As I am writing this week’s column, I am sitting on board Delta Air Lines Flight 2531 with direct service to Los Angeles in seat 27E at a cruising altitude of about 40,000 feet. At about an hour after takeoff, my guess is that I’m somewhere over Pennsylvania. Or maybe Ohio.
I’m currently on my way home to Santa Barbara, California, where on Sunday afternoon I will stand as a bridesmaid at my 23-year-old brother’s wedding in a flesh-colored, floor-length dress, not unlike the ball gown that Anne Hathaway wears in the final scene of “The Princess Diaries.”
Please, dear God, help me.
On this five-hour and 43-minute Delta flight, I not only have time to drink unlimited cups of the worst coffee ever brewed, write a congratulatory wedding toast to honor the newlyweds and this column, but also, ponder the circumstances of my own love, or should I say, loveless, life.
Believe it or not, I am a 26-year-old relationship virgin. And when I say “relationship virgin” please take care not to confuse it for any sexual definition of the word because, actually, anyone that knows me can tell you that if there was an award for “Allston’s Most Promiscuous Resident,” I would more than certainly qualify for first place.
When I got the text message from my brother Nathan, in the middle of an intense episode of HBO’s “True Detective” in February that read, “I asked Mercedez to marry me today. She said yes. And yes, we’ll have the wedding on a day that you don’t have school,” I had to get over the initial shock that he had decided to announce his engagement to me via text message. I also remember thinking, “How could it be that my younger sibling found his life partner before I even had my first real boyfriend?”
I’ll be honest. I’d be lying to you if I said that I haven’t agonized over my own dating ineptness and lack of relationship experience and that I used to worry that my perpetual singlehood meant that I was missing out on some crucial life experience.
But, on this five-hour and 43-minute Delta flight with nonstop service to Los Angeles, I’ve had an epiphany.
I’ve realized that living my life sans ball and chain has been anything but a total tragedy. My deliberate decision to abstain from participating in romantic relationships has given me the time and energy to focus on other, more important things in life, like my education, my career and my desire to travel. And actually, as a full-time student, graduate assistant, weekly columnist and gym rat, with hardly enough hours in the day to even make myself dinner, at this point in my life, the term “boyfriend” seems more like a synonym for “burden” than for “blessing.”
Perhaps one of the more aggravating assumptions about my perpetual single state is that I am “boyfriendless,” not because I choose to be, but because I am too high maintenance or that I have ridiculous standards when it comes to dating. Let me set the record straight by saying that is absolutely not true.
In fact, if anything, the astronomical number of losers I’ve engaged in sexual relationships with in just this last year alone is enough to prove that, actually, my standards for men are probably aren’t high enough.
At 26 years old, although I am a woman that likes to flirt and kiss boys (and by kiss boys, I mean have sex with them), I am also one that values her independence to the highest degree. The thought of draining my energy into a romantic relationship right now seems like more of a detriment or a distraction to the ambitious travel, career and life goals that I have set for myself.
What about the three-month trip to Thailand that I just booked as a gift to myself for when I graduate this December? Would it have been a possible trip for me to take if I had been tied down in Boston in a serious relationship? My guess is probably not, and, if being chronically single means that I get to lay on a white, sandy beach in Phuket Province for a month, then so be it.
Not surprisingly, relationship virgins aren’t so uncommon. Actually, it seems that more and more women, like myself, are choosing to enjoy their 20s as single and unattached. In fact, according to an April 2014 Urban Institute report, today’s young adults are on track to have the lowest rates of marriage by the age of 40 compared to any previous generation, and if this current pace continues, we can expect that more than 30 percent of Millennial women will remain unmarried by the age of 40, nearly twice as many as our Generation X counterparts.
What’s more is that according to a 2009 General Household Survey, an exhaustive check on the lives of more than 17,000 people conducted by the Government’s Office for National Statistics, the number of single women has more than doubled over the last three decades.
It’s official: relationship virgins are on the rise.
It’s not to say that one day, when I am established in my career and when I’ve finished school, that I wouldn’t like to eventually settle down with someone who hates children and dogs as much as I do. But for now, anyways, I’m happy to admit that the most serious relationship with a man that I have in my life is with my cat, Lars.
