Tick Tock, Old Girl
How the mythical dating clock can lead you to settle for less
There’s a scene in Bridget Jones’ Diary where she’s at a dinner party with 7 couples and she’s riding solo. She’s quizzed by an insufferable, curly-haired bloke on her love life mere fractions of a second after her arse hits the chair. “You really ought to hurry up and get sprogged up you know, old girl. Time’s running out. Tick tock” he says. Blegh.
We have an inherent expectation that if someone is single, then they must be looking for their next romantic partner. After a break up, “there are plenty more fish in the sea” is the go-to comfort phrase we offer our broken-hearted pals. When offered this cliché, my reply was always “yeah, but he was my fish” (spoiler: he wasn’t.). You don’t want to hear it when you’ve just broken up with someone you thought you’d have forever with.
Instead of encouraging the newly single friend to utilise this time for themselves, doing what they want to do, emotionally recovering and adjusting to this huge shift to their daily lives, we focus on their future not-single relationship status. Obviously, this isn’t our intention. Everyone means well when they say it; it’s an attempt to present a solution for the prospect of perpetual loneliness which apparently lies ahead of our single friend.
There’s absolutely loads of common phrases which perpetuate the idea of half-ness being single, and wholeness being in a relationship, “my other half”, “my better half”, etcetera. There is such an emphasis on being part of a relationship, that we don’t acknowledge that being single is a choice too, and something to take pride in the ownership of making that choice. While that choice can sometimes be made for you, it doesn’t stop you continuing to make the conscious decision to stay single, to heal and readjust rather than immediately be on the look out for the next partner. You’re choosing to not stay in a relationship which is not serving you or your partner for whatever reason, which is significantly healthier than staying in a relationship that is hurting one or both of you for the sake of status or fear of being alone. Own it!
So why is there such an emphasis on being in a relationship? Enter the clock. Going back to the Bridget Jones dinner party, it’s hard to ignore the pressure hetero/cis women face to get “sprogged up”. Quite frankly, it’s no one’s business if a woman is or isn’t trying to have children, or if she wants them at all, but there is an expectation on women to be in heteronormative relationships, get married, and have children, probably by about 30. Madness.
I could be criticised for heavily generalising, but men are often encouraged to “sow their oats”, women are encouraged to “find a man and settle down”. I remember being 19 and I’d broken up with a boyfriend and an older man said to me, “you just can’t seem to hold a man down, what’s up with you, eh??” I was 19!!!! Not that it matters, but it was my choice to end the relationship, I wanted different things than him for the future, yet I was the one that couldn’t hold him down and there’s something wrong with me? I was the one that had to start settling at 19?
Women’s dating expiry date is seemingly shorter than that of a man’s on the hetero dating scene. By my age, my Mum had me, my grandparents were all married and had 2 children on both sides of my family. Yeah, there’s sort of a Mamma Mia 2 vibe about it, but I feel as if I’m too late to the party and I should’ve had a child by now, but I don’t even want children! It’s never been encouraged by family members, but it is what I’ve grown up with. So we often have generational history and the expectation to partake in the nuclear family structure as contributing factors, not just for women, but everyone.
We see grandparents and parents who found love young, and this conditions us to believe that we need to too, and there’s something wrong if we don’t. We forget that people often stayed in abusive and unhappy relationships in previous generations for a variety of reasons; financial security, social rejection, religious shame, their children, simply having nowhere else to go, all reasons which still exist today. There is a nostalgia exists for a bygone era where divorce rates were lower and people “made it work”, as if not getting divorced is a signpost for a successful marriage, instead of having a genuinely healthy and happy relationship.
The expectation to be either seeking out or be in a relationship stems into the problem that we often actively seek a partner and then settle for far less than we deserve and with partners we are not as compatible with, simply for the sake of companionship. Our standards and boundaries are lowered; while no one is perfect, fundamental differences are set aside for the sake of being back on the dating scene. We feel rushed, and we may not even realise it. The more comfortable we are in ourselves and our single status, the more likely we are to choose a partner for love rather than loneliness. We choose more wisely as we’re content with where we are and who we are, with or without a romantic partner. The more comfortable you are alone, the more likely you are to seek genuine connection and compatibility in a partner rather than ignoring that little niggly voice that is telling you it’s not right. Your date could be stood there, waving a bright red flag in your face, and we still ignore it because we want so desperately to be loved and we think this is the prospect they are offering.
If you’re compromising who you are, making yourself smaller, more palatable and watering yourself down for the person you’re dating, it’s most likely not going to work in the long run anyway, or if it does, there will be some unhealthy imbalance and toxicity in there. If it is short lived, we then compound this idea that there is something wrong, as we feel rejected again and again because we can’t make it work with anyone. Our self-esteem takes a knock, and then we lean further into the desire to have another person validate that we are worthy of love, then we will once again water ourselves down to seek someone to do that.
Yes, all relationships require compromise, but not of who you are. Relationships are about healthy exchange and mutual support, not submission. When you stop feeling the need for romantic love to be complete and validated, the connections you make naturally become healthier for all parties.
We grow up being told fairy tales of Prince Charming and the perfect princess, that we will be saved by love. We will be completed by romantic love. “Soulmates”, “love of my life”, “The One”, “the big day”, “ooh, he’s a little heartbreaker”, all of this as if our life’s goal is to be fulfilled by heterosexual, romantic love, the pinnacle of life. No wonder we’re seeking it! We’re sold it from birth, but there are so many other loves out there. Family, friends, communities, hobbies, self love! Love can be lustful, playful, sexual, platonic, familial; romantic love is just one type and you are not incomplete or less than without it. In the words of the mighty RuPaul Charles, “if you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else? Can I get an Amen up in here?” Amen!
Take care of yourself, properly.
Sophie xox
