A Year Without Love

I like a year with an action theme.

A few years back, I wore the same used black dress sundress every day for a year, with nothing but accessories and layers that I received from free from my neighbors. Last year I burned hope and broke up with love. While casting about my mind for this year’s theme, I realized I already have it: This will be my Year Without Love.

In reality, my past 7 years have been this, but not by my choice. This year I choose it.

But I realize this sounds overly dramatic, pathetic, and like a plea for help. I promise it’s not meant to be any of those. It’s hard to talk about this without triggering people’s ingrained responses. It seems we’ve all internalized the lies in those inspirational memes and posters, the ones that say things like “True love will find you when you’re ready” and “No one can live without love.”

Before I go any further, I have to clarify what I mean by “love.” I have plenty of love in my life. I have my children and I love them even when they hate me. I have amazing friends who say they love me, and I believe them because I love them back. I have my family, and I know they love me because they have to; it’s a contractual obligation. The sort of love I’m talking about is the sort we prize in this society, the sort I’m positive those annoying posters and memes refer to: Romantic Love.

I’m here to say that it does not always find you when you’re ready, and you can live without it. And this is the year when I aim to prove that not only can you live without out, you can thrive without it, and without any space saved and held for it. If Love wants to find me, it’s going to need to wait a year and take a number. After 7+ years of life without this sort of love, and about 5 years of being happy on my own, I’ll be busy with some other things. Some of these will be TMI, so we’ll see how much I end up sharing about this process. A few of the things on my list:

– Invest in solid platonic friendships with people I truly want in my life, without suffocating anyone or otherwise making myself a nuisance.

– Find ways to share my incandescent moments of joy, e soul-crushing moments of despair, and mundane trials without having a partner to whisper with in the night.

– Become good enough at pleasuring myself that I’m not tempted to pursue sex without love. As delicious as that can be, I’ve learned it’s a lot like those Hostess Fruit Pies I used to be obsessed with. SO good going down, but then you feel empty and more hungry than before once the sugar coating fades from your blood.

– Figure out the financial aspect of permanent single motherhood enough that my children aren’t seemingly the only kids in town who never get to travel off this island for fun, take classes they’re interested in, or buy a treat without mental math of my bank account. And I’d love to be able to get my hair cut by someone other than myself. I’ll find a way to pay for all of this, one that’s fully legal and not demeaning.

I’ll come up with more, I’m sure. I’m sharing this here because I’ve learned a lot over the past few years of casting spells, and one of the truths I know is that speaking things aloud, writing them down and sharing them, carries a real sort of magic. Another is that choice matters greatly. So much that even though I don’t exactly have an army of suitors pounding down my door and fighting each other for my favor, my choice to live without love changes everything. This will no longer be the fault of bad luck, belly fat, or my leaden personality. It is my choice.

So. Onward. Into my new year, the one where I choose to live without love, happily and with gusto.