Single's Awareness Day 2014

On this day of Singles Awareness here in the United States I note that I have been alive post-partum for 526 months and of those I have been alone and single for 495 months.

I am beginning to recognize and may have to accept that I might never again experience the sort of amazing multiple layers of love I felt for two different people in the 2000's which were my first serious forays into any sort of emotional intimacy and romance in my entire life. The first one was a one-sided emotional affair for me with an amazing (in so many ways) but also extremely messed up young woman (whom I loved so much it hurt) who did adore me as a dear friend (and we remain dear friends to this day). The other one was a rebound relationship from that first one and was also my first ever romantic relationship, period, and it was with someone half my age at the time.

Now that I am in my 40's I realize my youth is ending and I may never again experience youthful love and have it be requited and consummated. My life has been a strange and mostly solitary journey that I am grateful to be undertaking but it is periodically tinged with a bit of loneliness and longing for love. To quote Selina Kyle a.k.a. "The Cat Woman" in the movie The Dark Knight Rises, "I'm adaptable". I will endure and survive and I will derive profound meaning from my life. I do not need another person to complete me. However, I do desire a companion and compliment and help-meet and soul-mate and lover.

It is thoroughly untrue what they say about one not being able to miss what one has not experienced. I am painfully aware of what I feel I have missed and am missing now. I will be patient and wait for God's provision.... regardless of what He does or does not provide and when if at all. My solitude has forced me to become emotionally self-sufficient and I am developing into a complete person all by myself. This is a good consequence of my ongoing status.

On the flip side of this equation is the fact that God has not given me the gift of celibacy which for me is therefore an unnatural and unhealthy state of existence. Consequently, my ongoing celibacy is a white knuckle experience wherein I find myself daily holding on for dear life baring this cross all the while being naturally wired by God to be anything but this sort of person. I am in an ongoing quandary, but I will continue to trust God because things always seem to ultimately work out best when I do and not work out well when I do not.

Going back to the wonderful cinematic character of Selina Kyle as portrayed masterfully by Anne Hathaway, she clearly is emotionally self-sufficient and rather cynical about men and relationships and seems to have given up on relationships apart from using men. Yet, by the end of the movie she has unexpectedly met her match and her soul-mate in the form of her nominal nemesis. Let's see if I receive an unexpected and wonderful surprise from God in the form of someone as equally well-matched to me as that fictional union.