BENGALURU: Now that the academic year has started in right earnest and as classmates get back in their groups, many are discovering that in the few weeks that people have been away, somehow, quite magically, several now are in relationships. People suddenly have boyfriends and girlfriends, or are seeing someone, though they haven’t labelled the relationship yet or are just chatting.
If you are one of those that didn’t get coupled up, and haven’t yet for a few years, you probably have mixed feelings about it. Your best friend barely has time for you, and when you do meet up, all you get to hear is about their lover. Even if you say you got into your dream college, you might get a, “That’s so great! I am so happy for you!” before segueing back into talking about the special someone. You look around and you notice everyone around seems to be interested only in hanging out with their sweethearts, and when you get invited or tag along anyway, you get quite conscious of being the third-wheel.
Sometimes, you even have fights with your BFF over how little your friendship seems to mean now, and you say hurtful things like ‘Did you ever even like me? Was I just a stop gap till you found someone?’ You experience cycles of feeling upset, fighting, crying, making up, and again feeling distant. You are good for about two days before it is back to the same old pattern. It is a mess.
Being single never feels as much of an issue as it is when surrounded by people in love. While for most, it is a mere annoyance and a change in social circumstances that need some adjusting to, for some, it can become really, painful as they tell themselves that they have somehow got left behind, that they ought to have coupled up as well and that they are not good enough.
Being in a relationship seems like a race or a competitive exam. There is an urgency to meet someone, and more often than not, the urgency leads to less than great choices, and that leads to cycles of its own misery, including breakups and patchups, neither because you really want the person, but because “something is better than nothing.”
If you really question that idea, you’d probably hear a more rational voice saying something is definitely not better than nothing when it comes to these matters. Being by yourself is not nothing. What we need is to respect that if people are coupling up, that’s fine – we each have our own life paths. It is not
a race.