New Year's Parties Ain't Shopping Malls

This is a post I wrote on a New Year’s Eve thread:

Hi everyone,

I have to be honest with you – I agree with the gentlemen who responded before me. We single women are very unlikely to meet an eligible dating prospect on New Year’s Eve. Many years’ worth of eager anticipations over one of the biggest party nights of the year, followed by the acrid let-down of yet another evening ended as a single woman, have led to a certain realism for me about holidays such as New Year’s Eve.

As single women, the biggest gift we can give to ourselves is the gift of honesty. We are all vibrant, active women, enjoying life, and none of us wants to be left in the lurch on New Year’s. We want to be out and about, enjoying the energy, partying with everyone else. That’s an absolutely beautiful thing that I think we should honor respectfully. We deserve to party like anyone else. But the problem comes when our hopes overtake our relaxed attitude towards simply enjoying the night.

I know that, speaking for myself, my hopes of finding an eligible bachelor have often taken over my experience of whatever party I happened to be at on New Year’s, leaving me resentful and frustrated. At this point in my life, I’ve learned to expect very little from nights like New Year’s. I’ve learned that dates will be sporadic in life and often come from the most unexpected of places.

And I’ve learned that I certainly can’t expect that those eligible bachelors show up on my timetable. Just because I took the time to go to the salon and get my hair blown out, spend money on a brand new dress and pair of heels, use the expensive body scrub, and spend forty minutes on makeup doesn’t mean that some guy is obligated to show up at my side at a given event and appreciate all the hard work I put into it. If I want to do those things, I do them for myself and for the pleasure of the way they affect my interactions with others. They don’t guarantee a warm reception with potential dates. The night a new date shows up might be the night I am dragging myself home from hot yoga in my Pink yoga pants and Aeropostale sweatshirt, skin inadvertently glowing from the workout.

At the end of the day, I go to these things for me, because you can’t guarantee a warm reception. If you want to go out to a bar or club on New Year’s Eve, go for the music, the open bar, the free buffet, the balloon drop, and the company. Forget about meeting someone. You can’t control that. Just enjoy it for what it is. And if you meet someone, all the better.

… Or you could just order in fancy gourmet pizza, invite a friend over, and drink sweet wine and watch documentaries like me. We're all at different points in our lives. Don't be afraid to be different.

The Satisfied Single

thesatisfiedsingle.blogspot.com