You really ought to give singlehood a try.

It's really not so bad.

No, really.

Once you get past the point where you want someone to hold hands with, someone who thinks you're beautiful (even when you're not wearing makeup), someone who somehow shares all your hopes and aspirations and is so like you and yet so marvelously different, and once you decide that being an aunt is so much easier than being a mom so why not just stick with it, you're pretty much set.

Because really, there are all these things about being single that are great! For instance, you don't have to work on a difficult and perplexing marital relationship. You don't have to try to form a family unit with someone who has differing (and sometimes opposing) views of what it means to be the heads of a family and raise children. You don't have to put up with someone else stealing the covers or wanting to turn the air conditioner in the bedroom up or down. You don't have to try to sleep next to someone who snores. Or grinds his teeth. Or has chilly feet.

And all the heaps and scads of money you're making right now? Yeah. It's all yours! You don't have to spend it on diapers and formula and multiple car payments (well...not usually). And, if you're pretty careful, you may manage to save just enough to travel a bit to those places you've always wanted to visit. Like England. Or South Dakota.

So really, in the face of all these great things about being single, wouldn't it be the most intelligent thing to just kind of let go of any desire to get out of the singlehood state? To interact with young men in a friendly but unconcerned fashion? Because you don't really care whether they'll like you or not, since you're perfectly happy with staying single for the rest of your life?

I keep wondering when exactly it's going to sink in, when I'll finally say to myself, "Okay, I guess it's never going to happen for me," so I can finally get rid of this 20% hopeful 80% despairing feeling every time I meet and/or interact with young men? Will it be after I turn 30 (in a week and one year)? 35? 40? 50? How long will I wait before I give up all my internal hope of marriage?

I search all these blogs of single women, looking for some sort of answer about how to be content right now, even when I'm alone, but I haven't found it yet.

Maybe there isn't really an answer for it. Maybe it's one of those things in life that you just have to bear, the way some people have highly allergic reactions to nuts, or children with congenital health problems, or really bad relationships with family members. It's just something that will always give you a small ache, no matter what else you may do with your life. And that's okay. Everyone has small aches they live with, and as mentioned previously, there are a lot of really great aspects to being single: even just the ability to retreat into my room and shut the door so that I can have complete peaceful solitude, something that would be impossible if I had children.

I just wish I could feel more actual contentment with this state, wouldn't feel lonely or long for someone to rub my shoulders after a difficult day or someone to kiss me in the early hours of the morning when the as-yet unseen sun is just starting to lighten the sky, wouldn't long for children who are my own, my very own, for the incomparable joy of being a mother. But I do have these feelings. And while part of me wishes I could just turn them off, another part tells me that doing so would somehow lessen me.

So with that, I will take the sorrow and loneliness that are part of being single in a married culture and I will continue to hope for a chance to marry if possible. And in the midst of the sorrow and loneliness I will enjoy the freedom to go where I please when I please, to spend all day reading if I like and to make a peanut butter sandwich without a husband carelessly asking me to make him one too.