The Art of Being Single: Shit happens, routines fail

Graphic by Loreanna Lastoria

You know when you meet someone new and life kind of just falls into place? Your days are occupied with texting them for hours on end, the conversation never fading or getting awkward. Your time not talking to them is hard to get through because you want to know what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, their opinion on x, y, and z.

Life falls into this routine: a morning text is waiting for you when you wake up; you know what time it was sent at without even looking. You know their daily schedule so you know when they won’t be available to chat, you know when they’re in a meeting, on the way home from work, or playing a sport.

The conversations flow so easily, so naturally. You learn their quirks, their slang, their terrible jokes. Even after only a few weeks, it feels like you’ve known this person forever and you look forward to the next morning’s text, the routine you’ve gotten to know and love. Nothing has ever felt so right.

Until it all goes wrong.

One day, the morning text you’ve woken up to for the last three weeks isn’t there. The consistent stream of inside jokes stop. The conversations that you’ve held near and dear, that you’ve looked forward to, day after day? They stop.
The routine is no more and it feels like you don’t even know what you’re supposed to do at 8:23 a.m. when they would normally text you, or from 10-12 when you’d sneakily message them during a meeting; or until 9 p.m., when they’d fall asleep.

Your life gets turned on its head and you don’t know what to do anymore. Was it something I did or didn’t say? Something I did or didn’t do? What’s so fundamentally wrong with me that someone suddenly stops talking to me after weeks of cultivating our routine? Sadness, anxiety, anger and pain creep in — sometimes separately, often all at once.

Eventually, though, they start fading from your memory and life resumes as it was before. You fall back into your routine, the one without the person who made your days brighter and more complete.

Eventually. But it takes time. In the meantime, it’s okay to still feel some lingering uncertainties about why it all ended; it’s okay to still care about them even though they hurt you like they said they never would.

Keep in mind that even though it’s hard to grasp why it happened, it did happen, and there’s no going back or changing the past. This routine will come and go many times, but, one day, it will stay forever. In the meantime, just remember it’s all part of the art of being single.

 

 

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