JOURNAL: WHY I HAVEN'T REMARRIED

I hadn’t yet found anyone I could envision as my life partner for a long time.. I seemed to be waiting for a switch to flip inside me, some internal confirmation that this person I was going to me was the one for me.  I became aware that I was hesitating at least partially because to make any choice was simultaneously to not choose everyone else—but I overcame that obstacle as soon as I realized it was an issue.  I only had to remind myself that most of the world’s billions of people would never make their way in front of me.  Almost certainly somewhere someone more wonderful for me was out there (just as almost certainly someone more wonderful than me was out there for her—neither of us is perfect nor perfect for each other), but she had to some of my deal breaker.

I began to wonder just why I still wasn’t remarried.  After my divorce, I didn’t think that marriage was necessary for happiness or that a married life was even necessarily happier than a single one.  But I’d always envisioned myself being married.  So why wasn’t I?  Had it only been a matter of not finding the right person, as I’d always presumed?

For reasons unclear to me, I found my thoughts drifting back to my early years.... and now when I was living completely alone  and as I thought back on it, I realized it was one of the happiest periods of my life.  Why?  Because when I came home at the end of the day I came home to an empty kingdom—one in which I had complete freedom to do whatever I wanted.  No one else lived in my personal space to ask favors of me or require my help or have an opinion about what do to that was contrary to my own.  That freedom, I suddenly realized, was what I really wanted more than anything else. At that moment, I discovered to my complete surprise that the true reason I was still single was that I wanted to be.  I wanted to be alone.  I was stunned.

Being alone was the strategy I used to protect myself against the demands placed on me by others. This, then, I realized, was the true answer to why I’d felt so anxious to get married. Most of my ex girlfriend were compunction at all about expressing their desires about anything:  let’s go shopping, let’s go for a bike ride, let’s watch a movie.  And though I didn’t dislike any of those things (except for the shopping), I often didn’t want to do them when They did.  My anxiety arose because I felt helpless to determine the direction I wanted my life to go when they were in it.  If I couldn’t express and take care of my own needs in a relationship, how could I ever accomplish my own life’s goals?  Up to that point, remaining unattached was the only strategy I’d discovered (unconsciously until that moment) that I felt capable of executing.  So I’d remained unmarried.


In that moment of understanding, I decided I didn’t want to remain as I was.  I needed to learn to take care of myself once and for all, even in the midst of a relationship, so that not only could I have a relationship but also enjoy it.  Any woman that I was going to be with was an opportunity for me to forge myself into a stronger, happier person.  And in that moment, I realized what my campaign had actually been about all along:  not finding my wife but growing into a person who could actually have one.