Just Because You’re Single, Doesn’t Mean You’re Ready To Mingle

If there is any advice I could give to single people out there, whether they’ve been single their entire lives or whether they currently find themselves emerging from the wreckage of a broken relationship – it would be this:

Just because you’re single, doesn’t mean you’re ready to mingle.

No, that isn’t a typo.  It is truly the best relationship advice anyone could ever give you.

You see, this world is a very strange place.  It never ceases to consistently shove twisted ideas about love and relationships into each and everyone of our heads.  They are thrown at us from every direction.  Unfortunately, no matter how hard we try, we can’t escape the madness.

If not properly recognized, these ideas can ruin lives.  When implemented, they can and will leave nothing but destruction and devastation in their path.

I could rattle off hundreds of these stupid ideas regarding relationships, but let me just get straight to the point.

The world tells us that being single for a prolonged period of time is a bad thing.

Nobody wants you if you’re single.  You’re not good enough for anyone.

I beg to differ.  I firmly believe that being single your entire life is better than ending up with somebody you weren’t meant to be with.  I think being single and being fine with it is showing extreme strength.

I mean it.  Sure, nobody wants to lonely. I will be the first one to admit one of my biggest hopes and dreams is to be a husband and father one day.  I literally can’t wait to be the best husband to my wife and daddy to my kids this world has ever seen.

However, I simply refuse to force that dream to happen with just anyone.  It is either going to be with the girl of my dreams, or it won’t happen at all.

Call me crazy, but I think we as a people compromise our integrity so easily in this world.  We throw our time, energy, love and emotion around like it means nothing nowadays.

How many of us have seen people we know give themselves a time limit before they got married?  These are often girls, but guys do it too.  I want to be married by 30, I want to be a young mom, or how about this may be the last train coming through my town.  People always playing the odds and forcing the issue.  People folding to peer pressure. People competing with one another.  People refusing to put in the hard work on themselves and instead looking to someone else to fix them.

I mean, how sick and twisted is that?

Nobody can do the work for you. Nobody can fill your void.  Nobody can complete you.

We can laugh and joke about it all we want, but it is a twisted way to think.  It’s not okay to think like that.  The truth is all those people will never live the lives God called them to live.

Thinking like that will have a negative and terrible impact on the person they are involved with, their entire family, their kids, everyone.  The reality is the whole world will indirectly suffer from their poor decision making.

The world also tells us that the best way to get over a relationship gone bad, is to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get back in the game.

I literally couldn’t disagree more.  To me, this kind of thinking is so selfish it’s sickening.

If you have ever been fortunate enough to experience any kind of relationship heartbreak, you can understand this –  the easy way out is to throw yourself back in the game and find someone to fill that relationship void in your life.

The easy way out is a road to nowhere.  Finding somebody new is fools gold.  The worst thing you could ever do when emerging from the shambles of a broken relationship is to find somebody else.  We call that a rebound where I’m from, and let me tell you nobody in this world wants to be or deserves to be a rebound.

When your heart is hurting from a broken relationship, the last thing you need to be doing is taking the easy way out.  It’s not fair to yourself and it definitely isn’t fair to anybody you get involved with.  To do so is being incredibly selfish.  You are setting everybody up for disaster.

So many people spend their entire lives floating around from relationship to relationship, running from the inevitable work they need to do on themselves.  The thing is you can’t outrun it.  It will catch up with you someday.

Nothing worth having comes easy.

The best thing you can do right now is get back in the lab and do the dirty, emotional, lonely hard work on yourself.  To deal directly with that feeling of loneliness, set goals and define the person you aim to be and what you can bring to somebody else.

Only then will you be ready to bring the essence of who you are to another person.

My conclusion is this – you aren’t ready to mingle until you are perfectly okay with being single.

It’s simple.  You won’t ever be in a loving, healthy relationship until you have your own identity.  Nobody can save you from yourself.  You should not be out there mingling with anybody until you conquer the behind the scenes, hard work it takes to be okay by yourself.  Nobody can complete you.  Until you are okay on your own, stop the mingling.

Thanks for reading.

KMB