The Psychology of your 20s - 218. Overcome your fear of never finding love

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

Our fear of being alone forever and never finding the right one is scary, but it's also pretty natural. Whether you have never dated before, or are worried that you have missed your chance for true, long term love, it can be hard to imagine ourselves finding the right person without getting really caught up in the dating process. Today, let's talk about how to overcome your fear of being alone or ending up single, including:  The fear of missing out The impact of social pain  The societal narrative towards singlehood  Single shaming language + the role of ambiguous loss  Does a fear of being alone make us less selective?  How to be self partnered and actually LOVE it! All of that and some much more! Listen now!  Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast  For business enquiries: [e-mail]  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. New listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s. I'm so glad that you're here. I'm really excited for this episode because it is something that comes up so much on the podcast and is such a deeply hidden fear for so many of us. One of the things I hear so often from 20-somethings from people beyond that age, people in their 30s, is this fear of ending up alone and of never finding the one. I hear it from people who have never dated before and feel very inexperienced and behind when it comes to those romantic

situations and hitting those romantic milestones that everybody around them seems to have already met and, you know, they find it really hard to imagine that they'll find love because they've never experienced it before. I also hear from people who have been in long-term relationships for years and years, and they've broken up with their partners, perhaps the person that they thought they were going to marry, and they wonder, they wonder that they've missed their chance to grow old with somebody and whether they will ever find anyone better. It is such a common dilemma, one that I think really unites us not just as 20-somethings, but But as people, as human beings, I don't want to be alone.

I want love. I want someone to share my life with. And it's not bad to admit that or to assume that just because you have this deep desire to maybe eventually find somebody. You can't also be happy as a single person. You can be so self-aware and content and fulfilled and still want someone to add to your life without giving up everything that makes you independent already. But I also think in many ways we have been conditioned to see singlehood as this curse,

as something that everybody wants to avoid. And that really fosters a fear of being alone and a fear of ending up alone. When really I don't think that that's the worst thing that could happen to us. This episode was really inspired by someone who contributed to our 20-something diary series on Instagram, if you follow us on Instagram, you will know that once a week, we basically talk to someone anonymously who is in their 20s, somewhere in the world, and we ask them, what are you worried about? How much do you have in savings? What do you want to change in the next five years? And we have this person from Perth and Australia right in and talk about how the thing

that she is most worried about is ending up alone. And during this like day in a life that she gave us, she was going on a date and she kind of spoke about how she was in this relationship for most of her late 10 years and early 20s, suddenly found herself single and had been single much longer than she expected. And with each passing year, it just felt like more and more people were finding the one, we're getting into these relationships and there were no good people left. There was nobody left that would fulfill her or be her partner. And it just kind of felt like a race, like a race to find someone before she turned 30. And when I posted that and we spoke about it, so many of you could relate. So many of you were listening and reading her account

of situation ship after situation ship with no future and no exclusivity and really seeing yourself reflected back at you. I think at the root of what this person was talking about, what we're talking about today is a completely natural fear of loneliness, a fear of missing out, a fear of falling behind, a fear of judgment of uncertainty, like, you know, who am I going to have when I'm old and gray? And of course, social pressure and how so many of the cultural narratives we experience and we're exposed to seem to innately tie our self-worth and our identity to a relationship status. Like, having a partner, you know, finally means that you are desired. and valuable. And if you don't have a partner, that is a personal failure, there is something

about you that is lacking. It is such a labyrinth. I don't feel like I don't need to tell you that if you're experiencing it right now. And it can be pretty emotionally draining when you've been dating with no luck, no end in sight, when you want to deprioritize dating and actually be happy alone, but it feels like there is this little voice in your head being like, you're running out of time, you're running out of time. So today, let us talk about it. We're going to talk about this very innate and psychological fear of ending up alone, where it comes from, what kind of people it turns us into, how it influences our dating habits as well, and how it is possible for us to really hold two truths at once. I want love, but love is not my only purpose. I can be happy alone and still want a

relationship without letting it sabotage my individuality. How exactly do we sit with our fear, without letting it control us or making us very deeply unhappy and stressed as it so often does. Well, strap in, we have so much to unpack, so much to talk about today. And surprisingly, perhaps not surprisingly, if you were a long-term listener, a whole lot of science and psychology to explain what it is you may be feeling. So without further ado, let's get into it. Our fear of being alone is a lot more complex than just that, just simply being alone.

It really taps into our very core, and I would say primal, fears of firstly rejection, and secondly, isolation. Two things that we have been hardwired for millions of years. Millions of years of evolution have taught us to avoid those two specific feelings and experiences. As humans, we really thrive on being seen, being loved, being surrounded by community. and it has built us to really want connection wherever we can find it, and to build trust, build something bigger that feels meaningful and safe around those connections. That is what ensured our survival long, long ago.

When we don't have that, especially when it comes to a romantic love and we've been single for some time or we've never dated, when we've maybe been rejected far too many times and we would like to acknowledge, this elicits a very distinct kind of feeling known as social pain. So social pain occurs when we feel isolated, we feel excluded, rejected, cut off. And it may sound like it's less serious than physical pain, but actually neuroscientists back in 2014 in Italy found that when they were studying the brain regions that lit up when we were experiencing rejection versus physical pain, it was the exact same region that was processing those distinct kinds of discomfort and pain. So this area, this brain region

is called the posterior insular cortex, for those of you interested. And that is what we used to think as our pain receptor. And our pain receptor in terms of, you know, we kick our foot or like bump our toe or we cut our finger and that's where physical pain is processed and that is the only role of that area. Here is a brief lesson about pain though. Pain, pain. is constructed entirely by our brain and by our neurons that are responding to some environmental stimuli or cue. You know, if you bump your knee, you'll be like, yeah, my knee hurts, but it's actually your brain that is creating that painful experience for you. And the same goes for social pain. And that social pain, when we get rejected, when we feel lost, lonely, when we feel

unworthy of love is happening in that same cortex area, the posterior insular cortex. If you have been, you know, single for some time and you recently went on yet another date that was a dud or you feel disconnected from all your friends who are in relationships who just aren't making the time for you that they used to, that is a painful experience and it is felt as intensely as physical pain. It is processed, created, constructed, felt by the exact same region. So I really don't want you to be sitting there being like, oh my God, I'm just making way too much of this situation. I don't want you to be shaming yourself for this experience, feeling like you're overreacting, feeling like it's not as intense as you feel it is, because the science is telling us, the, you know,

research is telling us that actually, no, it is very equal to what might be a much more valid physical experience of pain or what society would like to tell us as a valid painful experience. So we have a natural drive to want to find someone. We are both motivated by the comfort of finding someone and the discomfort of the social pain that we tend to experience. We are hardwired to avoid these scary feelings of isolation and rejection. However, the thing is, is that so often just because we are single, we aren't actually fully alone.

We are surrounded by people. We're surrounded by friends and family. family, we do have community. So it's interesting because surely this experience of isolation shouldn't sting as much as we think. It's not like we're stranded in like the wilderness and a boyfriend or a girlfriend would be our only chance for connection. We actually have plenty of chances for connection. It's interesting because what we are lacking is not an entire support system. We are just lacking a mate or a partner. And why is it that despite having all of those connections, we still feel this social pain so intensely.

If you want to identify why people fear and feel this fear so intensely, even when they have, you know, platonic and familial relationships around them, you have to also examine the cultural environment that we are in. It is very hard to feel shame or embarrassment or even fear about something. If somebody hasn't told you in the first place that there is something wrong with what you are doing, or that there is something wrong with your reality, or someone hasn't scared you with some awful future hypothetical of being miserable and regretful and lonely at 50. Our fear of being alone is also partially derived from our environment.

I would say about 20% of it might be biology and evolution. The rest of it, the 80% that is left over is societal, it is cultural, it is social. If you are single right now, I feel like I don't even need to tell you this, but society really does prioritize partnership and it puts romanticly. love on a pedestal. A relationship is like this golden prize and it's made to seem so wonderful. People write poetry and love songs and create works of art about love. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to show their love for one another through a wedding and lavish gifts and huge grand gestures. You know, people die for love. People survive for love. That looks pretty appealing.

And if you've never experienced it before or it's something that you're really longing for, that can be made to seem a lot bigger than it actually is. Society is also not fully accepted the timeline that is becoming more and more common in which people stay single for much longer, or they adopt the kind of life in which, you know, you can be happy alone. There is still this overarching philosophy of, you know, who are you if you are not in love? Who are you if you are not in a relationship?

You are still half a person. And it's that kind of culture of, of shaming and of stereotypes and perhaps of stigma, that plays on our more evolutionary fear of isolation. Where this has seen a lot and felt a lot is around things like language. You know, there are words like spinster and cat lady. That's definitely one dimension. But it even goes deeper than that.

So there's this data from a survey that was conducted by the dating service match back in 2019. and it showed that 52% of single people that they surveyed in the UK had experienced single shaming in conversations and in the language that was used to approach their relationship status. And so when researchers kind of dug into this and they were like, what do you mean by language, they talked about these shaming phrases. A lot of people,

a lot of these single people had heard things like, you'll find someone better soon, 29% said they'd heard or had experienced. people suggesting that they must be really lonely. 38% of them just reported a general level of pity in conversations over their relationship status. And this led to many of them to report having an increased sense of urgency, even panic, to find someone when actually about 55% of them were pretty happy with their relationship

status. And they were pretty happy with it until an outside force came in and disturbed that piece. this language, you know, these shaming phrases of you'll find someone soon, you must be so lonely, are you dating at the moment, or you're not, that's such a shame. It implicitly assumes that everybody's goal is to find love. And the fact that you haven't assumes that something is wrong with you. Either A, you must be lonely or defective, which is not true. You know, most research shows that single people actually have equal.

rich and fulfilled lives as non-single people, or they assume that you are unable to commit, that you were wired the wrong way, you were wired away from partnership. And for men, they're perhaps given a bit more of a free pass when it comes to that to be uncommitted and to be running around. For women, not so much. And again, it's not true that you are unable to commit or that you have some kind of abandonment problem or whatever it is. It's more likely that you're just not willing to commit to the wrong person.

and that should be totally normalized. But because it is always about partnership before you as a person, there is still a level of shame. And these false beliefs around who you must be if you're not prioritizing dating and a relationship in your 20s or just in your life in general. All in all, I think these assumptions, this language, it displays the lives of single people as being less rich.

And I am like a huge fan of a lot of accounts and Instagram accounts that are put. pushing down the stereotype. But even if you truly believe in the sacred nature and the benefits of being single, even if you are really, really happy where you are right now, I think the older we get, it's also natural for a bit more fear to creep in. And sometimes this comes down to yet another factor, which is social comparison. And even deeper than that, the fear of missing out on what everybody else seems to be having and seems to be enjoying. I think this is especially the case when you haven't dated or been in love before, seeing how much people really enjoy the experience,

or when you're kind of getting to a stage where people are moving in together, people are getting married, they're having kids, maybe you see a life that you may want at some stage. You see your friends kind of outgrowing, perhaps the life stage that you were all previously in, and it's really difficult and stressful, and the only way to describe it is a fear of missing out. It's also what psychologists may call a sense of ambiguous. loss. Feeling like you've lost something or you are grieving a life that you are yet to have, despite being really happy with the one that you do have. So because of these two conflicting truths, you know, I'm happy where I am, but I also feel a sense of, I don't know, desire or jealousy

or a sense of panic. You are unable to really find a home or a place for these emotions. You feel constantly like there's a tug of war in your heart between staying, you know, staying single and doing what everyone around you is telling you to do. This creates dissonance. Basically, dissonance is just another word for being uncomfortable. And we don't like being uncomfortable. So we look for a way to lessen that discomfort. And often a relationship is the band-aid, right? It's a great way to do that. All our problems or our fears are solved. This isn't always for the best, though I feel like that is such an obvious statement, but let me just make it. What actually happens is that when we have this fixation, this focus on the life that will emerge

if we stay single for too long, we end up being ruled by fear. We end up being ruled by hypotheticals and catastrophizing that hasn't even happened yet, that may not even happen. when a fear or an anxiety towards this potential future is the only thing that we feel our behaviour becomes driven by that fear. And that behaviour is protective. It truly is. Because our brain, I guess, our higher conscious, our ego wants to protect our future self

from what it sees as a harmful outcome. And a harmful outcome, you know, based on biology, based on this weird evolutionary drive, but also based on what society is telling you as the norm. this fear can firstly cause us to be less selective. So there was an article published about four years ago and the title is the predictive effects of fear of being single on physical attractiveness and less selective partner selection. Long title, I know, but look it up if you, if you want to, if you can. Basically what the researchers wanted to know is, okay, the more desperate you become, do you lower your standards? And I don't like the word desperate.

I hate that word, but, you know, the more fearful of our future status is. as a single person, the more fearful of that we are, do we become less selective? I will take a direct quote from this paper because I think it really solidifies this point. For both men and women, a stronger fear of being single predicted greater romantic interest in dating prospects who were less responsive and less physically attractive. Once in a relationship, there was a lower likelihood of initiating breakups with dissatisfying partners. So what does that actually mean? It means that firstly, when we are really scared of being single and we are scared of that hypothetical above all else, we end up choosing people that

firstly don't even like us back or who we don't even find attractive, but once we are in that relationship, even when we realize it's not for us, we stay because being with the wrong person is less scary than being alone. This can also mean that, you know, not only are less selective, we also undervalue ourselves. We undervalue what it is that we can bring to the table. And so we let people perhaps, and I don't like saying let, we perhaps experience circumstances where people are treating us not as well as they should. And they know that and we know that. because we kind of feel like we are forced to endure bad behavior or else encounter an even worse fear for ourselves and that is again the fear of being alone it also ties our self-esteem to our romantic or physical value

so what i mean by that is basically when we begin to perhaps buy into this belief that if you are alone that therefore says something about how attractive you are, how valuable you are, how desirable you are, how confident, how successful you are, the only way in your mind to make people not believe that about you, that you are unattractive, that you are undesirable, that you are not successful or not intelligent, is to find a partner. And when our self-esteem is tied to our relationship status, that is not a very sustainable bond. That is not a very sustainable relationship to maintain because it bobs up and down based on whether you are single or taken. And it means that everything about who we are, our authenticity, our confidence levels

become tied to this very small part of our life, which is a label, which is an exclusive label. We also put a lot of pressure on everyone that we meet, even when they give us a whole lot of signs that they may not even be reciprocating what we're putting down. Perhaps we're kind of blind to it because we see a spark and we just chase it. And again, it's very much like an all-or-nothing approach. Like this relationship is what I need to be happy. It's what I need to feel good. It's what I need to impress other people. And it's what I need to finally feel maybe complete.

And I was speaking to a friend about this who was single for 26 years before she met someone. And I was asking her about it. I was like, you know, think back to that time when you were dating. What did it mean to you that status of being single for that long? Did it actually change how you approach situations? And she was like, yes, absolutely. She was like, everybody she met, everybody she encountered. She immediately ran this like series of series of series of,

situations in her head in which they could be the one. Her mind immediately went to the most far-off conclusions. Like, they would do one nice thing for her that meant that, you know, that was her husband, that was her future partner. Because, you know, it was just always on her mind. She was always thinking about it. She was always hoping for it in every situation, in every circumstance, and she didn't care who it was with. And what she was saying to me was that it was really frustrating because she kind of wanted her heart to slow down so her brain could catch up. And her brain could be rational without getting caught up in really intense feelings that ended up shutting down a lot of that logic.

You know, she was like, oh, I would meet these people and we would literally go on one day. And there was nothing that you could say to convince me that they weren't the one. And so I began treating them like that before they'd even showed an interest in me. And she was like, I just kept getting my heart broken without ever actually being in anything serious, without ever even feeling like I'd done the relationship thing. So I think that really comes down to a sense of scarcity and a sense that we better like getting quick. We better find someone to commit to right now.

Otherwise, all the good ones are going to run out. Otherwise, we're going to, I don't know, somehow run out of time, somehow be left in the dust. And the scarcity effect really comes down to when something seems more rare to you, such as a relationship, you don't have one, that suddenly that thing that is scarce feels a lot more valuable because not everyone can have it, because you can't have it. It's basically like the grass is always greener mentality. It's, you know, wanting what you can't have. It's all of those things. It's looking at your situation and wanting the one thing that you're missing more than you even value the things that you do have. That can lead us to a pretty dangerous place, as I just described. And I

think when we encounter that kind of thinking, it's really important to remind yourself that it is much better to be single than to settle for something else. And blah, blah, blah, I get it. You probably heard that a million times. You know, that might not change the underlying desire or fear or behavior, but let's make it even more mathematic. You could settle down and spend the next five to 10 years in a mediocre relationship that eventually crumbles, meaning that you're going to be back to where you are now, back at the starting line, in 10 years time, or you could wait another three to five years, be selective and find the one. You could find the soulmate, you could spend the rest of your lives together, or you could have neither option and you could, yeah, maybe be alone for the rest of your

life and maybe be really, really happy. Perhaps be the happiest version of yourself that you were ever going to be. The secret to living and fulfilling life is not as simple as a relationship status. I think that's the one thing that I really want us to remember. There is this weird fear that is implanted in us that we are on this timeline and this timeline involves securing a relationship and that if you don't have it, there's something wrong with you, your life isn't going to be as good. That is fearmongering. That is fear mongering that we eventually adopt ourselves because it's really hard not to.

So how do we really fully embrace our power, I guess, is I would like to. to say intentionally single people. How do we have patience? How do we also make our lives as rich as they possibly can before we get back out there, before we find someone who is going to match that? Well, I have some tips for you, some advice, and some psychology after this short break. So stay with us. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more,

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found himself at the center of a paternity scandal. The family court hearings that follow revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story. This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth. You doctored this particular test twice in so-ins, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case. I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.

Sunlight's the greatest disinfected. They would uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg Lespian and Michael Marantini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trap. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.

Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges. This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona. Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How can we still recognize that a relationship is part of our timeline? It's okay to want love. It's okay to desire that as part of your future, but not get bogged down by the fear of being alone and let it influence us to make rash decisions.

Because it's okay to say, like, yes, a big part of my life plan and something that I want for my future is to find someone and is to love them and build a family or a business or a house or a life, whatever it is. We just don't want that to be our goal. above everything else and feel like we can't start living till we've secured it. I think it's about pursuing an authentic, well-lived life that a relationship could only benefit but not complete. So my first tip around kind of countering this fear of being alone,

it revolves around continuing to make yourself an interesting person, find yourself interesting, find your life interesting, regardless of what's happening when it comes to your romantic life. And I think in this way, not only does it help us stay secure that we are a really cool person, this will come in time, but I think that authenticity in itself actually inevitably and eventually attracts the love that we want so badly, but in a healthy form and on its own timeline. Work on making yourself an interesting person and in the process, creating. a life that you absolutely fucking love that anyone who walks to the door is going to have to compete with. They are going to have to compete with your dream life before they are let in.

And that is a really hard bar to get over. And it means that you are more selective. It means that you also just enjoy your time as a single individual without seeing it as a waiting period without seeing it as like you being on the sidelines or you being on the bench before, you know, your life truly starts. That authentic well-lived life to me involves having things that keep you busy whilst giving you purpose, having things that make you feel aligned with yourself, actually exploring who you are. It is so, so rare that we have time in our life to actually think about what we want to think about what you want from yourself right now and from your future to think about your identity and who you really are. I really implore you to think about this.

When was the last time you really thought about those things? When was the last time you really thought about what kind of person do I want to be? What kind of life do I want to live? How am I going to work on myself? Am I really happy right now? I think that's one of the gifts about being single is that it does allow for that really intense and beneficial and significant self-focus. Another element of that authentic well-lived life also means having an active and engaged life, having hobbies and people you see in those spaces that casual social interaction that is such an antidote to the loneliness we sometimes feel and we're single. There's no shame around it.

It is something that we experience. And also taking opportunities that you might only have while single. you know, being able to date freely and openly without looking for commitment, being able to drop what you're doing and go and explore and not having to, you know, really think about someone and really count them into your plans. That is something that we don't talk about when we get into a relationship, like it's another person to think about. And sometimes it's nice to just have to think about yourself. And also, like I said before, ensuring that when the time comes, when that, you know, someone does come into your life because no one goes through life without ever

meeting somebody who could potentially really match them and be the person for them, knowing that you are going to still be in control of your fate. You are still the master of your own fate and you still get to be the one calling the shots around. Does this actually benefit my life? Am I being selective enough? Or does it feel like there is a hole that I couldn't feel myself? And that's why I'm pursuing this relationship. When we feel strong as an individual, we are able to bring that part of ourselves, bring that persona, bring that identity to dating in a way that is more selective,

more mature. I also think more fruitful. And here's the added benefit. Authenticity makes you attractive. It makes you so much more attractive through its influence on our sense of self-confidence. If you know yourself and you know yourself well, you're not going to let the opinions of somebody else

or their approval or rejection of you get in the way of just being yourself. And you exude that kind of confident elixir that we are all after. If you want some evidence of this, you can check out a research paper that was published in 2015 by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. I have quoted this study so many times on the podcast because it is probably one of my favorites. But in this research, these researchers looked at a series of dating scenarios between two people in a lab,

and they found that confidence was actually one of the strongest predictors of romantic attractiveness. And confidence, we cannot have it without a sense of authenticity. One of the reasons that it's so attractive is that a lot of the things we want in a partner are really difficult to observe upon first meeting them, right? things like competence, things like drive, things like kindness, things like intelligence, you know, you only really get kind of a peek at whether somebody has all those things upon a first impression. But if that person shows up and is confident, we kind of believe that they know themselves, right? We believe that they have a reason for being confident and that this reflects

their actual value as a partner. So we feel, you know, really into them. Another explanation, confidence creates a real aura that draws people in. I'm sure you've had that experience where you've met somebody, perhaps not even somebody that you're like romantically into, just like someone and you've just been like, wow, I want to be around you. You make me feel warm. You make me feel seen. You are like this bright light. And I think what that comes down to is that a lot of us do lack self-esteem. And so we are really intrigued by people who seemingly don't. We want to learn from these people. we want to maybe have that energy rub off on them. And if you take time to really build that in yourself,

I think it's just a win-win scenario. You attract better people and you're more discerning of those people as well. Another, I think, benefit of choosing to be very authentically aligned with yourself in a way that is not reliant on your relationship status is that it helps you disperse a lot of those false beliefs that society would have us believe about single people. And as we said before, it's those false. beliefs that contribute to this fear of being alone. If I'm single, you know, I must be unattractive. I must be boring. I must be unworthy. I must be lonely. That is what so much of the information

we're picking up from society would lead you to believe. And that is what makes us feel like a partner is the only answer to making ourselves feel more worthy and being a full, complete person. You could trust that narrative. You could trust that societal rhetoric and that societal vision, or you could trust your own reality, which is that you are thriving, you are purposeful, you are busy, and you know yourself better than most people ever will. When you are confident in yourself, you are able to look at those beliefs that might be creating fear within you and creating poor decision making and say, actually, I don't think that that's true because I know myself better, than what this outdated narrative is trying to tell me.

The thing that really helped me when I was single was looking at people who were still single at 30 or 40 or 60 and had really vibrant lives because I feel like the examples we are so often given of happiness as we age is the happiness that we get from big milestones that are associated with a partner. You know, marriage, moving in together, having children together,

vacations together. Like it feels like past 35, a lot of the significant moments in our life need to be with somebody else. And when we counteract that with the examples of people who are still showing us that they are fulfilled and happy despite going against the blueprint, we are able to really, I think, dispose of that belief system and dispose of that construct. Somebody that I always used to think of was Emma Watson. And she did an interview a few years ago where she, like, publicly described herself as self-partnered.

That is a concept that I love. It's like, I'm not single. I'm self-partner. I'm like consciously dating myself. And she really, like, encouraged other people to view their own, I don't want to say lack of a romantic partner, but their singlehood as a positive, not a negative. Nearly like 40% of adults in the US don't have a partner. About half of those people. even express that they won't even interested in dating according to this research by the Pew

Research Centre. And I think that that is something that if you only listen to what the media said, if you only saw examples online or in movies or in the news or in like opinion pieces, you would believe that that is not the case. You would believe that it's the opposite, that most people are in relationships. Most people are happier in relationships. But in this example that they gave in this research, they talk about this woman, Bella DePollo. She is a famously single person. She's 69 years old. She's never been in a relationship.

And she describes her solo life as authentic, as fulfilling, as meaningful, as psychologically rich. That is the opposite of what the world would like to tell us about single people in order to fearmonger. And I think once again, those examples, wherever you see them in the world, they are really powerful because they get rid of the doom and gloom that fuels fear. Finally, I think it's so important that if you are somebody who is such a lover who really just want someone to pour all of that brightness and life and energy and passion and compassion into, remember that platonic love is just as important. Just having a partner is so lonely and I've seen that amongst people in my own life who

deprioritized friendship once they had achieved that relationship status that they wanted. And they are very, very lonely people. Because as we said before, that social pain that we feel when we are isolated is real, it's tangible and it hurts. And so it's really important that if you are somebody who is a lover, is a giver, you find a way to still tap into that part of you either by showing that love to yourself or really fostering those connections that are going to sometimes last so much longer than a love connection than a romantic relationship.

Just because you are single, you are not alone. There are so many single people in their 20s. There are so many single people at any age. And it's not like every single one of them is miserable and hidden away and isolated. They have family, they have friends, they have people that they admire. I think our fear of being alone often occurs when we aren't given that vision of what life could be like as an unpartnered person. When there is a very shallow and false, false story about the unhappiness levels of people who are alone, of people who have never met the one. So finally, I want to wrap this up and just conclude by saying it's okay to want love.

but don't let the pursuit of love dim you down. You are still young. You still have time. You will find the right person if that is what you are after. But don't wait for your life to start until then. The fear of being alone is a very, very deeply rooted one. It is an instinctual one. It is a primal one.

But it's also one that is stoked by a lot of unnecessary stories and pictures and narratives pushed by our society. So take your time. It's all right to just like really enjoy being self-partnered and exploring yourself. And if you fear being alone forever, just know that there are people who your worst fear is their reality. And I'm sure they would sit you down and say, it's really not that bad. I promise you it's not that bad.

I promise you that there is a lot about this that was a choice that I made the same way that you will be able to make choices and you'll be able to. create a life that you want, regardless of whether dating right now feels out of your control, regardless of whether you feel very fixated on love right now. It is not the end of your life to not find love. So thank you so much for listening. This was a bit of a pep talk and I want to just extend a lot of empathy and a lot of strength and a lot of love to you for what you're going through. You do have time. I promise you. I'm not going to give you those like bullshit phrases of like it happens when you least expect it because I just don't think that is very helpful. And sometimes it's

not true. Sometimes it happens when you are like, when you most expect it because you are at your most authentic and at your most confident. And whilst you wait for that, build those things up. They are a tool. They are a skill. They are a part of you that never goes away that never expires, that can never be dimmed. So thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you are listening right now. Make sure you're following along or send this episode to a friend if you think that they would enjoy it. If you have any further thoughts, if you have an episode suggestion, I love hearing from you.

You can follow me at that psychology podcast or at Gemma Speg. Come and join the community. Come and say hi. And until next week, make sure that you are safe. You are kind. Above all else, you are gentle to you. yourself and we will talk soon. Hey, what's good, y'all?

You're listening to Learn the Hardway with your favorite therapist and host, Kear Games. This space is about black men's experiences, having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing. How many men carry a suit

are armored? It signals to the world that you not to be played with. And just because you have the capability that does not mean that you need to. Listen to learn the hard way on the I-Hard radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.

You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Owens, correct? I doctored the test ones. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern. Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian. Michael Mancini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young.

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