How Do I Release The Longing for A Romantic Relationship?

Don't. Being a romantic is courageous. The Advice Column.

Credit: Ethel Moore

Hey besties!!! You may have noticed my posting schedule has been a little wonky the last few weeks. I’ve been living life, growing, and discovering, but we’ll be back on track this week. Thank you for rocking with me! Additionally, I’m going to be rolling out some video and audio content - playing with different versions of storytelling for the Thursday newsletter, Yellow Brick Road, to keep this fresh and hot for all of us. All feedback is welcomed!

How do I let go of my longing for a romantic relationship? I know I don't need one to "complete" me & I know about "romancing myself" but I can't help but still want one. I've done the all internal work. I've always been single so I've never had a relationship before & I guess I'm tired of waiting? Or longing for one?

The more we tell our truth to be quiet, the louder it shouts. It seems the capacity to have partnership - a meeting of two souls, a union for the ages - is within reach for you, and perhaps you’d be better off not shaming yourself for knowing it to be true. I’m not gonna give you more platitudes about loving yourself, but tell you to believe in loving others more.

Not All Loves Are Made The Same

Doing internal work is not denying partnership. Partnership is divine! Special! Magical!

There are many kinds of love to be experienced in this life - all very affirming, expanding, and potent - and you deserve to feel all of them. In my opinion, they are not interchangeable, cannot be compared or replaced with one another, and breed different forms of abundance into our lives. Friendship love is not self love is not romantic love and there’s no need to pretend they all serve the same purpose in our journey. Friendship and self-love are child’s play in comparison to the kind of work required to be prepared for partnership. That work you do on yourself? It’s integrated and practiced in partnerships. We play out our shadow - our deepest and most compulsive beliefs and challenges - in romantic connections, which can make them so triggering and so rewarding. In the collective push toward loving ourselves and valuing platonic relationships as they should be valued, we’ve swung to the other end of the pendulum and started denying the absolute healing power of romantic love. Big Miss Steak.

The power and purpose found in being single is real. I believe romance is to be found in the mundane and in solitude. I buy myself flowers several times a week. I take myself out on dates constantly. I make short rib paired with my favorite full-bodied red just for me, and get a sweet treat from the bakery whenever I desire. I’m truly the poster child for a happily single woman as a chronically single woman, and I’ve finally started to admit it makes me sad. These are not grand gestures or an act, but how I choose to enjoy my time, and are not a replacement for connection with another human being. For sharing what I love most with someone I love most. Less hot or fun? No. Different? Very.

Pretending romantic partnership was less important to me because I was subconsciously convinced it was resulting in disaster, and maybe it’s not working for you either. Instead of fighting the longing to be in partnership, consider more honestly what being ready for partnership means, and what within you needs to be interrogated, honored, and encouraged to get you there. If that’s what you want, that’s what you want. It’s not bad. It’s not wrong. It’s not weak, and it’s not low-vibrational of you - as much as emotionally unavailable weirdos want you to believe it is.

At some point, we as a society decided admitting loneliness doesn’t agree with our idea of what a boss bitch is, and now all motivated women are expected to magically fulfill every emotional and physical need by themselves. Humans are hardwired to have our needs met by a diverse pool of energies and people, and the reality is - it’s not guaranteed for everyone and that’s scary.

There’s a misconception that fully actualized women don’t suffer the weakness of loneliness - that our loneliness can be solved by going on extravagant dinners for one, taking bubble baths, and channeling our inner wild. It seems like another version of overcompensation I don’t desire or have the energy to walk in anymore. Instead, I’m getting real about my capacity for love.

Being Single Hurts Even When It’s Good

Being single by nature can suck severely and its suckiness is physical - marked by a persistent grip in your chest and dull sense of grief for what has been and could be. It can feel like the longest waiting game. It unearths so many old hurts and feelings of unworthiness. It can feel really silly and juvenile.

Especially if you’ve never held partnership. Especially when you love your own company and feel you should know better, but still experience that pang of disappointment when you do yet another embarrassingly romantic gesture by yourself. Obviously, a lot of people are single because of a breakup, in which case their communities and support systems rally around their grief and empathize. But there’s so much shame in acknowledging the grief that comes with not being touched, cuddled, nuzzled, spooned, and kissed for extended periods of time. For acknowledging the grief that comes with witnessing everyone around you not only fall in love, but rise in it as my queen Toni Morrison says. For acknowledging the nagging voice that not being loved in that way feels like failure - not because partnership is a badge of honor, but because you know you deserve it.

Dating Is Systemically Challenged

As I became a teenager and my friends acquired love interests, crushes, and prom dates, my mom would lovingly remind me I was “better off” without the petty drama of puppy love. I didn’t feel that way. I felt robbed of life experience because of things out of my control - being fat and black in a suburban landscape. Having divorced and neglectful parents and not knowing what actual love looks like. Fearing power dynamics and manipulation in love at 16 years old. This is how I first became aware that finding loving romantic connection of any kind would be a more challenged journey. Throw attachment issues and trauma into the mix, and we have a cocktail for a life struggling to make romantic connection.

Fat women are less likely to have quality relationships. Black women are the least likely to be partnered in their lifetime. Educated women are less likely to find dates even. Having dark skin, being queer, being disabled, managing mental illness, and a number of other factors also contribute to chronic singledom. For many of us, finding partnership is statistically tough. So, I’ve never been a huge fan of the dismissive implication that anyone coming to terms with the emotional hardships of being single is self-hating or incapable of being alone. For many of us - regardless of identity - alienation from intimacy and being alone has marked most of our lived experience, and admitting that finding love is important to us is courageous.

It wasn’t until my senior year of college that I went on my first actual date - the kind in which someone politely asks you to go somewhere to get to know each other and then pays for it - and that person became my first boyfriend. I rushed into a relationship, like if I didn’t devour love in one bite, it would run off my plate forever. Confirmation that I could have a relationship was intoxicating and relieving, regardless of the relationship’s quality.

Even while I entered the relationship, in the back of my head I just kept hearing “you’re better off.” I was a modern woman, I told myself. Nobody will be able to support the life I had planned but me, I told myself. And so I manifested a series of relationships in which I took care of people who could not take care of me. By refusing to accept and believe in partnership as a gift instead of an obstacle or inconvenience, I didn’t even give myself a chance to dream of what an ideal partner would mean for me and what work I needed to do to meet a match. So I settled for many not-so-matched. Instead, I called in many people who affirmed a belief that I was worse in love than I was alone.

And then of course, there were the daddy issues. And mommy issues. Just regular, degular ol’ broken family issues which I felt haunted me with or without my consent and most likely would result in a lifetime of inevitable and fated heartbreak. I’m so serious - this is what I thought until like two years ago. That even in my greatest efforts to rectify generational trauma and make different choices in love, I was programmed to not mesh with lasting and healthy partnership. So, having a relationship for me meant breaking the spell cast over heart to be locked in solitude for eternity because of stuff my literal great great grandmother did. I had never seen true romance before, but I was determined to create something I’d never seen and I just needed another alchemist to do it with. Not having a reliable, stable, and kind partner come along has been crushing at times, and I have no problem admitting that because it’s such a brave leap from the cowardice of pretending I didn’t dream of a life with a partner to witness me and be witnessed.

Being an incredible person - which I can say confidently because I built this person - who has yet to find a genuinely good relationship sometimes feels like an incompetence. I’m used to working hard and getting what I want. I’m used to making a game plan, channeling all of my personal power, and making it happen for myself and by myself. Love and union, however, can’t be worked for, forced, or created in solitude. It’s received. While I’m still learning to radically receive, I’m still learning how to be a partner, and I’m trying to show myself grace in that.

Unfortunately and so sadly, I am not a City Girl. I fear I am actually a wifey of astronomical proportions and was not emotionally built to entertain a million talking stages. I don’t have the heart to have any more bad sex, bad dates, or stale wyd texting convos. I’m frankly too fucking whole for situationships and trauma bonds. I applaud all who still have it in ‘em. For us? We can enjoy the delights of longing for love. We can lean into the desire to have someone cook a meal when we’re too tired, care for our plants when we’re away, and check in on us when we’re having a tough day in the way only a partner can and will.

Maybe what you’re feeling is not desperation, but the blossoming capacity to love someone. Maybe you’re growing evermore into the kind of person who can have an incredible relationship, and your heart is asking you to believe it. Either way, lying to yourself - as in most cases - won’t get you anywhere. Do as I say, not as I do; choose romance unabashedly. Don’t wait to have a series of people make you feel unlovable, uncomfortable in partnership, and in conflict with union before you realize all you had to do was accept partnership as a possibility and make it a priority.

When I say make partnership a priority, I mean be vulnerable enough to say you want to be a partner. Lead with the vibration of love, have compassion for any limitations in learning what love means, and put yourself in a better place to receive partnership when it presents itself. Know what a good partner looks like and be fearless in pursuit of that person and only that person. I wish someone would’ve told me I could and would have it all. That being a fulfilled, ambitious, and whole woman is not a mutually exclusive experience to being in union, and vulnerability in all areas of my life would serve me well. So I’m telling you. What’s holding you back from finding partnership is denying its magic and importance to you. I can promise it will take less time when you actually believe it’s coming.

iuliastration

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It sounds like you’re a romantic. Be a romantic. Make them sick with how romantic you are until you find your way into love at last. Over. And over. And over again.

Journaling Prompts:

What do you want to get out of partnership that you can’t get from others/yourself?

What opportunities for personal growth can support calling in a partner?

What does your ideal partnership look and feel like?

How can you put yourself in environments conducive with meeting someone?

What limiting beliefs/behaviors are still standing in the way of partnership?

Why do I feel alienated from partnership and how can I shift that perspective?