Am I Single Because of the Choices I’ve Made?

Did I make one too many bad decisions…or did things just happen?

Did I choose this life?

I wonder about that a lot. I am fascinated by the idea of radical responsibility — of the concept that we chose every circumstance in our life. There’s something very empowering about that.

When my ex left me for a younger woman, I thought I could take that to epic levels. It was my fault, I decided. I had chosen to date a younger man who was “biologically predisposed” to want younger and younger women as he aged. My fault. I had forgiven him the first time he had an affair and set a precedent. My fault. I had not been a perfect partner. My fault.

Miraculously, I found that there were millions of ways that I could blame myself for what had happened. And it felt good for a while. I needed to be able to take back control in a situation that had left me feeling powerless.

He left because I chose that.

With that power, I hoped I could rise again from the absolute devastation that my life became in the wake of his departure. I didn’t have to sit around feeling angry with him when I had to find a new place to live and could barely afford a shitty duplex on my nonprofit salary. I didn’t have to make voodoo dolls out his image and stab them with pins to direct the rage I felt when my dog died and he wasn’t there to help me bury him or grieve. I didn’t have to cry and scream into my pillow when I felt so alone I thought I was going to die, too.

It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t fair to be angry with him.

I chose this.

It took me years — literally, years — to realize that the whole “radical responsibility” thing was much more complex than that.

How do you account for the choices one makes in response to someone else’s choices, for instance?

I stayed because he kept apologizing. I stayed because he kept telling me he loved me and didn’t want to lose me, but was just afraid to commit. I stayed because almost every time I left, he came chasing after me, begging me to come back. I stayed because I didn’t always know how to distinguish his lies from the truth.

It wasn’t so simple as “my fault,” as many friends kept trying to tell me.

I still refuse to make a full shift and saddle him with all the blame. That’s absolutely not fair. Two people were involved here and we both deserve a large helping of the blame.

But if I refuse to hold him 100% responsible, then why do I so often insist on holding myself 100% responsible?

How much of my life today is “my fault?” The result of my choices?

As I go flying at the speed of light into middle age, I find that people often scold me for expressing grief over the current state of my life. I am single and childless, a statement that always makes me feel like I’m living in a parallel universe. How did that happen?

People often say it was my choice, though. If I had really wanted to get married, wouldn’t I have? If I had really wanted children, I could’ve just adopted, right?

My favorite comment is when people tell me I was promiscuous in my twenties, a time when everyone else was getting married and having kids — that I deliberately gave up my chance to make a lasting relationship by sleeping around, and therefore, it should be no surprise to me that I’m in this boat now.

If I had really wanted to get married, wouldn’t I have? If I had really wanted children, I could’ve just adopted, right?

I never know whether to laugh or punch a pillow when I hear that. Yes, I love to talk about my sexual exploits when I was going to art school in Santa Fe. But I’ve always been clear that that was one year of my life — one year, not all of my twenties.

Further, I’ve never over-exaggerated the number of partners I had. I’m not going to use actual numbers, because I think that sets a bad precedent (why should that matter so damn much?), but let’s just say that a “handful” would best describe the amount of partners I had back then. I mean, shit, how many people do you think a person as repressed as I was could go through in a year? I wish I had been “promiscuous.”

So did my one year of giving indiscriminate blow jobs or rolling around naked in the basement of my Catholic college’s library really define the rest of my adulthood? Because of that one year of my life, I’m supposed to take responsibility for the fact that I “gave up” the chance to be a wife or a mother? That seems a little much to me.

Do people not meet and marry in their thirties, too?

That was my next plan, by the way. Granted, I chose someone much, much younger — not the best idea I’ve ever had — but in the first year of our relationship, he was extremely domestic-minded. He talked all the time about what it would be like if we were married and had kids. He specifically and regularly told me he wanted that.

It wasn’t until we moved in together that he confessed he wasn’t sure he believed in marriage, didn’t want to get married before 30, and didn’t want kids.

And I thought if I gave him time and space, he’d grow into it. I thought he had cold feet. I thought it was perfectly natural that he would want to wait until he was a bit older to make major life decisions.

The only problem was…his timeline would’ve made it too late for me. One of us was on a clock, after all.

What exactly is our culpability when it comes to our circumstances in life?

I wonder if childless men in their forties ever get the feedback that they “chose” this because they didn’t get married (or were “promiscuous”) in their twenties.

And what about other life circumstances?

Did the people who lost their businesses in this pandemic choose their circumstances because they didn’t have enough savings or a better contingency plan?

Did people who were diagnosed with chronic illness choose that because they weren’t mentally strong enough to manifest good health?

Did my friends who lost their homes in the recent fires choose that because they decided to buy property in the drought-infected West?

Or do things just sometimes happen, despite our best intentions?

I wonder if childless men in their forties ever get the feedback that they “chose” this because they didn’t get married (or were “promiscuous”) in their twenties.

Yes, I think I’m responsible for the life I’m living now. I made very poor choices when it came to partners. I tolerated too much. I didn’t prioritize my own desires and needs. I was terrified to ask for more than what I had.

I also think that life just happened. That I am not 100% responsible for the fact that I didn’t have the family that I had hoped to have.

And frankly, I think the old, easy-to-spout philosophy that a woman “made her choices” by “sleeping around” in her twenties is overwhelmingly sexist. No one would ever say that about a man, and not just because he can make babies until the day he dies, but because we don’t expect men to settle down and get on with their monogamous business as soon as they reach sexual maturity, as we do with women.

In fact, it’s so much easier to say something was someone’s choice than to experience the vulnerability of compassion for them. We all know life is precarious as hell. One day, we could lose everything in the blink of an eye. I guess it’s so much more comforting to believe that we figured out the game. It can’t happen to us because we saved enough money, we have that “success mentality,” and oh yeah, we locked down our partners in our twenties, suckers.

Maybe it’s a little scary to look at someone like me and realize that your husband might be hiding an affair from you right now, that your plans to get pregnant when your partner is finally ready might never come to happen, that your wife might walk out on you tomorrow without a look back.

So it has to be my fault. I had to have made these choices — otherwise, it might be unbearable to think about how random life can be.

Grief hits me at the most random of moments. Mostly, I’m happy enough with my life. But sometimes, I remember the life I had dreamed of and it hurts so much that it never happened.

I found a doll from my childhood in a box in my garage the other day. I was saving it to give to my daughter. I carelessly threw it into the back of my car so I can give it to my nieces when I visit my sister in a few weeks.

I don’t even care about that doll, anymore. It means nothing to me now.

But I cried later. For what, exactly, I’m not sure. Ghosts. Dreams that turned into intangible filaments of smoke when I tried to grab for them.

Did I choose this? Is this my “fault” because I screwed around with a handful of guys when I was 25 and spent my thirties with a commitment-phobic partner?

Do I, as this all implies, deserve this grief? And is this (also implied) the end of the road for me?

If you asked me those questions in regard to someone else, I would say, emphatically, no.

But for myself, I don’t know.

I could have made different choices. And I didn’t.

© Yael Wolfe 2020

Musings on the single life: