Evergreen single Singaporeans in your late 20s or early 30s, what are you currently struggling with?

Friends getting BTOs and married left right centre but here I am, 29F, been single my entire life. Have used dating apps but just couldn’t get past the talking/situationship phase.

As I get older I do struggle with more self-doubts about myself bcos I’ve been single my whole life and afraid that I’ll be left on the dusty bookshelf.

Dates usually give me a rude “what???!” look whenever I tell them I’ve never been in a r/s before, and seemed like they take that as a red flag.

I do yearn to be in a r/s, but at the same time very comfortable with my freedom of being single.

It’s not like I am lonely or anything – I have a healthy r/s with my family, amazing friends, am also financially independent.

But then again, I do yearn to experience that intimacy you get with another person when in a r/s.

Netizen’s comments

I like to joke that I’m single by choice, just not my choice; but what I’ve come to realize is that a lot of the decisions I make (or don’t make) are either consciously or subconsciously motivated by my own desire to remain single. Because while being single can sometimes be lonely, it’s also a very very easy state to be in. To become attached means to make active choices to push yourself into that direction, it means being able to say that you’re willing to commit time and energy into building up that relationship, and it also means opening yourself up to the almost inevitable possibility of rejection and heartbreak.

All of that just builds up this tremendous amount of inertia that is very difficult to break if you’ve not been attached before. And I think after a while, you just start to rationalize a lot of it: ‘I want to focus on my studies first, ‘I want to focus on my career first, ‘I think I’ll hold out for the right one, ‘maybe I’m just not the dating type, ‘they probably wouldn’t like me anyway’. The last example is particularly scary to fall into. Because once you do, you might start to build up the belief that you’re fundamentally unlovable, not just in a romantic context one but in platonic ones as well. It makes you skeptical about the intentions of people trying to get close to you, and you might just end up turning down social opportunities and occasions where you could have found somebody to build a relationship with.

There’s a quote from the book Perks of Being A Wallflower that I like a lot (though I didn’t particularly enjoy the rest of the book): We accept the love we think we deserve. Unfortunately, after a while of being single, I think a lot of us become increasingly convinced that we are less and less deserving of that love. And the tragic thing is that we act accordingly.