Nobody wants to end up on their own. The creeping feeling of fear and dread that comes with the thought of getting old and dying alone is familiar to everyone. This anxiety about the future can be bad enough on its own, but it’s made even worse by the feeling we get in the present when we’re all alone and it feels like nobody knows or even cares that we exist.
It’s at times like this, such as when we’re lying awake at night alone in our beds, when we’re at our most emotionally vulnerable; it’s at times like this when we begin to think that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to message that ex, or to take another swing at online dating, or to settle for that person that we know deep down isn’t right for us.
We all crave love – not just any love, but real, true, deep love. Vibrant, intense, unconditional love – the kind of love that most of us only see in the movies, the kind of love that we can only dream of. We all want to experience the kind of love we know would allow us to cope with even the most difficult of circumstances, the kind that helps us to keep going even when we’re exhausted and a hair’s width away from giving up completely. We all want to find someone who will love us with all of their being, someone who will accept us in our entirety and cherish us exactly the way we are.
We want all of that. We want it more than we’ve ever wanted anything. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
The thing is, our craving for this feeling can cloud our judgement. It can make us reckless and hasty, causing us to rush into situations that we might not have found ourselves in if we’d only taken the time to think things through a bit more.
All too often, our desire to find love and avoid being alone leads us into the trap of getting into a relationship with someone who isn’t right for us. The thing is, being in a relationship for the sake of it can never make us happy; it will only make us miserable. True happiness comes from within, not from outside. We cannot expect other people to make us feel any different to how we feel deep inside. No one can ever fill the void inside of us; we have to learn to do that ourselves.
Being with someone who isn’t quite right for us to avoid being alone might seem like a somewhat sensible decision at first, but this isn’t the case. In the long term, we only end up feeling more lonely, more lost, and more desperate to find the love that we so badly want. It’s far better to be alone than it is to settle for second-best.
Deep down in our hearts, each of us knows that. We know it when we look at the person we’re with and feel a sharp pang of pain and regret. We know it when they seem distant and disinterested, more focused on themselves than they ever could be on the relationship. We know it when they don’t meet our energy or make us laugh, and when they tell us our quirks and eccentricities are annoying or weird rather than accepting us for who we are and seeing our true beauty. We know it when we lie awake at night, with a warm body right there in bed next to us but feeling as though we’re completely alone.
It’s far better to be alone than to endure all of this. And it’s only then, when we finally become comfortable with our own company, when we finally learn to embrace ourselves completely, that it all comes together and we find that person who we’ve been looking for all along. And then we laugh, because we realize that the happiness and contentment that we’d been searching for in the form of another person was like looking for the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. We see that we had it inside of us all along, and that we didn’t need anyone else to get it.
