One of the questions I am asked most often is surprisingly simple: “Why are you still single?” It usually comes from relatives, family friends or kindly intentioned acquaintances. Sometimes there is concern behind it, sometimes curiosity and occasionally genuine confusion. The question itself does not bother me. What interests me is the contradiction concealed within it.
I grew up in a culture where the script for a woman’s life appeared straightforward. She met someone, married and built a family. Dating, in the modern sense, was not something young women were encouraged to explore. The expectation was not that we would meet different people, learn about ourselves through relationships and gradually discover what kind of partner suited us. We were expected to find the right person, although nobody quite explained how, and then get on with the serious business of life.
Girls were taught many useful things. We were taught to work hard, consider our families, behave respectfully and protect our reputations. We learned how to become good daughters, wives and mothers. What we were not taught was how to approach someone we liked, express romantic interest or navigate the uncertainty of a developing relationship. Most importantly, we were not taught how to choose. We were taught how to be chosen.
In my case, this was almost literal. My first relationship was with the man who became my husband. The decision was shaped largely by family and presented with the confidence of something already settled. I married him, and together we built a life and a family. At the time, none of this seemed unusual. Many women around me followed a similar path. Only much later did I understand that I had entered adulthood without making one of its most consequential decisions entirely for myself. There had been no period of discovery, no uncertain first meetings and no opportunity to learn what compatibility meant before committing to a life together. There was a path, and I followed it.
When the marriage ended, the life that followed looked nothing like the one for which I had been prepared. There were people to care for, work to build, bills to pay and problems that would not solve themselves. I became the person others could rely upon, the person who made decisions and kept moving because stopping was rarely an option. I built a life in unfamiliar circumstances and rebuilt myself within it. Yet when it came to love, I often felt strangely uncertain.
Part of the difficulty was that I no longer lived in the world that had taught me its rules. Around me, dating was not merely accepted but regarded as the obvious route towards partnership. People met, spent time together, made mistakes and sometimes left. Through that process, they learned what they wanted, what they needed and what they could not live with. I had been prepared for commitment, but not for the process of choosing whom to commit to.
This creates a peculiar dilemma for women raised between traditional expectations and modern relationships. The same culture that asks why a woman has not remarried may feel uncomfortable with the process through which she might meet someone. She is expected to find a husband without appearing to look for one, to be open without being forward and to make a wise choice without acquiring the experience from which discernment usually grows. It is a puzzle in which every possible move can be criticised after it is made.
The puzzle becomes more complicated when a woman already has a life she has fought hard to create. Choosing a partner later is not simply a question of attraction or personal happiness. Someone new must enter a world containing family, routines, responsibilities, history and a peace that did not arrive easily. The question is no longer only whether two people want one another. It is whether the relationship can live respectfully alongside everything that already matters.
Perhaps that is why I have become less interested in finding someone quickly and more interested in choosing someone well.
For a long time, I treated my uncertainty as a personal failing. Perhaps I was too cautious, too independent or not sufficiently open. Perhaps I was trying too little or trying too hard. I wondered whether I was failing at a game whose rules changed according to whoever happened to be explaining them. More recently, I have begun to think the problem was not that I could not play. It was that I had never decided whether I accepted the rules.
I am no longer a young woman waiting for life to happen to her. I have made difficult decisions, lived with their consequences and found my way through circumstances I once could not have imagined. I have created a life rather than simply accepting the one assigned to me. There is no reason why choosing a partner should be the one part of that life in which I surrender my judgement to someone else’s expectations.
This does not require me to reject where I come from. I still value commitment, family and the seriousness of love. I still hope to find a relationship built upon trust, friendship, affection and genuine partnership. What has changed is my understanding of who decides what that relationship should look like. Tradition can offer wisdom without being granted complete authority. I can honour the values I inherited without allowing them to make every decision on my behalf.
For years, I thought the challenge was finding the right person. Now I think the deeper challenge is trusting myself to recognise him. It is learning that another person’s interest is not, by itself, a reason to say yes. Being wanted is not the same as being valued. Being chosen does not relieve me of the responsibility to choose in return.
That responsibility once frightened me. Now it feels like freedom.
So when somebody asks why I am still single, the answer is not that nobody has chosen me. Nor is it that I have stopped believing in love. I am simply no longer willing to treat partnership as a position that must be filled, regardless of who occupies it. The life I have built is not a waiting room, and being alone is not an emergency from which any available man may rescue me.
For the first time, the decision belongs to me. I am not waiting to be chosen. I am learning how to choose.
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