Celebrating my 4th singleversary

Frans (still not his real name) and I broke up on the 25^th of July 2014. So that’s it. A couple of days ago I celebrated the 4th anniversary of my singleness. You might wonder how I know the exact date, well last year when my friends were celebrating their 4^th anniversary I decided that I should also celebrate my relationship status. A quick Whatsapp search of “dumped” and “broke up” brought me to this date. And I have remembered it ever since.

always the third wheel

Last year I planned well in advance to celebrate my singleversary with an “awkward/romantic” date with my friend Mike. He agreed to this but then somehow backed out of it at the last minute (if you’re reading, I’m obviously still hurt and devastated by this). When I questioned him on this, he actually danced away from me. Danced. So that’s my dating life, people will actually dance away from me.

And I know being almost 29 and single might sound quite normal to you (well, if you aren’t from Indonesia) but what does this singledom mean when living in this marriage-obsessed country?

Firstly, you’re gonna be answering a lot of questions. Indonesian people love to throw that “kapan nikah?” (when are you getting married?) question out there. I don’t really know the answer to that, seeming I have been single for the last four years, have no romantic prospects and haven’t met a single person in this world whom I would like to be married to, but “hopefully this year” is a good vague response (my friend Maltha suggested “besok kalau gak hujan” [“tomorrow if it’s not raining”] as an excellent alternative that I’ll definitely try at some point.). In the past “my soulmate is in Palembang and I haven’t been there yet” used to be enough but after going there and checking this in 2015, I know the Palembang story doesn’t check out. I guess this question would be even more soul-destroying if I actually cared about getting married, so I guess I should be grateful that I don’t.

Next, people will give you unwanted advice and motivation regularly. They’ll encourage you by telling you you’re pretty and someone would want you (which is quite insulting as my self-esteem doesn’t need to be based on who wants me and also considering someone an option because they see me as “pretty” is kind of sad). They’ll tell you to just find an Indonesian man and that it doesn’t matter if there’s a religious difference because you can just follow his (which is not really the kind of thing you can decide for someone else but okay…).

You might begin to deal with this by sometimes lying to strangers about your marital status to avoid unnecessary pity and worry. But then you’ll end up getting confused about which Gojek driver you told you were married and which you told the truth to, so I guess if you’re going to go down that road, you have to go all the way. I realised this recently when a Gojek driver asked me how my husband was and if he still worked at EF Plaza. I almost said “what the hell?” but thankfully remembered that 2 months ago I’d told a Gojek driver that I had a husband and that it’d lead to so many follow-up questions that I just told him my housemate was my husband. It then turned out he had driven my housemate to work before and knew who I was talking about, so great.

But, it’s not so bad being single to be honest.

the "wall of love"

I don’t really want a boyfriend but when I say that in Indonesia it’s met with “ohhh mau langsung nikah?” (which is some kind of idea that I’d just marry someone without dating them, an arranged marriage perhaps? I don’t know how to translate this well) which is not really the point. It’s not even that I’m against marriage or anything, I’m just not particularly interested in the idea. I don’t like the idea that I should do something to check it off some kind of “TO DO LIST FOR PEOPLE THAT WANT TO LOOK NORMAL” (I also don’t care about looking normal). There’s no need for me to get married to impress other people. I know that when the “when are you getting married?” question gets satisfied “when are you having a baby?” becomes the next annoyance. There’s no end, so I’ll settle for the familiar “kapan nikah?” and look for more creative ways to answer this.

But, I often blame my singledom on this country, firstly because I rarely meet anyone new outside work and also because I spend most of my time dressed in khaki trousers and a polo shirt which isn’t exactly going to catch too many eyes even if I did meet someone. But, in reality the main reason probably is the fact that I’m only capable of being romantically interested in people who pay no attention to me or are completely unattainable. Seriously if you knew my last few crushes you could equate these to a list of impossibilities. I also find it somewhat annoying if someone is romantically interested in me.

But, in some way unrequited love has become more attractive to me than any other kinds of love. It feels less selfish, more authentic and serves as a good test of how you’re willing to treat someone without gaining anything in return. This kind of love is corrupted by “hope” because imagining that it could lead somewhere makes it selfish and defeats the purpose of the “love”. It can also make you disillusioned that you might deserve something as some kind of reward for your efforts. In any sense, when that hope is quashed you are left with some kind of emptiness, in any sense love that you regard as hopeless from the beginning comes with no unpleasantness.

Over the last four years, I have actually been on a few dates as you might have seen from my stories here. I’ve experimented with Tinder to no avail, dated a nazi-symphasizer and met my “soulmate” at a hospital (see previous blog posts if you don’t remember).

Well I’ll give you the highlights of my dating life since I stopped blogging about it:

·         Once I was lining up in Melbourne airport and a guy started talking to me. Then I ran into him again at Bali airport and we friended each other on Facebook. Turns out we went to the same university. A couple of months after that he was randomly in Surabaya so we met for coffee. A month after that we had dinner together in Melbourne. It all felt very international. But I don’t think we’ve spoken in more than 2 years now.

·         There was this guy that I spoke to a lot, over a long period of time. I wrote the poem below and put it up on the “wall of love” in Seoul and then basically immediately stopped caring about that guy which is a massive contradiction of the poem itself. But, it’s still there I guess and I’m not going back to Seoul to take it down, so oh well.

my ridiculous poetry

·         Once I was so awkward texting a guy that I had to ask two of my friends to help me write something and then while I was passing my phone to my friend I accidentally sent him a random picture of a fox and couldn’t really explain it so I stopped talking to him. I ran into him once when I was drunk and it was incredibly awkward for everyone involved.

It’s been a thrilling four years as you can see.

But I’m happy. Except for occasionally missing conversations like this:

not even worth translating...

But I’ll be okay without it (really I will, it seems ridiculous and unnecessary even now).

So heres to  many more singleversaries to come. 👍🙏