All my life, I’ve dealt with severe FOMO, or, the “fear of missing out.” I saw what other people were doing and felt as if I was living my life wrong, like there was something I should be doing in order to properly be a kid. This extended to my love life. Watching everyone around me experience young love the way an adolescent is “meant” to, not only made me feel like I was doing something wrong, but that there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

What did I emit that so strongly repelled any romantic relationships in my life? Why did it seem like everybody around me – no matter how annoying, or boring, or undesirable I saw them as – could get themselves into a (seemingly) real relationship? Obviously, I didn’t find the answers to these questions or else I wouldn’t be writing to you today, but what I did realize is that I didn’t actually care.

Leaving home forced me to give up my insecure, FOMOtic tendencies; it demanded that I let go of what everyone else was doing with their lives and focus on what I was doing with mine. I’m aware that I am not living up to my collegiate expectations, or those of anyone else, but wasting time racking my brain for what I could be doing differently wasn’t an option anymore. Taking that option away is when I finally began to evolve (albeit not in the ways I originally desired, but beggars can’t be choosers).

Considering we just met, I feel you may still think that my seemingly inevitable singleness is sad. That’s totally understandable – and at times I would agree with you –but for now, I’ll enlighten you about what this commitment has done for me…both good and bad.

Making it the entirety of my teenage years sans romance gave me a unique outlook on myself and the relationships I do have. Despite my lack, I believe that romance and love are inevitable, but where these feelings land is where variations occur. Without having someone else to bestow these feelings on, I was forced into a committed relationship with myself. I think that eventually, everyone ends up here, but I just got to skip the bullshit and get it over with.
How does this benefit me?

Really good question – it didn’t for a while. Making it through my awkward stage, my second awkward stage, and then probably a third with a whole lot of love that I didn’t know what to do with yet, made me jaded. I saw my circumstances as unfair and that everyone who wasn’t as unlucky as me was against me. I hated love. It made me sick. Like I said though, love is inevitable, so the way I tried to show this love (which I hated so much) was trying to spread my hatred. I worked tirelessly to spread the disease I seemed to have fallen ill with. Evidently, no one was too big of a fan of this mindset, and I almost lost the few people I actually cared about… I almost managed to suck the marrow out of everything good I had.

They say love makes you blind, but so does hatred, and I was blind to the benefits of being my very own partner. Going through my developmental years without the ability to depend on someone else to give me my identity taught me who I was when no one was watching. I didn't have anyone to prove anything to other than myself—and my standards were pretty low. This knowledge about myself prevents me from settling on anything. Realizing that you don’t NEED anyone else makes the people you WANT even more special. I know that I can get through my days without talking to anyone other than myself, so when I have someone there I’m ten times more grateful. Not only am I more appreciative, but the list of people I keep around is perfectly curated by yours truly and anyone that doesn't live up to my standards doesn’t have to be there…respectfully.

Being on my own raised my standards, and although this might lengthen the time I spend single, I’m okay not wasting my time on people who don’t serve me. Finding out who I was and what I wanted from the world was the first step I took toward becoming me, and I don’t think I could have done this with my teeth sunk into somebody else, no matter how symbiotic the relationship was.

The ability to be alone with yourself is an important skill and the only way to learn it is by actually being alone with yourself (I’m a genius, I know). I like to think that I was lucky enough to be forced to do this, so I’d like to thank everyone who never loved me because now I can at least start to like myself instead.

Love,

Isabella

Photograph: Pinterest

FOMO on Love