Single in Midlife? Nothing Is Wrong With You.

Every relationship I've ever left ended with the same feeling. Relief. For years, I thought that meant something was wrong with me. Who feels relief when a relationship ends?

People are supposed to grieve and miss the other person. I never seemed to miss them. Instead, every time a relationship ended, I felt like I could finally exhale. Then I’d spend the next several months wondering what that said about me.

I couldn’t understand why marriage never felt the way everyone said it was supposed to feel. I’ve been married three times. My longest marriage lasted only four years. After a while, it seemed obvious that I was the common denominator. Maybe I was just bad at marriage.

I was 19 the first time I got married. I had planned to go to college, but during my senior year of high school I started dating an older man. I quit college six weeks into my first semester, moved in with him, got married, and got pregnant in quick succession. Looking back, what strikes me isn't any one decision. It's that I never stopped to ask myself what I wanted. He wanted me to quit college. He wanted to get married. My parents thought getting married was the right thing to do, since I was “shacking up”. So that's what I did. At 19, I didn't even realize I had a choice.

It would be years before I realized I'd built a life almost entirely around other people's expectations.

It wasn’t just that first marriage. Once you spend your early adulthood believing your job is to make everyone else happy, that pattern has a way of following you. I became a mother. I became a registered nurse. I took care of people. I went back to grad school. I homeschooled my two youngest kids while building a career. I kept checking the boxes that were supposed to lead to fulfillment. Every time a relationship ended, I’d stay happily single for a while, but then eventually find myself in another romantic entanglement, convinced maybe this time I’d gotten it right.

Looking back, I don’t think I was choosing nearly as much as I was reacting. I was surviving. Doing what needed to be done. Building the life that made sense on paper, without ever asking whether it actually fit me.

I was listening to an interview with Liz Gilbert a couple of years ago when she started talking about the research on marriage and happiness. She explained that while marriage tends to benefit men in measurable ways, the picture for women is much more complicated. Some studies have found that single women report just as much, or even more, life satisfaction than married women. Married men, on the other hand, consistently see improvements in health, longevity, and overall well-being.

I remember stopping what I was doing and grabbing a notebook, thinking, Well... that explains a lot.

It didn't change my opinion about marriage. It changed my opinion about myself. Maybe I hadn’t failed at marriage. Maybe I was just someone who was happier on my own. An independent woman, as they say. And maybe there was nothing wrong with that after all.

I know women who have wonderful marriages, and I genuinely wouldn’t want anything different for them. But I also know women who have spent years believing they’re somehow incomplete because they aren’t married. We’ve been told for generations that a successful life follows a certain path, and marriage sits right in the middle of that story. If you’re happy outside of it, people assume you’re settling, or bitter, or secretly lonely.

That hasn’t been my experience. Looking back, the loneliest I’ve ever been wasn’t when I was single. It was when I was in relationships where I no longer felt like myself.

Today, in my fifties, I’ve built a life that fits me better than any marriage ever did. I live alone, and I love the peace that comes with that. If I want to spend the afternoon in my garden, I do. If I decide to take a solo road trip to Nova Scotia, I don’t have to negotiate anyone else’s vacation schedule or convince someone to come along. If I want to spend a Saturday writing, reading, or wandering through a historic town, I simply get in the car and go.

Looking back, I don’t think I was ever looking for someone else to complete me. I was trying to build the life I thought I was supposed to want. It took me a long time to realize those aren’t the same thing. These days, I’m less interested in living the “right” life and more interested in living one that feels right to me.

That doesn't mean relationships aren't worth having. I still believe in love, in building a life with someone if that's what you both want. But I've come to question whether legal marriage is still the best framework for those relationships. For me, they're no longer the same thing.

If you’re someone who feels happiest on your own, or you’re questioning whether the traditional path is right for you, I hope you’ll at least ask yourself the question I never thought to ask at nineteen.

What do I want?

It took me decades to realize I had a say in the answer.

My life today isn’t what nineteen-year-old me imagined.

Thank goodness.