All my life, I’ve dealt with severe “fear of missing out,” aka FOMO. I saw what other people were doing and felt as if I was living my life the wrong way—like there was something I should be doing in order to be living properly. This insecurity extended to my love life. Watching everyone around me experience young love the way we’re shown in the movies, 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, boring, or undesirable I saw them as— could get themselves into a (seemingly) real relationship? 

I didn’t find the answers to these questions, but what I did realize is that I didn’t actually care. Leaving home forced me to give up my insecure, FOMO-driven 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. By spending less time observing others, I was able to open my mind to deeper introspection on my loveless life and how this isn’t a bad thing. Taking this deep dive didn’t make me think that everyone else should be jealous of my lifestyle, it just made me not care about anyone but myself. 

Surviving the entirety of my teenage years sans romance has given me a unique outlook on myself and the relationships I do have. Despite my limited experience, 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 to treat myself as the partner I lacked. At times, seeming like a recluse to others, and honestly even to myself, made my love life incomparable to those around me. Realizing the potential of this newfound uniqueness forced me into this committed relationship with myself that I fueled with my former obsessive observations of others. 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 a fan of this mindset, and I almost lost the few people I actually cared about.

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. This knowledge about myself prevents me from settling for 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 10 times more grateful. Not only am I more appreciative, but I’ve perfectly curated the list of people I keep around 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. Instead of forcing myself into a mediocre relationship just because everyone around me is doing it and acting out of fear of missing out, I’ve embraced a life that comes naturally to me. Finding out who I was and what I wanted from the world was the first step I took into 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 think I was lucky to be forced to do this, so I’d like to thank everyone who never loved me because now I can at least begin to like myself.