Single or Singled Out?
Are You Single Or Feeling Singled Out This Wedding Season?
Picture this: After working relentlessly for hours you finally want a break and log on to Instagram just to find that almost every other person is either getting married or attending a wedding. You head on to the explore feed, hoping to find something new but it’s still flooded with wedding pictures of Vicky-Katrina and even random couples, and you sit there wondering if you’ll ever find your perfect someone (and a good wedding photographer, of course).
The wedding season and its effects
Yes, the wedding season may feel colder than the temperature outside for most of us. You might be “pro” marriage, “pro” partnership or even “happily single” but with pictures that speak a thousand smiles, the thought of whether you’ll ever reach that level of happiness with someone might flutter at the back of your mind or at times, even haunt you. If you are in your late 20s or early 30s like me, you would’ve witnessed friends gradually getting their +1 to every social event.
The pictures, the love story and the protagonists make you want to believe in love and magic. But the uncertainty comes with its own set of anxieties. The pressure to create something magical before your “biological clock” (as society states) runs out can be pretty daunting. For me the question of ‘is there something wrong with me for not finding love’ is a constant companion. So why does being single feel more like being singled out, especially during the wedding season?
With each well edited, hearty and aesthetically pleasing picture that surfaces from a new wedding function, my anxiety deepens. Honestly, I am a decade over my Bollywood craze *deep sigh* but the fear of loneliness, the fear that probably I will never find someone who looks at me the way Vicky looks at Katrina, the fear that I can’t date someone for 11 years before tying the knot like Rajkumar & Patralekha, the fear of not being able to create a family like Virushka because my biological clock might not allow that, often palpitates my heart. As a psychologist I wonder if the entire self-work has spoiled me because now no one seems ‘woke’ enough to live with. These thoughts are often accompanied by overthinking, body image issues and feelings that are hard to let go of.
Dealing with insecurities
But for me, the best part about knowing what you think and feel is that you understand that it’s a rather temporary state of mind. Because I’m pretty sure something else will fill my explore feed in the next few weeks. The one thing that helps me is to acknowledge what I feel because the more you fight something, the more you struggle to make your peace with it.
I’ve learned that everything in your life unravels at its own pace in its own time; whether it’s a relationship or even a simple work project. Just how J.K. Rowling once wrote, “the mistake 99% of humanity made was being ashamed of what they were; lying about it, trying to be somebody else.”
So ultimately shaming ourselves and hating ourselves for our thoughts and feelings doesn’t help at all. Feeling anxious about your best friend tying the knot when you’re single doesn’t make you a bad friend, only human. Dig deeper; ask yourself if a marriage is something you truly desire at the moment or is it just the ravishing wedding that you want?
Why we’re easily affected and a way out of it
It’s easy to compare ourselves to others, especially because as humans, we find it more convenient to look at the outside rather than the inside. But when we compare ourselves to others’ milestones, we set standards of success according to their lives without considering the fact that their goals, their needs, their journey is entirely different. It limits the potential that we carve for ourselves.
Remember that we don’t all have the same purpose, the same family, the same personality or even the same health. We’ve all come a long way on our own and someone else’s pictures of happiness shouldn’t make you change your course at all. So let’s enjoy the wedding buffets and slowly chicken dance our way out of the wedding season and always, always remember that a partner does not necessarily guarantee a lifetime of happiness.
