Coexistence?

I'm really enjoying being single. My time is my time and I get to do whatever I choose with it. I don't have to worry about satisfying someone else's needs. No taking care of other people when they're down and out. No having to listen to someone else blab on about their day and pretend to care, etc.

However, that means that, by being single, I don't have anyone to take care of me when I'm down and out, and there's no one there to listen to me blab on about my day and feign interest. In a way, it's a Catch 22 - a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't situation. It's this fact alone that causes us to compromise our own lives in order to make room for another's.

If being engaged once and almost engaged twice has taught me anything, it's that selfishness gets you nowhere. There is a point in a relationship where you stop thinking of you and your partner as two seperate entities, and you truly become one organism. Your wants are his wants. Your needs are his needs - and vice versa. If you're good at it, you enter a symbiotic relationship, and if you really learn to depend on one another - to count on one another - then you end up becoming two halves of the same thing - unable to function without the support of the other.

That's the way a true relationship works (romantic or not). When you're joined by a true union, being apart or out of touch is unbearable because all you yearn for is your other half - the person who knows you, sometimes, better than you know yourself. I had that once, and I gave it up because I didn't understand that unions like that are hard to come by. Trust me, if I could do it all over again, I would - and differently!

You see, all the hype about losing yourself in a relationship and compromising yourself is not all that bad. You're sacrificing just a little part of who you are in order to gain a whole other half of you who will sustain and care for you for as long as you want them in your life. And the great thing is that, if you decide to get rid of them (or if they leave you), the parts of you that you let go to begin with will grow back.

But it's a small price to pay, this compromise, in order to coexist. After all, to coexist means to exist together. It's not a "you versus me" situation. And that's something that, being single, I have the all the time in the world to think about.