Follow Your Heart

As single women, one of our biggest gifts is our opportunity to create change in our lives. Our married and boyfriended-up sisters are spending a lot of time and energy thinking about their partners, and even when they’re not, their bodies and minds are humming with the energy of their sexual relationships. Having a partner fills a primal void inside of a woman that, when we’re single, we have the opportunity to fill with spiritual, creative, and other personal pursuits. We can choose to do anything we want. If we marry a computer programmer a year from now, it’s probably a given that we won’t be living in an artist’s commune and studying to become a full-time yoga instructor in five years.

But of course we're all kind of down about being single, and maybe feeling a little unmotivated. How to deal with it? The best piece of advice is probably to follow our hearts. We all have different interests and different strengths. Some of us are intellectuals, some of us are artists, some of us are humanitarians, some craftspeople, some world travelers and some social butterflies. No matter what our passions, it’s REALLY important to indulge them when we are single.

Actually, probably the biggest thing that will keep us from getting depressed and morose about our single situation is indulging ourselves, in every way we can. Don’t, under any circumstances, do anything you think you SHOULD do, or that you think it would be IMPRESSIVE to do. The quickest, most sure-fire way to misery in any undesirable situation, when we’re facing circumstances we don’t like and didn’t create, is to make things worse by trying to force ourselves to do even MORE things we don’t like. While you may be an intellectual, and it may seem like a really edifying idea to read every one of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s books, if they put you to sleep THEY WILL MAKE YOU FEEL REALLY MISERABLE and you will be fantasizing about your ex-boyfriend the entire time. Put the book down and pick up some Arianna Huffington or Ann Coulter instead.

Read books. Listen to podcasts. Knit. Go caving. Bake red velvet cake for yourself every Sunday and have a slice while reading Fifty Shades of Grey under a warm blanket on your living room couch. Mentor a ten-year-old. Nurse a friend through a really bad break-up. Visit Thailand. Paint canvases and get a gallery show. Just do FUN stuff. Stuff that will make your life feel alive. If it’ll make you feel alive to work at Wal-Mart and watch the sunset every evening over the Tappan Zee Bridge, do that. And, while you’re at it, being single is a really good time to improve your life as well. I know this falls under the banner of Very Miserable Work for many people, but if you’re not one of them, improving your physical health, your spiritual life, your professional career, your mental health, or your relationships with friends and family can be an empowering, thrilling, and FUN experience. And it’s one experience that will keep on giving, long after you’ve found Mr. Right, if that’s in your cards.