Seven Years Single: Notes from a Reluctant Escape Artist

On loneliness, long gaps, and the strange art of waiting

I didn’t mean to be single for seven years. It wasn’t a vow or an experiment or even a conscious choice, it just happened, like forgetting to water a plant until you realize the leaves have gone crisp. One year folded into another, countries blurred, jobs stacked, the world shut down, and when I finally looked up, I realized I hadn’t been in love since another version of me was alive. A younger me. A girl I can barely recognize.

The astrologers say next spring the chaos will soften, like butter on the counter. My 7th house of relationships is in Uranus and that humour is not lost on me. They say the wheel will slow and I won’t feel like I’m in some never-ending grocery sweep, snatching at whatever looks good before the buzzer sounds. I pretend not to believe them, but I circle the date in my mind anyway.

There have been long periods of nothing. Not even a kiss. Not even a stranger’s hand brushing mine by accident. And then bursts of dating, a string of first encounters. I am, apparently, very good at first dates. I know where to sit, what to order, how to make the other person laugh. But then, aloof. The most common complaint is that I don’t like them enough.

I do like them. I like them the way I like finding a cool rock on a walk: I admire it, I hold it in my hand, I put it back. I don’t need to keep it forever.

Everyone in my life has a gentle theory about me, as if I’m a mystery they’re all trying to solve. My mother told me last year I would meet a man from New Zealand at the airport. My father, in winter, insisted I needed a good European man - Spanish, Italian, Mediterranean to say the least. My best friend thinks I need someone introverted and obsessed with me, someone who watches me breathe and never tires of it. They all agree on one thing: that I care too much and receive too little. The lack of reciprocity is noticeable, like a draft sneaking under the door. And yet the men tell me I don’t care enough. Not soon enough.

The truth is, I like to get to know people. I like to take my time. We all should. I want to known.

I told a friend that by now I know before a first date even begins how it will end. She said it’s not cynicism, it’s data collection. Seven years of trial and error, patterns building themselves into a kind of psychic shorthand. But I don’t believe in true hallmarks. Sometimes I know it’s going to be something, and by something I mean two or three dates, maybe four, and then the quiet dissolve.

When I do fall, it’s for men on other continents. My love life is international, untranslatable. From seventeen to thirty-five I was always in something - four long relationships, if you want to count. One ill-fated, criminal marriage. After that, nothing steady. Just long gaps, fleeting connections, and me, trying to catch my breath.

Seven years single. I don’t fall in love before I meet someone. But I know when it comes again, it will be undeniable, a gravity I can’t escape. Until then, I keep moving.

And this isn’t a poor-me, male-centered cry. This is me genuinely curious about my own experience rather than performing my own pain. It’s the honest messiness of wanting connection. It’s about giving space to the space that stretched longer than I anticipated. A space I can’t yet foresee ending.

We’re told to rebrand our loneliness and call it peace. We’re told the world is better without men, and maybe there’s some merit to that, but the world isn’t so black and white. I’ve been told I celebrate heartbreak too much, that I’ve made a career out of it. But what are you supposed to do when you don’t have what you want? You transmute. You create. You see where it goes.

My favourite quote about love is lack luster but comforting: Love is like a bus, if you wait long enough another one will come around. It’s just that I seem to be on an entirely different transit line these past few years.

So if you’re like me, and you’ve found yourself on the wrong line, or the opposite side of where you thought you’d be, lean into it. Remind yourself you are giving yourself your best years. That even when love feels far away, you are still here - living, writing, making, laughing, and moving toward whatever bus, train, or unexpected ride is coming next.

And maybe that’s the strangest kind of love story: the one you write when no one else is around to write it with.

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