligent and Strategic” which, to be honest, is a pretty fair assessment of me, albeit one that anyone with half a brain and eye for observation could probably tell about me just watching me walk into a room.

Funnily enough, it completely backed up what a Psychic said to me a few months ago, that everything in my immediate future points towards being by myself and achieving career related goals.  And really, why is this such a bad thing?  I mean, I’m not some sort of dead eyed careerist or anything, like some sort of big shouldered, power suited stereotype from an eighties movie, but I do have things that I really want to achieve in my life for myself still before I can feel like a true success in life.

I guess the thing is, whilst I’m never not open to the idea of a relationship in theory, I don’t think there’s any point in meeting the love of your life when you’re still only half a person.  Because once I really am in love with someone, they’re pretty much my number one, which means I’ll never have the drive to focus on my writing and what I could still very easily accomplish with it.

Manhattan Michael was the only guy ever that I imagined both goals could ever feasibly coexist.  Mostly because he had not just the ambition and drive, but the same (if not higher) level of belief in my music and my writing abilities as I, in my wildest dreams, did.  In a lot of ways, I’ll always be tremendously sad that things worked out the way they did on that one, but it’s not something that I can let hold me back in life either, especially since I learnt some pretty cool stuff out of it.

The thing is, I look at my life right now and I’m so fucking proud of where I am and what I’ve achieved.  Which is not to say I don’t have a long, long ways to go, but just that I feel a level of completeness about how I’ve spent the past 29 and 11/12th years of my life to date.  And I can look at my path for the next twelve months and feel such excitement for what I’m on the road to being able to achieve.  I can’t think of anything worse than sitting in this same chair in ten years time looking down the barrel 40 and wondering “what if?”  That would just be THE WORST.  Right now, when I look at all the things I’ve managed to do in my life to date, I feel so proud that I’ve managed to not just do them, but do them on my own, and that’s a pretty amazing feeling.  You get a real sense of confidence from that, like the social equivalent of knowing that you can survive on a desert island or something.

I guess, at the end of the day, if you can’t be happy by yourself, how can you expect anyone else to be happy with you?  Until the end of last year, I was literally single for almost two whole years without a break and I didn’t once feel inadequate about it.  I wish I could help more of my friends feel the same.  When I sit here in my apartment right now, overlooking one of the most beautiful views in all of Sydney and reflecting on my life at this very moment and all the things that lay ahead, my heart is so full of happiness and contentment that I could cry.  It’s a nice feeling..