The Bridget Jones industrial complex
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The thing about being a single girl in your thirties is that it is so easy to slip into the narrative that you are tragic, and lonely, and ugly, and unlovable. Even if deep down you know those things not to be true, it is just too easy to slip down the rabbit hole of your mind, and spend days flicking through dating apps and checking your messages and feeling sad and rejected.
I have found this feeling becoming more acute now that the festive period is rearing its head. It’s a trope that gets played out time and time again: Bridget Jones, Kate Winslet in The Holiday, pretty much every female character in Love Actually. It’s like we get conditioned from a young age to equate being single with misery and I’m sure I’m not the first person to write about the topic but it’s actually really fucking boring? Like as a consumer to watch the same old narratives get wheeled out time and time again. I guess with Xmas we have this weird appetite for familiarity, but I wonder what it would feel like to flip the script.
Leaning into the yearning and the sorrow is actually weirdly delicious. Yearning and sad songs and crying in the bath and pressing the metaphorical bruise. It’s easy to sit in it because it’s familiar and because it’s what we grew up watching women do. We are in love with the idea of being in love, and we are in love with the image of ourselves suffering for our love, even if the love doesn’t exist in the first place. Even if it’s just ‘potential’. Even if we’re just using that person as a mirror, holding them up up up until we find the best view of ourselves.
When I landed at Heathrow the other week, Lonely This Christmas was playing as I stood at the luggage carousel and GUESS WHAT I suddenly felt acutely alone. Stormed around M&S like a frazzled English woman in a film buying a meal for 1 and feeling dejected but the reality is - I chose this for myself.
It creates this weird behavioural/mental loop:
I feel lonely → I recognise this → I must BE the lonely heroine → leaning in → more loneliness/bad decisions/etc etc etc
And aside from this being a really tragic way to spend your one wild and precious life, it also means that you start approaching relationships from this place of lack. Of not feeling like enough, of begging for scraps, of accepting behaviour you know is hurting your feelings. I see it on TV and I see it in my friends and I see it in me.
There’s this Self Esteem song ‘Cheers To Me’ (go and listen to it the minute you finish this subby) and on the face of it it’s this very LOL disco pop song about being a sucker for skinny motherfuckers, but she actually touches on this topic so well. Anyway THIS lyric really stands out 2 me:
“Do you really want a lover
Or a reason not to bother
With the dreams and goals you once had for your life?”
And yeah, I guess you could say that lyric hits a nerve :) Because if I am being reeeeally honest, I am a pro at using relationships as a way to validate myself. Not in a ‘pick me’ way but in a deep, boring, patriarchal way we all get saddled with (fun!). It’s the narrative of a thousand romcoms - you are more worthy if someone else chooses you.
Even though I know better, even though my long suffering whatsapp groups have therapied me to death, even though we’ve all agreed that having a boyfriend is low key embarrassing now.
Still, I love to hunt for gold star stickers in the shape of men :) because of this (actually ridiculous now I write it down) idea that if someone desires me, I must be doing life right. And the reality that I would rather sit in the bittersweet of ‘almost’ than sit with myself and work out what I actually want.
Because yearning is easier than trying, longing is safer than doing, and outsourcing my future to someone else is less effort than building it on my own. Woof!!!!
Anyway, the good news for us (if this resonates with you at all) is that our brains are lovely and malleable and we can gradually gently unlearn this narrative. I took myself for a big stomp around the marshes today and I already feel 2% better so just 50 more stomps until I have everything worked out. (Yes I am sure that is how it works.)
I’m not saying I’ve cracked the code. I’m still one sad John Lewis advert away from losing the plot. But at least now, when the festive loneliness narrative starts creeping in, I can rolllll my eyes and go, oh right yes this again.
And then I’ll stick my headphones in, stomp around the marshes, and remember that I’m actually A LAUGH™️ and get back to doing that xoxoxo
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Obsessed as always