How long is too long to be single?
Tenderness, cynical romance and something soft lost along the way
Last weekend, I was standing in front of La Cathédrale at Musée Rodin in Paris, feeling despondent. The marble sculpture depicts two intertwining right hands. To me, hands are the most beautiful part of the body. I was struck by this comparison between lovers’ hands and cathedrals — something sacred, ornate, the heart of a city. Yet tenderness felt far away. Beauty did not move me as much as it should.
I would like to think of myself as a romantic. Someone who could be moved to tears in the halls of a gallery. Who could spend long, slow afternoons writing poetry. Who could hear the universe in the sound of churchbells and morning birdsong. Who feels deeply and loves fully.
Only one day soon, I will be tripped up, caught out, revealed to be the cynic I might truly be. It will happen at three o’clock in the morning when liquor turns my language to venom. Barbed words spew out into the soup of the spring night. I’ll mask it all with physical passion, then leave for another foreign country in the morning.
Scratching the surface of Paris, a layer of shame covers my clothes like dust kicked up by careless tourists at the base of Notre Dame. Because the day before I stood in Musée Rodin thinking of love and hands and cathedrals, someone had told me they wanted me to be more tender. I had wanted to twist my hand in theirs. I had wanted to reach out gently for what I desired, but my ability to be tender has atrophied over the years. My heart is not the cathedral it used to be, but a labyrinth made from ugly, modern architecture.
Losing the ability to be tender is like a slow death sentence. You wait around in your cell, and when the day arrives, you realise you don’t know how to be a feeling person anymore with hot blood pumping through your veins. One morning, your heart dances along the cusp of tenderness, and the next, it’s hard like a statue. It is strong in your palm, then weak in someone else’s arms.
Being tender is like training a muscle. We are supposed to believe that love is natural and easy, but if you have been single for many years, it will feel unnatural and disruptive, like speaking a language you haven’t studied in a very long time. Tenderness is a practice.
How long is too long to be single? The only true, rational answer is, obviously, that there is no such thing as being single for too long. Love is mostly luck. And there are many benefits of long-term singleness; freedom, independence, time to focus on your art and hobbies and friendships and work.
You can throw yourself into everything aside from romance headfirst and reeling. Turn yourself inside out in new cities to be reborn again. Know yourself and love yourself deeply. Yet these are all mixed blessings. After hearing the same positive platitudes too many times, they no longer sound so sweet.
If you stay in the same state for long enough, you must work hard not to fall into the trap it sets for you. For people in relationships, that looks like stagnating in life, or taking romantic love for granted. For single people, it’s tiptoeing around the bitterness and cynicism that springs from perpetual disappointment. But the cure is also the cause. Closing yourself off is falling into the trap.
We measure love and loneliness in years. Time rules over tenderness. And time is always running out. In the Black Mirror episode ‘Hang The DJ’, couples who meet on a dating app can see how long their relationship will last. They can calculate how much tenderness to give each other based on the time they have left. A hot and heavy one night stand or a slow, tender love affair.
The concept is, of course, dystopian, but so are the dating apps that exist in the real world. Time still controls all our movements, even as we search for a moment of tenderness so complete that time is suspended in the ether.
Many of our ancestors never got the opportunity to experience the joys and disappointments of long-term singleness. To live alone. To move to a new country. To have a career. To write. To flirt with someone new and wonder where it might take you. I cry for the women who came before me who dreamed of escaping their repressive marriages to move to Paris and write.
I celebrated my first year of singleness with new friends on a night out in Nantes in 2019. Being alone for a whole year felt good, in a way. But six years later, I approach the date with trepidation. Years keep piling on top of each other like heavy marble slabs. A hand outstretched is crushed between them. Only mangled desire remains.
When Izzi comes to visit, we stare up at Notre Dame at dusk and I say, “Men used to build shit like this and now they just ghost you on Hinge.” If we’re in on the joke, then maybe it’s not so bad. I am fluent in brainrot, but I cannot tell you the truth in the moment in English nor French.
I roll my eyes at vacationing lovers lurching along the Seine or attaching padlocks to the railings at Sacré Cœur, but maybe I could learn something from them. The tenderness of taking someone you love to a city that is known for romance. The giddy folly of no longer caring about clichés because love matters more than being cringe.
At university, I used to toss my head back and say things like, “I think I’m just a relationships person” or “I’ve been lucky with relationships.” First love is like that. You fall into it without the trauma that accumulates in its aftermath. We rarely used words like situationship or ghosting or red flags. We hadn’t cauterised the sinews of our hearts with internet irony yet. It wasn’t always easy, but I knew how to be tender then.
When I left Musée Rodin that day, I put on my headphones and hit play on my playlist of love songs. The Velvet Underground’s ‘I Found A Reason’ hummed into my eardrums as I walked back to the metro station, letting my thoughts linger on the tender embrace of statues. Letting my eyes wander over the intricate buildings like they would observe a lover. All the delicate carvings that someone designed with work and love and tenderness. I memorise a line of poetry in the metro: Mon amour est beaucoup plus grand que mon passé. My past is insubstantial, but my love is not. One day, the tenderness will return.
What I’ve been loving lately:
The song ‘Paris 1919’ by John Cale, a song about a failed wedding in the aftermath of WW1, but weirdly also describes exactly what it feels like to be a British tourist/visitor in Paris.
The David Lynch drag show by Screen Queens I went to last night at Point Éphémère was a fever dream. Might be the best thing I’ve ever seen in Paris.
Rewatching La Prisonnière, a film that shows desire is not always tender, but sometimes feels like getting hit by a train.
this is amazing and hits a little too close to home
This is beautiful!