bah humbug
By me • Dec 23rd, 2007 • Category: being single, heartbreak, holidaysThank you everyone for your congrats - I am tremendously relieved and happy about it. With all that out of the way I was hoping things would calm down and I’d start enjoying the holidays. But something’s just not quite right. This year the Christmas spirit just isn’t quite getting to me. I’ve tried shopping, baking Chrismas cookies, listening to music, even watching White Christmas (which I normally adore) but nothing helps. I couldn’t even make it through the movie without grumbling. It’s just, well, there’s so goddamn many happy couples EVERYWHERE right now, and honestly, I just can’t handle it this year.
If you are male or coupled up please let me explain. As a single woman you go through the holiday bombarded on all sides by commercials, movies, stories, and traditions that emphasize family and traditional love. But not just any family. Not a single woman with three cats, great parents, two sisters, a brother-in-law, and two nieces kind of family. No, it’s an attractive and happy wife, adoring husband, and excited children kind of family. Or the happy, in love, getting engaged over the holidays couple (I am so sick of seeing the jeweler ads.) Which is cute. For a little while. After 30 years I’m so fucking through seeing it and being reminded of what I don’t have that I’m about ready to mandate a personal hibernation for myself from November to January every year. It’s like spending six weeks having the media reminding me that, as far as society is concerned, I am an outcast.
I haven’t always felt this way. For most of my life I’ve been single over the holidays, but I always had this little bit of hope that’s pulled me through. Hope that it was the last time I’d have to do this alone. Next year there would be someone else to help me put up the tree, bake cookies, and wake up with on Christmas morning. Someone to build new traditions with. Sometimes it was hope about a particular guy, but mostly it was just a hope that everything would work out, and that some great guy, whoever he may be, was out there. But this year, due to the fact that I’ve turned 30 (and am now officially closer to 31……holy shit) and some other stuff that happened over the course of the year there is no hope. None. And I don’t think it’s going to come back any time soon.
It’s not that I’ve decided because of all of this to hate men, far from it in fact. But at the moment I am solidly stuck in reality which, while painful at times, is also rather empowering and not that bad of a place to be. It’s just that when I see all these lovey-dovey movies and commercials right now I’m not thinking “I want that for me” instead what’s going through my mind is, “Thank god that’s not me. He’d just leave me when I went through a rough patch anyway, or, once we got really involved he’d turn out to be like this creep.” And I don’t like thinking like that. It turns me into an ugly and cynical person. So I think I’m just going to pretend none of this is happening right now, and hopefully the next week and a half will pass without too much fuss and life can go back to normal.
me is
Email this author | All posts by me
I think you need to get yourself to Tasmania, missie. I know so many single guys who are aching to meet a really switched on, intelligent, gorgeous girl like you. When I was pregnant, my partner’s good friends kept telling me how they couldn’t wait to be Dads themselves, but just couldn’t find the right girl. Or any girl, really. I think it’s actually a big problem here - I have two tables at my wedding which will be all men bar one token female.
We also have a shortage of qualified librarians.
Ugh, I am 40 and still not married or “in love.” What’s worse is I GOT a bf whom I argue with all the time! And I never want to marry him OR ever live with him either.
It sucks, and I feel like a wash up. I think that is why I am such a computer geek.
Trust me, it’s not any easier on this side of the fence. Christmas is a rough time for all of us that are single.
I personally find the jewelry and automotive Christmas advertisements funny, in a sad and pathetic way. “Show her how much you love her this Christmas with the most expensive thing you can get that’s beyond your monetary reach.” — OK, so I’m also a bit of a cynic. It seems the older I get the more I find humorous and wonderful in this life.
And speaking of old. There is nothing wrong with 30 and single. Society may make us feel like outcasts for not obtaining the “model life” that the Media forces down our throats. But it’s all BS anyway. They want us to want these things so they can charge us interest for the rest of our lives. Working away to pay off what we have while they entice us with the next best, and of course more expensive, things. I saw too much of it at my 10yr reunion. All the happy (not really) couples, with the nice houses and cars going further into debt. Most of them were already near the $30,000 mark. That’s not the “Model Life”, it just can’t be. But nothing ever changes. Publilius Syrus noticed this in the 1st Century BC when he said “For a free-born man, debt is a form of slavery.”
Everyone wants the same thing in life, to be happy. However, despite what the multi-billion dollar Advertising Industry wants us to think, happiness is not separate from us. It’s not “out there” to be bought or sold.
Whoops. I’m sorry. It seems I got stuck in a rant of my own.
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!!!! May we find the joy in life that is all around us. And once found, may we freely give it away.
p.s. Not all of us are like that freak in the link there. (Wow! That was..¿?.. He just needs to be {Runtime error 23-20-6: expletives deleted}!!)
And after eleven years of marriage, my hubby and I ended up in fits of laughter after watching some diamond and perfume commercials…
“If you EVER buy me something that crazy, I will kick your ass. I’d rather have a new kitchen.”
“Don’t worry. I’d rather have a new band saw.”
“Why do perfume commercials always choose really wussy names for their scents. Exuberance. Harmony. Eternity. Why not more fun-sounding words like…mucus?”
“Flatulence…?”
“Placenta…!”
Yup - that’s our pillow talk.
Hope you had a Merry Christmas and that 2008 will bring you everything you want and need.