And if you believed that title…

Let’s get real. Being single ain’t easy. You wake up each day, look in the mirror, and you say to yourself, “Welp, nobody will be enjoying THIS today.”

And as the days turn into years, you start to understand what it’s like to be a beautiful flower that no one gets to see or touch…

or love.

And you get sad and you want to die. But dying is such an effort—figuring out how to do it successfully, making sure no one finds out beforehand, finding a method that’s not painful, deciding what to put on your note for loved ones to find next to your cold corpse.

So, you choose not to die. You just learn to accept your sadness. And you alone-ness (which is not the same as loneliness). And you make peace with your life as it is.

And then one day something magical happens.

NO!

You don’t meet the One.

Something else.

You actually realize that how things are, right now, isn’t so bad. It’s not a travesty. In fact, because you’re single, you’ve had a lot of free time to spend on yourself. Exercising. Reading. Watching porn.

You’ve got a good thing going. You don’t get super-hot in the middle of the night because your partner rolled up on you. You get more rest at night. Which means you wake up rested and don’t feel like such a zombie.

You don’t have to answer to anyone, and best of all, you’re not stuck in a mediocre relationship that you have don’t have the willpower to leave. (Because if you were that person, and you left, you’d have to go through all of the crappy stages above.)

So, eventually, you become stronger. You realize that you don’t need someone else in your life anymore. You get to the point where it’s going to take someone pretty goddamn amazing for you to leave the shrine of singledom that you’ve created.

And then you start to bend the rules more. You don’t just flirt with people you might like anymore—you flirt with life.

The truth is this: I could be happier. I could be in a succulent relationship, loving and being loved. But I’m not. Instead, I’ve been preparing the soil, as it were, for love.

Not solely for one person to love, either! I’ve been learning to be kinder, to be more open and vulnerable, to be more responsible for my feelings.

The beautiful thing about being single is that it’s a great time to unlearn all the fake imitations of love. Because all of that unlove that we try to pass off as love is like rotten plankton; it gets eaten up by other things on the food chain, spreading a lot of indigestion. And nobody’s got time for that!

So, it all starts with the love that we digest—with our love diet!

Being single is about learning how to nourish ourselves so that when we finally do choose to swirl around with an other, we can do so without depending on them to be our plankton dealer. Our happy pill.

When we are nourishing ourselves on the regular, we’re also very keen to when someone is trying to pawn off some inferior-grade plankton. And we say, No thanks, Mister! I’m good. You keep it!

So my Valentine’s Day wish, whether you’re single, coupled, dating, partnered or somewhere in between, is for you to nourish yourself.

Really, really nourish yourself.