Why Being Single Might Be the Most Self-Aware Choice You Ever Make

The belief that a partner is necessary for a complete life is one of the most aggressively marketed ideas in human culture.

If you are not with someone = you are broken.

If you are not with someone = you are incomplete.

If you are not with someone = you are not whole.

This is something that we as a society have made every single child born in the last 40 years feel.

We have romanticised the idea of romance, and it's cancerous. People are more in love with the idea of love than the person they are with.

It's in every film, every song, every family dinner table. But it's not data, it's mythology.

Most relationships aren't built on two whole people choosing each other. They're built on two incomplete people hoping the other person will fill the gap. And that's a very different thing.

Marriage was never invented for love or companionship, those are embarrassingly recent additions. It started as a property contract, a political alliance, a system to control inheritance.

Romantic love as a reason to marry only became a thing in the 18th and 19th centuries, pushed further by Hollywood in the 20th.

You've been sold a love story that was written by poets and film studios, layered on top of an institution that was built for land, power, and ownership.

Let's talk numbers for a second

In Portugal, 92% of marriages end in divorce. In India, it's officially 1%.

Before you feel proud about that number, India's low divorce rate isn't evidence of happy marriages. It's evidence of trapped ones.

In many Indian families, the stigma of divorce is considered worse than staying in an unhappy marriage. A divorced woman's social value collapses overnight.

That's not tradition, that's control dressed up as culture. Religion, culture, and family pressure add layers of guilt to an already difficult decision.

And the legal process itself is designed to exhaust you, emotionally and financially.

People don't stay married in India because they're happy. They stay because leaving has been made almost impossible, socially, financially, and legally.

India's 1% divorce rate is not a statistic about love. It's a statistic about fear.

Do you really think getting a partner will make you happy?

Or is it possible that you've just been told that so many times you stopped questioning it?

Many people have come to the conclusion of intentional singlehood through a variety of different experiences. Let's meet some of them.

The Deeply Burned

Multiple relationships that each took something from them. Maybe they gave their everything. Maybe they couldn't reciprocate love and died with the guilt of it. You never know.

The Self-Dissolver

Every time they get into a relationship, they slowly disappear. Their choices, their opinions, their friendships, all of it quietly becomes about the other person.

They don't do it on purpose. It just happens. And one day they look in the mirror and don't recognise who's looking back. So they choose themselves instead.

The Solitude-Dependent Creator

Some people do their best thinking in complete silence. No interruptions, no one else's moods, no background noise of another person's life. A partner, even a great one, breaks that. Writers, artists, deep thinkers, a lot of them guard their alone time like it's sacred. Because for them, it is.

The Autonomy Addict

These people need to be able to make decisions without explaining themselves to anyone. Move cities. Change jobs. Stay up all night. Say yes to something crazy. The moment they have to check in with someone before living their life, something in them starts to die. Compromise isn't love for them. It's a slow leak.

The Caretaker By Nature

They're already giving everything they have to their parents, their friends, the people they work with or coach or support. There's nothing left over for a romantic relationship. And they've made peace with that. They love a lot of people, just not one person exclusively. That's still a full life.

The Deeply Ambitious

They have something they're building. Something that matters more to them than almost anything else. And they know, honestly, that it will always come first. Instead of pretending otherwise and making someone feel like a second priority forever, they just choose their mission up front. That's not cold. That's actually admirable.

The Philosophically Convinced

They didn't arrive here after a bad breakup. They arrived here after years of reading, thinking, questioning. They looked at marriage, at relationships, at the whole structure of it, and concluded it doesn't make sense for them. It's not emotional. It's a position. And they can defend it.

The Trauma-Aware

They know themselves well enough to know that right now, in a relationship, they would either hurt someone or destroy themselves. So they're choosing not to do either. That's not running away. That's actually one of the most self-aware things a person can do.

I'm sure you must have seen your or your friend's reflection in the above descriptions. I'm sure some memory might have surfaced, which might have made you a bit uncomfortable.

So why does any of this matter?

Because nobody talks about this honestly.

Everyone's either romanticising relationships or complaining about them. Nobody's sitting down and saying, maybe this just isn't for me. And maybe that's okay. Maybe that's actually the most self-aware thing you can say.

Here's the part nobody wants to admit.

Most people who choose singlehood aren't afraid of being alone. Many of them can carry themselves alone anywhere and have the time of their life.

And then there are some who are afraid of what people will think about them being alone.

There's a difference. A big one.

When someone finds out you're single, especially past a certain age, you can see it in their face. That flicker of pity. That slight tilt of the head. Like you're missing something. Like your life is somehow incomplete.

But here's what I want to ask that person, what exactly are you basing that on?

Your own relationship? Your own marriage?

Are you happy? Are you genuinely, actually happy, or are you just comfortable? Are you growing, or are you just stable?

Their pity says nothing about your life. It says more about what they've never questioned about their own.

The Jigsaw

Daniel Sloss has a Netflix special called Jigsaw. Worth watching.

He uses one of the simplest and most brilliant analogies I've come across, life as a jigsaw puzzle. You're born with a box of pieces, and your whole life you're building the picture.

Family goes in. Friendships go in. Career, passions, experiences, all of it slowly comes together.

And then society tells you, the most important piece, the centre piece, the one that holds the whole picture together, that has to be a romantic partner.

Find that person. Put them in the middle. Build everything around them.

And most of us just... believed it. We didn't question it. We spent our twenties desperately searching for that centre piece, forcing wrong-shaped people into that spot, wondering why the picture kept falling apart.

The centre piece was never supposed to be a partner. The centre piece is supposed to be your happiness, something that you cherish.

Whatever genuinely lights you up, your work, your curiosity, your purpose, your peace, that goes in the middle. And then everything else, including people, fits around it naturally.

When you put a partner in the centre, and they leave, the whole puzzle collapses. Because you built your entire identity around someone else's piece.

You had nothing of your own holding it together.

That's not love. That's outsourcing your wholeness to another person and calling it a relationship.

The math that changed everything for me

If you only love yourself 20%, someone can come along and love you 30%, and it'll feel like the most love you've ever known. Do the math on that.

That's a tragedy dressed up as a relationship. You'll be so smitten by this person who offered you more love than you offer yourself.

Whereas if you love yourself 100%, the person who falls in love with you has to go above and beyond to make you feel special. And that's something every single one of us deserves. You deserve that, you really do.

If someone does not love 100% of who you are, just let them go. That's not arrogance, that's not narcissism, that's the way every single person should feel about themselves.

They love an idea of you which they have falsely fabricated in their head, and it is not your fault if you do not live up to their expectations.

If you don't love 100% of who I am, there are 7.5 billion people on this planet. Go out and find one of them.

Because I'll love 100% of you. I will even love the bits that annoy me. That's what makes you you. And you have to love my weird little bits, too.

And if I still find someone who lets me be 100% myself all the time and understands me, I'll gladly choose her.

Sloss talks about his own parents as the exception that proves the rule. Thirty years of marriage, and his father still wakes up every morning and looks at his mother like he can't believe she chose him. Still smitten. Still grateful. That's real, and it does exist.

But here's the thing. For his father, the happiness piece and the partner piece happened to be the same person. That's rare.

That's lucky. And most of us, if we're honest, have been trying to force that same equation without ever asking whether it actually applies to us.

If you're in a relationship that genuinely makes you happy, and you make that person genuinely happy, hold onto that. That's everything.

But if you're single, or stuck in something you've outgrown, or just quietly wondering if this is all there is, the point is simple.

You have to learn to be okay with yourself before you can honestly offer yourself to someone else.

Why I chose this

I'll be honest with you. I'm writing this from experience. I have lived with the extremities of bipolar and still am living with it. I have survived suicidal thoughts. I have survived the worst of it.

I have been in relationships where I gave everything I had and came out the other side not knowing who I was anymore, and also relationships where I went all in and still fell out of love, crushing under the mountain of guilt about what I had done to the other person.

I realised I just cannot handle the ups and downs of any relationship. I cannot handle a partner. And evidently, I am elated when I am by myself. I have too many things to do. Too many books to read and so much to know.

I have felt that pity from people when they found out I was single. And for a long time, it worked. It made me feel like something was wrong with me.

But here's what I know now. The fact that I'm still here despite the hell I've gone through, still thinking, still building, still questioning, that's my anchor.

Not a partner. Not someone's approval. Not a relationship status. Me. My survival. My truth. The life I've chosen to build on my own terms.

And that anchor can't be given to you. Nobody can hand it to you in a relationship.

You build it yourself, through the hard stuff, through the losses, through the moments you thought you wouldn't make it but did.

Through reminding yourself that when no one was there for you, you were. You were there for you. You trusted yourself. You gave yourself hope.

Now that is your anchor.

And once you have it, really have it, someone else's pity just doesn't land anymore.

You stop looking for validation in someone else's eyes. You stop building your jigsaw around a piece that was never meant to go in the centre.

You start building it around yourself.

The deeper reason this matters

The deeper reason most people can't stay single, even when they know they should, is that they have no internal anchor. Their sense of self depends on someone else confirming it.

Partner validates them, and they feel okay. Partner leaves, and they fall apart. Stranger pities them, and they feel ashamed.

That's not a relationship problem. That's an identity problem.

The goal of intentional singlehood isn't just to avoid bad relationships. It's to build such a solid relationship with yourself that you stop needing external confirmation that you're enough.

That you stop looking at someone else's face to know how to feel about your own life.

Whether you're single by choice, single by circumstance, or in a relationship wondering if it's the right one, the work is the same. Build the relationship with yourself first.

Everything else either falls into place around it, or falls away because it was never meant to fit.

If you've been sitting with questions like these, about who you are outside of a relationship, about what you actually want versus what you were told to want, that's not confusion. That's the beginning of clarity.

And sometimes one conversation with someone who asks the right questions can turn that beginning into a breakthrough.

I wrote about the childhood conditioning that teaches us our worth is conditional — and how to unlearn it: You Were Never the Problem

If you've been losing yourself trying to keep everyone else happy: Are You a People Pleaser?

If you've been pretending to be someone you're not to fit in: How to Stop Pretending to Be Someone You're Not

Book a free discovery call — no pitch, no pressure, just a real conversation about what you've been carrying: Book a discovery call

Or start with my free guide on managing anxious thoughts: [Get the free guide]

Choose intentionally.

Sarthak Mirchandani