How To Be Single And Not Feel Like Shit About It

Making sense of this mysterious, stubborn freedom

Hello <3

It’s so nice being back in your inboxes. I missed it.

After over a decade of writing advice columns, one of the most common questions I’m asked is: How do I get truly OK with my alone-ness? It was asked of me again recently in an AMA I did on my Instagram, and I wanted to take it here.

If I’m honest, writing about being single feels overdone and vulnerable and cliché, like, get a hobby, girl, feel lucky to be alive and get over it.

But on the other hand, it’s a conversation I find myself having a lot with friends at the moment (looking ahead in time, thinking about The Holiday Season etc etc), which makes it feel like a bruise worth pressing on.

I am interested in this force of loneliness (sometimes alive, sometimes dormant) that lives in all of us. I suspect being single, it’s more explicit. But even in a relationship, loneliness manifests in its own ways. And this is what I want to understand more about: how do you manage feelings of alone-ness?

And, more specifically, in relation to the topic of being single, how do you find a sense of belonging when you don’t have these traditional points of gravity that give direction to your life?

If you have opinions on any of this or the below, I’d love to read them in the comments <3.

I just want to know whether or not it will happen one day

Years ago, I read Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn, and the central idea of that book has never left my psyche. Lunn is a journalist who spent years interviewing people about love and says the most recurring point people made about ‘finding someone’ was: If I just knew, for sure, that it would happen to me, I would be able to relax and enjoy life. To quote:

“The obvious story was that I was unhappy being single. Beneath that, a private fear that I always would be; and worse, an anxiety born from not knowing either way. The simple fact of the unknown was one I could not resist wrestling with. Like hauling a heavy suitcase up the stairs at a station, I imagined it would be easier if there were an endpoint in sight, because when you see the top of the station stairs or the finishing line of a run, it’s easy to dig deep for an extra bit of strength to get there. What I found tiring about looking for a romantic relationship was that there was no way of knowing for certain if there would ever be an end point. I would tell friends, ‘I don’t mind if I don’t meet anyone for another ten years, I just want to know that it will happen one day.”

It’s naive to admit that I never considered being single at 33. I know that sounds young to some people, but it does not to me. I guess I also never expected to be stalked, harassed, and ignored during what’s meant to be the romantic part of your 20s; dating, sex and falling in and out of love. But hey, life is copy. Any single person in 2025 can tell you that. I got to make out with a man outside a medieval bar in the rain once, so one shouldn’t complain about everything.

Every day, trying to be chill about it

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found being OK with singleness is a constant daily discipline in becoming comfortable with not knowing when or if I’ll meet someone. Any part of life can change in the fastest shift — we know this — but we often forget this is also true when it comes to love. After a while, you just get so sick of paying for everything full price and managing every minute part of your life that the yearning becomes more… practical. It’s like, yes, I’d love for someone to think I’m sexy and love me forever, but I’d also just love not to have to think about dinner every fucking night and know that someone can share the load of living with me.

I want to resolve this in some intelligent counter-argument, but I just can’t. I don’t think there is one. We have to just get comfortable with sitting in the mystery of it and viewing it as open potential. Ugh.

This came up the other night out with a friend, who was asking me about this frustrating feeling: that we can’t think our way out of everything, especially love. She has a partner and children, and, as a writer herself, wanted to know more about the desperate, deflating sensation I was describing. Opposite us sat a man and a woman, his hand draped around her shoulders as though she was the last gemstone on earth, both lazily and lovingly, and I realised how long ago it had been since I’d experienced that level of connection. It ached. It felt like another lifetime ago. ‘It’s that,’ I said after a sip of wine, and pointed with my eyes. ‘It sometimes feels like a human travesty to be alive and denied to be looked at and touched that way. Like I’m a body donated to science.’

These are the parts that are embarrassing to admit.

Keeping our lives alive

We tend to view romantic love as the thing that elevates us, and without it, it’s very easy to feel stuck on the ground, looking up at everyone who’s taken off. Especially when you start experiencing the divide economically. This is a certain type of uncertainty only single people will truly understand because it’s something you must contend with every day. Your life can be made to be small because it’s not multiplied by two, and so, the mysterious missing gap, the prime number-ness of ‘one’ must be filled with things that make you feel alive instead of driving you insane by forming a giant chasm in your chest.

Just live to feel alive, you say? Sounds fun.

The above is easier to write on a lofty Saturday morning, the autumn light gently filtering into my apartment about to meet a friend for coffee, than it was crying on the phone to Nathan from ANZ Bank the other week, explaining the difficulty of paying a mortgage as a single woman in a tanking, over-inflated economy, asking if there was any way I could get some sort of compassionate relief because of it. (No, lol. Duh).

Everyday romantics

Watch any interview with a couple who’ve been together for a long time, and the question the journalist asks is always, ‘What do you do to keep the romance alive?’

Thinking about this in relation to my own life held an answer for me — whether you’re single or in a relationship, it is your responsibility to keep your life alive. That either way it is work. It’s all work. And so the task becomes to make your life as romantic as possible:

Living romantically.

Wearing the army jacket I bought in Japan. Lighting incense my friend sent me from Paris. Getting the man who owns the convenience store to cut my watermelon up into small pieces before I buy it. Trips with other single friends who feel the exact same measure of untethered, free, and alone. Surfing with kind strangers. My Sunday quest up to the yoga studio to lie down in a dark room looking up through the glass ceiling at the moon. Taking a CBD gummy to face going to the Portuguese post office and calling a friend on my way there. You know the things I’m talking about.

All of these small gestures towards myself can’t fully fill the void, no, but they have to count for something. But the most romantic way I think you can live right now is with urgency. I don’t mean rush, or with stress or anxiety. I mean with the sense that now is the moment, feelings must be felt, and when there is a void of them in our lives we are personally responsible for seeking out the experiences that will fulfil them.

How romantic love is changing

The practical realities of being alone in 2025 are making the emotional part heavier. I know single women who’ve had to move out of their apartments because they can no longer afford to live alone. I’m in various WhatsApp groups with single friends going back into therapy or becoming reliant on ChatGPT to make sense of this feeling of ‘still’ being alone. Others have started seeing a financial advisor just to help figure out a practical way forward into a future they hadn’t imagined — its own type of constant daily grief. In the scheme of Bad Things In The World, it’s not terrible, but if you don’t know how to think about it in a healthy way, on the bad days, it feels like living in constant deficit.

I thought about this a lot over summer, which was the first one in a decade I haven’t had multiple weddings to attend. I love weddings, I love love, and was even a celebrant for a period of time. But not having to orchestrate an international quest alone was a relief. For once, I did not find myself in a corner of a catered table talking to a wonderful older couple about how they met, 'how I do it,’ and how ‘love always finds a way.’ It hasn’t yet, and that’s ok, but in my most embarrassing, yearning moments, it also fucking sucks. It feels melodramatic to say that last bit out loud.

Questions I don’t quite have the answers to yet

All of this is why I am interested in how the role of romantic love is changing (If you have read Miranda July’s All Fours, you’ll know what I mean).

I am interested in what kind of pressure we can realistically apply to romantic love, given the state of the world, given the state of the modern psyche about commitment and hyperoptimisation. I am also interested in the way it elevates us in almost every aspect of our lives.

I am interested in what it’s like to have romantic love happen at the time of your life you expected it to, and what it feels like from the outside looking into singledom from its safety and comfort.

I am also interested in how singleness can lead to unimaginable freedoms, not just deep aches and social ostracisation.

My preoccupation with all of this started when, earlier this year, I heard someone describe being single as ‘a constant daily grief,’ and I felt the hearts in everyone’s bodies plummet to the floor. It made me think, Is there even anything we can do about this?

Not hating the part that’s meant to be loving

Writer Sheena Patel shared the below on her Instagram the other day (side note — she has the best meme presence on the internet imo). It's from the book How to End A Story by Australian writer Helen Garner, which is a collection of her diaries from 1978-1987:

“I am not bored, and neither am I being hated by someone who is supposed to be loving me.”

Garner is talking about a romantic partner, of course. But I wonder if she is also talking about herself. Learning to truly be alone is an equally important accomplishment, as romantic love is often made out to be. That last part holds the deeper revelation, I think.

I showed this to a friend the other night. We live around the corner from each other and had gotten up early to work by the beach for the day. When she read it, she teared up, visibly gulped, and the heart-dropping thing happened. She said the feeling for her was physical, a heaviness in her chest she felt each morning when she woke up and spent the whole day working to dissipate. The grief is real. It’s important to feel it.

After that, we lit a cigarette to share after a swim, and laughed about all the ludicrous things we could plan to do this winter that could help it feel like it wasn’t another void to fill. She asked if she could come by my place at 9 on Sunday so I could braid her hair before a Jujitsu tournament, and I said, absolutely, I will have a small mirror to hold and some coffee brewing. I would do anything for you. And I meant it. I felt cute, and alive, and silly, and in these moments, that complex ache feels distant, like a terrible hangover you forgot about. They are what keep you alive.

There it is: these other types of love we mustn’t dismiss. They are not nothing. They are deep and fulfilling and, at their best, life-affirming. Being alone is not the same as being nothing.

It takes just one person who truly sees you, and it does not always have to be through the eyes of a lover. We are socialised into feeling that this form of belonging needs to come in the form of romance. If you have this, love it, work on it to keep it alive, hold onto it like light. But if you don’t, I have come to know, there are so many other forms of connection you can find as part of this strange, stubborn single freedom. Will it last forever? I can’t promise you a thing. But thinking about it in this way becomes a practice of waking up and thinking, well, what the hell are we going to do with this loneliness today? and knowing there are people in your life who, together, will help you come alive, despite it.

Then it becomes a creative challenge, less so a lonely one.

If you’re wrestling with aloneness right now, I hope this helps <3

Wishes,
Bel
x

PS. This is a great listen:

PPS. A short playlist this week, which I don’t tend to enjoy because I love a hands-free operation, but look, sometimes you just have 57 minutes and 1 second to fill, and if that’s the case, this is for you:

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