Old enough

I’ve heard it all before.  I’m young and single and should be relishing in the lack of responsibilities and huge quantities of freedom I have in my life.  I shouldn’t want to settle down, tie myself to one person.  I shouldn’t have intense urges to have babies and buy a house and hurl myself into family life.  I should want to stay out late, drink my face off, worry about nothing and just be young.

The trouble with should is that it implies some standard, some conventional wisdom you’re supposed to follow according to everyone else. 

So is it strange that I hate being single?  That I would trade in every night of drinking at a bar, making small talk with strangers for domesticity?  Should I feel ashamed that I’m not enjoying my twenties like everyone else?  I’ve never been like everyone else.  I’ve never felt my age.  I think I felt 23 when I was 17.   Now?  I’m not sure there’s a specific age I feel but perhaps just a place in my life that many people are not when they hit quarter-life. 

For lack of more eloquent and precise phrasing, dating sucks.  For that matter, being single sucks even more.  Not that I would qualify myself as single, per se, considering that implies open and available to anyone who asks – because truthfully, I’m not.  Not even close.  I have zero desire to date again – getting to know someone all over again, knowing that there is no possible way I’m going to feel for them the way I feel for her.  I’ve never been one to sleep with strangers – never had a one-night stand and don’t get turned on by the thought of fucking someone I barely know.    There has to be something else there – more than just a pretty face – for the pants to come off.  And because I’m picky as picky can be, it takes a whole hell of a lot for me to see something worthwhile past the nice tits and pretty eyes. 

Maybe it’s because I’ve developed a morbid and vivid sense of mortality.  I am painfully aware of how little time we really spend in this life and the thought of wasting it bouncing from one date to the next, being just another notch in someone’s bedpost…is, well, nauseauting.  Empty and unfulfilling. 

So perhaps I am always 10 steps ahead of where I should be – but as I watch one of my best friends get ready to marry to love of her life, as I hear her talk about their babies and their future house and the rest of their lives together, I can’t help but feel a cord within me, struck hard by the notion that it is exactly what I want.  It may not be life in the fast-lane, uber excitement at every turn – but I don’t necessarily believe that’s what makes a life worth living.  As I watched my family say goodbye to two very important women in their lives this past year, I would be remiss if I wasn’t bound by my belief that love is really all that exists.