On being single in a world built for families

Hello! With this thread, I'd like to narrow down the focus a bit: the additional challenges, material or otherwise, that one faces living as a single adult in society, and ways to deal with these challenges.

I'll start with a set of governing questions for this thread. I intend these to be fundamental questions that apply to most people dealing with single life that they can answer with specific examples. If the questions we're asking and answering evolve into something else, that's OK; I've created this so we can learn the right questions to ask as well as the best answers to those questions.

• If you are single: How does not having a steady partner make living and working as an independent adult more difficult for you than for someone like you who has a steady partner?
  
• If you have always been single: How does not having the past experience of being with a partner make living and working as an independent adult more difficult for you than for someone like you who is single right now, but who has had one or more steady partners?
  
• If you feel difficulty with yourself from being single or always having been single: Do you find that dealing with such difficulty impedes your career, your life as an independent adult, and your relations with other people?
• If you've been through any of these and learned how to deal with them while remaining single: How have you dealt with these challenges at the time you've faced them, and what do you wish you'd known then that you know now?

 

For a start: I've always noticed that without a partner, the range of ways I can spend my free time and enjoy it is very limited. For example, there's a play in my area that I'd like to see, but where I live, plays are typically activities for date nights. What this means is if I were to go by myself, I'd be by myself surrounded by people on dates, and I'd not be able to enjoy the play. Similarly, at least three of my coworkers went on trips to the mountains this fall with their partners. I enjoy hiking in the mountains, but going on a long hike by myself would be somewhat dangerous, I wouldn't be sharing the experience with anyone, and I'd be paying the full cost of driving to the mountains by myself. I haven't gone to the mountains for the past few years since I there haven't been enough single people I knew who were interested in going.

And something I learned recently: headphones and a good set of music playlists for various situations are a helpful tool for living and working. Often while I was in a group doing something (such as with coworkers taking a lunch break), people would start talking about living with partners and having families, and I'd be disengaged from the conversation at best, and miserable, unfocused, and unproductive for the rest of the week at worst. Now, music in such situations not only allows me to remove myself from a difficult situation (but it's not always an appropriate response), but also it distracts me from negative thoughts and feelings so that I can readily return to work or whatever else I'm doing.

 

I can relate to feeling limited in how you can spend your free time. Often when I want to go to concerts I end up not being able to go because I would have to go alone and usually its too far to drive alone at night. In fact, I don't go out very much because most of my friends are either in a relationship (and would rather spend time together as a couple) or aren't really the types of people with whom I would go out by myself.

Being single is quite depressing for me at times because I see so many people around me all the time who are in a relationship and I just want to experience what they have.

As such, I used to deal with feelings of loneliness with PMO. Needless to say, that affected my life to an extent as I wasted a lot of time browsing for P and watching it. I feel like I wouldn't have the need to PMO if I was in a relationship.