How being single lets you build a relationship with the most important person in your life (yourself)
Nicola Slawson: When I was going through these relationships, I was jumping from one to another and getting my heart broken in each one. I just didn’t really think of myself and look after myself. Becoming single and learning to actually stand on my own two feet and look after myself has been incredibly empowering and beautiful.
I hate when people say, “You have to love yourself before anyone else will love you,” because even when I didn’t love myself, lots of people in my life loved me. My parents loved me; my friends loved me. Learning to love myself and learning self-respect has been life-changing, but I’ve done that for myself. I haven’t done that to impress someone.
At the same time, I do think that when I do get into a relationship in the future, it’ll stand me in good stead that I do have all those things, and I do look after myself.
What being single can free you from
I was so obsessed with getting a boyfriend when I was a teenager and in my early twenties that I would just completely ignore red flags and basically have no self-respect because I thought that having a boyfriend was the most important thing and that would give me validation. And so it’s very freeing when you realize that’s actually not true.
I think when you’re single, you really nurture your friendships and you really nurture your community. My friends are the loves of my life, and I’ve really invested in them — which I’ve been able to do because I wasn’t sort of sidetracked by a man.
It’s not just about “things that you do on your own,” although that is also very liberating.
Being single will always have its ups and downs
Sometimes, people would react to the fact that I had a newsletter called The Single Supplement, saying, “But I don’t want to be single,” “I don’t like being single,” or “I’m unhappy being single.”
That’s not what the newsletter or my book is about. It’s not about making you feel better about being single and just ignoring all the challenges.
I hope to have a romantic relationship in the future. I’m comfortable and confident being single at the moment, but it’s something I do want in the future.
I think that sometimes, there’s a tendency to sort of be very all or nothing: “We’re going to talk about single positivity. It’s amazing being single!” … and then completely overlook all the challenges and the difficulties. Or the fact that you might not want to be single, which is why I say in the book, “Whether you’re single for a day or a decade, it’s about making the most of the moment — and not putting your life on hold in this moment.”
Why it’s important to leave behind the stigma of being single
In the disability community, they say, “You should be interested and care about disability rights because one day you probably will end up disabled.” … And it’s a similar thing with being single.
I interviewed people who were widowed, who were divorced, and some of the ones that were divorced, they had no idea it was coming.
For people who were in really toxic relationships or even abusive relationships, there’s an idea that everyone buys into: That you should feel lucky to be in a relationship. And if we can break that a little bit and make people realize that actually being single isn’t the worst thing in the world, I think it would help people leave situations where they shouldn’t be in — or even unhappy ones, even if they’re not abusive or anything like that.
You just never know when you might end up on your own.
Addressing fears of being alone in later life
That is something that comes up a lot in the community that I run … and it’s quite a painful topic for some people. Some people have had to have quite honest and painful conversations with family members — with nieces and nephews, for example.
There are people who are looking into retirement villages, paying a lot more into pensions to make sure they’re okay, life insurance and things like that. And it is something that people do worry about and they also feel like they don’t want to be a burden.
And it’s a really hard thing because you’ve got to have conversations with people so they know what you want as you’re getting older. You might need somebody to be the person making decisions about your health care, for example.
But some people in the community will say, “Actually, this is more about society as a whole and how we look after the older people, rather than necessarily [about] being single.”
Being single when you want — or have — children
So I spent years being single and wishing I was a mom … I was really, really struggling with it when I was approaching thirty-five … I began to panic about it. It was almost like the soundtrack of my whole life was, “How am I going to have a baby?”
But at the same time, I was feeling really good about being single, and I didn’t want to date just to find somebody to have a baby with — because that felt really forced and also just really awkward. So I was looking into solo motherhood, with a sperm donor, but the cost of that was really prohibitive for me. I’m a freelancer, and I just felt like I would have had to save up for years and years, and that would have been my fertility years.
But luckily, I had another idea, which was when I met a lesbian couple who platonically co-parent with a gay friend — and so that was the idea in the back of my head because that worked out really well for them. Then, during the pandemic, I met a gay guy called Tom, and we quickly became really good friends. We actually bonded over the fact that all of our friends had kids and we didn’t, and we had no one to hang out with … I realized that he would make a really good dad.
Obviously, we spent months and months discussing it and all the ways it could possibly go wrong. But we’re now parents of a 10-month-old baby girl … Tom and I are actually housemates, so we’re at the moment parenting completely 100% all of the time. It’ll only be in the future where we split our time … and that will be a whole new experience for me.
I think writing the book really made me really reflect on what was important and what I needed to do because I’m writing about how you shouldn’t wait for a partner for your life to start. And I needed to take my own advice because the thing I wanted most was to be a mom.
