WILSHERE: Why can’t we date ourselves?

I am the cheapest date I know. I go to the Museum of Fine Arts for free, I see $20 concerts and keep my lattes on the short side. When I order a meal, I only pay for one. I go on moonlit walks through the park and strut down Newbury Street without spending a dime. What sounds like a frugal mess and an unsustainable budget is actually my newest fascination: dating myself.

When I proposed this to my friends, one responded, “So what does this mean? You’re going to take yourself out to dinner? Perhaps a movie afterwards? That’s a ridiculous way of saying that you’re going to be spending a lot of time alone.” Maybe it is.

But I don’t want to just spend time alone. I want to take the time that I am spending alone and focus it into areas of improvement and self-learning. I want to explore, create and discover things about myself that I may have overlooked. I want to know if I like Monet rather than Manet. If I find out that I like CrossFit, I’ll want to change that as soon as I can.

The backlash stems from a societal view that we, as human beings, will never be whole until we find our other “half.” I disagree. I believe that a relationship is a partnership between two people. No one is more or less than a person than their partner. Partners should challenge each other and support each other, not complete each other. Every cliché and movie line aside, I want to choose myself. I want to know me before I let someone else know me, my eccentricities and love for cheese included and unhidden.

A single person does not fit into the system that society has created and enforced. As demonstrated by the concern of what feels like the entire world, a single person is a loose end — something that either needs to be tied down or kept away from society. The phrase, “you’ll find someone” should be retired from dinner parties and high school reunions alike. Until I am ready to commit to the emotional whirlwind that is trusting another human being with my heart and my vinyl record collection, I am going to take the time to commit to myself.

Family dinners turn into interrogation sessions too quickly when members asking if I’m seeing someone. “Don’t worry there’s someone out there for you, you just have to find them,” they say.  Any time I hear this tired tale, I imagine the “love of my life” sitting in a room, reading men’s health magazines, waiting until the day he meets me. (Really? Waiting this whole time? You didn’t want to take up a hobby?) This also makes it seem as if my whole life should’ve been spent searching for “the one,” instead of doing things that matter to me, like avoiding multi-colored cargo shorts and petitioning for more dogs in the world. I am looking for answers. I am looking for reasons and explanations. I am looking to find something in myself that I want to share with someone else. I am looking to do it alone.

It is neither vain nor narcissistic to want to spend time with yourself. Spending time with yourself does not mean that you have to take up a life of loneliness, or condemn all relationships (although I believe your health and bank account balance would improve greatly if you did). It does not mean that you are condemned to a lifetime of going to French noir movies alone or taking long walks with The Smiths playing softly in the background. It just means that you can devote the most amount of time to the relationship that matters the most to your development: your own.

We are in a long-term relationship with ourselves. We should be able to take the time we have when we are single to learn the most about ourselves. We should be able to improve ourselves and to be the best versions of ourselves. For the first time, I want to jump into this relationship head first. For the first time, this is a relationship I’d like to define.