I like being by myself. I don’t need that special someone.

I’ve never experienced any desire to be in a romantic relationship. I’d find it suffocating to be involved with another person so intimately, and exclusively. 

There’s all these expectations, and obligations, that tend to come when you commit to someone; to share your time, your talk, your energy. 

Sack that; I’m just not that kind of person.

Being in a relationship would snuff me out; I couldn’t be myself, my truest self, the self I am in solitude. Therefore, I don’t need a significant other to ‘complete’ me. They’d compromise me. No one could know me better than I know myself.  

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I used to look to feminism to affirm my single status. 

Whenever I’d start to feel embarrassed, or ashamed, about my perpetual singleness, I’d rally myself with thoughts of: ‘it’s perfectly a-ok for a woman to be single; any weird ‘n’ ugly I might be feeling about not-ever-having-had-a-partner is just the poison of patriarchy seeping its way in’. I’d then ask myself whether a relationship was something I truly-wuly wanted anyway. And the answer was always an emphatic ‘no’. 

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This ‘no’ has always come from a deeply-felt place; less head shake, and more heart pull. I’ve never chosen to be single. I didn’t weigh up my options, note that marriage tends to send women to an earlier grave, and therefore decide to place my eggs in the spinster basket. Being in a relationship is something that’s just never been on my radar. I’ve never had the slightest interest in partnering up, or settling down. 

As I alluded to before, the whole idea of being in a relationship actually repulses me. 

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This is why I identify as aromantic because my singleness feels innate to me. It’s not a choice. It’s the way I’m oriented. I was wired for the single life. And it’s aromanticism that’s helped me to understand that, and enabled me to start taking more pride in my perma-singledom. 

It makes perfect sense to me that someone as asocial as I am would also be aromantic. I don’t experience romantic attraction, and this intersects, oh-so-rightly, it feels, with the preference I have for my own company. 

I like being by myself. I don’t need that special someone.

I’m naturally solitary aromantic.