Valentine’s In The (Newly) Single World
It’s Valentine’s Eve in the year 2019. I don’t know if Valentine’s Eve is actually a thing or if I just made that up. I am sitting in a posture that I know will hurt my back eventually, just like several other habits I have adopted that will harm my body at some point or the other and a part of me is sad because my favourite season is slowly fading away. Writer’s Block, my true companion, has once again proven that we’re not parting ways anytime soon.
It also happens to be the first time on this day when I am not with someone. When I use the term ‘with’, I don’t mean physically, I just mean having someone in my life.
Gregory Alan Isakov is keeping company in the background, and if you haven’t heard of him yet and call yourself a fan of music that soothes your ears with the first second, you really need to check his magic (yes magic, not just music) out.
Current source of happiness is the soreness in my body from two consecutive days of killer workouts.
Thought process incessantly consuming the subconscious of my mind follow a highly constant and therefore predictable structure -
What B-School do I apply to?
Wait, which one would even take me?
Should I even go to B-School at all?
Well, would doing so & so look good on my application?
I wish I wasn’t in such a quandary all the time.
Let’s just sleep.
I have only lived on this planet, or existed on most days and lived a few, for twenty three years so far, and when I talk about the first Valentine’s without a ‘significant’ other, I am only talking about the past eight years or so. Technically, last year involved going through a breakup during this period — the kind that takes weeks to process.
I have never had a special relationship with this day — never enough to make a big deal out of it, and honestly, I still don’t get the point. Being single and being bombarded with endless deals at numerous restaurants, takeaways, hotels, online travel agents has not left any impact on me to make me miss ‘someone’ — be it a specific person or the sheer idea of having someone.
If anything has changed in my life in the past year of being single is that I got introduced to dating apps and the idea of meeting strangers and being disappointed quite often (but that’s for another post) or how I didn’t actually need someone to ring up each night before sleeping because that act in no way affected the soundness of my sleep. If there’s anything I miss, it would be having one constant person you could take with you for any plan you wanted to make, any place you wanted to eat at, or a movie you really wanted to watch. Having been in one long distance relationship for a few years actually didn’t make me too dependent on this, and being blessed with a friend circle in the city I reside in gives me options to choose from for my escapades.
All this brings me to the point — what is it that we exactly celebrate on the Fourteenth Day each February, and what is it that people are chasing?
Like most people my age, every time I open a social media platform, someone new is getting married. Until a year or two back, it was mostly people slightly elder to us, so it wasn’t a cause of major, or any worry. Suddenly it’s our batchmates. No offence to anyone making this choice for themselves, but nothing about those posts makes me, or my friends, want that for ourselves right now. I mean — there’s an entire life I have planned for myself which I am yet to live. Sharing it with someone would be… okay, I guess (?) but tying myself down to that person (assuming I would like to get married without imagining the possibility of a divorce) for a lifetime at an age where I can’t even decide what course of further studies to pursue does not seem like a ship I’d want to sail on. However, it makes me wonder if I would feel differently about this in a few years.
It makes me think if I wouldn’t be so comfortable with Isakov keeping my ears company while I lie in a slightly better posture because I would’ve become more thoughtful about back problems on the Fourteenth Day of February a few years from now.
What if the checklist I have made for myself looked different, would I view certain days and the lack of another person to celebrate them with, differently?
Good B-School. Check.
30 Countries before 30. Check.
A good, stable career. Check.
If the ambition stays, and things fall into place — a business in my name, up & running. Check.
A dozen other bucket-list-y items that I would put up here but wouldn’t because they’re safer in my journal. Check.
Nothing changes, I guess, or feels different, until the ones you have keeping you company and listening to your rants and accompanying you on your escapades eventually have someone else to call their own, someone more permanent and more stable, whom they’d be willing to move cities with, make compromises for, and prioritise over your movie/ coffee/ paintball/ spontaneous trip plans.
Nothing changes until the pictures I see on Instagram, of two people holding hands taking vows, aren’t of some batchmates I haven’t seen in half a decade but of very real friends I interact with on a weekly or fortnightly or even monthly basis.
Nothing changes, until drinking plans are cancelled not because of some urgent commitment that came up at work or an early morning flight (which is also a major transition from plans being cancelled because of an exams season) but because the new born baby will keep the parents up the whole night.
And these are the thoughts that frighten me, and make me wish for perpetuity of the current state because growing up, and young years have a peak, and I fear that I am nearing that peak as each day passes. Until then, I will continue being at peace with all the spams places to eat at, lounge at, travel to keep throwing at me with couple deals, only crossing the bridge where my peace might begin to shift, when I get there.
