Single On Purpose: Prioritizing Self-Love and Personal Growth in Your Journey Through Life, Dating, and Relationships

by John Kim

The truth is, you don’t have to be in a relationship to be happy. Sure, a relationship can bring you lots of joy. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be in a relationship—we’re all human. But a relationship is not required for you to be happy. It’s not the only way to find joy in your life. Your happiness isn’t contingent on loving someone else. That’s something that’s been programmed into you by movies, advertising, social norms, social media, and old blueprints.

Singlehood isn’t just about being single. Singlehood is about being a whole person.

And when you do meet someone—because of course you will—you will bring a more interesting, alluring set of skills and experiences to the table. Instead of meeting someone who will save you from your situation, you will meet someone who can share your current joys.

Love and relationships are only one part of your life, not your entire life. There are so many other aspects of your life that are meaningful and fulfilling. Your art. Your career. Exercising your voice and the dent you’re going to make in this world. Your friendships. Your family. Your passions and hobbies. Your curiosity leading you to explore, learn, grow, and expand. When you actually build your own life, a life that is honest to you and stands on its own, the fear of being alone starts to fade.

Then, we get into relationships. We feel a sense of worth and importance. We feel desirable. And because we finally feel seen, we believe we have found ourselves. But what actually has happened is that we have begun losing ourselves in someone else. We discover codependency, unhealthy love, and heartbreak. Over and over. Eventually, we believe we are not only defective but unlovable. We develop poor coping strategies that create a pattern of self-destruction. This creates more disconnection as we lose trust in others, but more importantly in ourselves. We become putty, moldable by others. We do anything we can do to prove we actually matter, have value, and are lovable. We buy things to fill a void and lock our dial on “Achieve.”

Doing things for the outcome rather than for the joy of the process disconnects you from yourself. You start chasing. You get desperate. You forget your “why.” But most importantly, you don’t allow yourself to be happy until you get what you want. And if that never comes, you never practice being happy. (Yes, happy is built through daily practice. It’s not a light switch to flip on or a destination to arrive at.) So instead of practicing happy, I just worried and dreaded and saw the glass as half empty. The sky was always falling. This mindset kept me trapped, stunted, and in a low-grade fight-or-flight state. You can’t enjoy life when your body thinks it’s dying. It made me hollow.

Okay, now forget about liking yourself. Because that takes time. You’ll work on it. What about love? Love is a choice. How do you like to be loved by someone? At the end of the day, to love someone means to respect them, treat them well, allow them to be heard, validate and support them, and champion their story. Right? Not just in action but also in words. Actions and words go hand in hand. If someone treats you well but speaks to you like shit, that’s not love. Or if someone speaks to you with love and kindness but treats you like shit, that’s not love. It comes down to actions and words, and they should line up. That’s how you love someone. Anything else isn’t love. And if it’s not love, there is no way to build a healthy relationship. Sound familiar?

Self-care could mean telling yourself you matter. Acknowledging how far you’ve come and who you are today because of it. Not bashing yourself every time you “fuck up.” Practicing self-compassion and forgiveness, which, by the way, is a daily choice. Being easier on yourself. Giving yourself space to be human. Self-care is building a better relationship with yourself by listening to yourself and giving yourself what you need and deserve.

All those ways in which you’re not supporting and speaking to yourself are the ways you should support and speak to the people you love. That’s what you need to work on.

Regular exercise and good nutrition are the by-products of the healthy relationship you’ve built with yourself. Instead of yo-yoing, you have a relationship with your body that’s sustainable and steady.

Men also define themselves by their bodies. It starts with idolizing superheroes, and that follows us into locker rooms and onto the football field, the basketball court, the baseball diamond. If we don’t have muscles, we are seen as weak. Or maybe it’s not physical strength we lack but physical ability. We notice the attention boys get when they can skate, surf, throw, tackle. If we don’t have these abilities, we are the last one picked for teams. And we internalize a belief that our lack of physical ability makes us less than.

No, we don’t get as much pressure from society and advertising as women do. But we do get it from other men. And from porn. We internalize the images and expectations about penis size, performance, body types. Porn stars used to be chubby with mustaches. Now they look like abnormally endowed quarterbacks. This brainwashing pollutes our sense of worth as well as our relationships, hurting the people we care about the most. Let’s take a detour to see what this looks like in real life.

When she told her community and her husband what she was doing, they all supported her. The more she connected, accepted, and dropped into her body, the happier she became. The pressure to be a superhero was gone, and the giant weight she’d been carrying since age fifteen was lifted off her. People loved and looked up to Anna for being Anna, not what her body could do. Wonder Woman realized she didn’t need the bracelets after all.

Feel the hot coffee going down your throat and notice how that makes your body feel. Notice your grip on the steering wheel. Notice sensations in your body as you listen to music or a podcast. Or when someone cuts you off. Notice where your mind goes when you sit in rush hour traffic, but more important, notice how each thought makes your body feel.

Does anyone really do this? Of course not. Mainly because we’re thinking all the time. I mean, who’s got the time to notice how they feel in their body every minute of the day? But if you don’t make an effort to do just that, you will always be disconnected from your body. Living in your head and leading with logic prevents you from being present. The here and now is where life is lived, and the way to get there is through your body, not your mind. You can’t think life. You live it by feeling it. To reconnect with your body, you have to reset your default from thinking to being. As a daily practice. It may feel awkward at first because you’re not used to it. After all, you’re changing years and years of wiring. But through practice, being instead of thinking will get easier.

Your body is a radar system that guides you on your journey. It’s where your intuition, soul, and truth live. If you don’t drop into your body, accept it, listen to it, and feel it, you will not know yourself, or like yourself. You will make decisions that are not honest to you. You’ll become a walking shell.

The activity doesn’t matter. What matters is that you listen to and connect with your body through movement. You have to enjoy the movement. If you don’t, you won’t connect.

You establish a healthier relationship with your body by accepting it, dropping into it, and moving with it. Not once, but as a lifestyle.

According to neuroscience expert and bestselling author Dr. Joe Dispenza, we have approximately sixty thousand thoughts a day. Most of those thoughts not only are negative but are the same thoughts we had yesterday. So besides swimming in our own shit, we are also living in the past. Really think about this. It’s a game-changer. The same thoughts produce the same feelings, which produce the same behavior, which leads to the same experiences. And I’ll take this one step further. Having the same experiences cements the same false beliefs. Basically, we live in a loop—a pattern that keeps us stuck and disconnected, not only from ourselves but also from the world.

It’s this one fact: those negative voices don’t belong to you.

I grew up in a house of panic: all we cared about was how much fried chicken we sold (we owned a Popeye’s Chicken). Life was black or white. Good if we sold a lot of chicken. Bad if we didn’t. And yeah, I get it. My parents grew up in poverty and their mental dials are permanently set on survival. But now I knew mine didn’t have to be.

I started thinking about all the external influences on my thoughts and ways of thinking. I thought about the blueprints I was following and whether they were honest to me (more about this in Act II). Although our thoughts are our own, they have been influenced by teachers, parents, boyfriends, girlfriends, and unhealthy experiences. We acquire desires that don’t even belong to us. Realizing this felt like a huge weight being lifted. It made me understand that I wasn’t at fault. That I’m not defective. That I am a product of where I grew up, who raised me, and what has happened to me. And I realized I could return that shit and think new thoughts, choose my own ways of thinking.

Step 1 is to become aware of this. Notice your thoughts. Don’t judge them. Just practice noticing them. Also, notice the feeling in your body when you have those thoughts. Notice. Notice. Notice. Watch your thoughts as if they were drifting in a snow globe.

Break this pattern by questioning your thoughts. Is there truth in them or are they tainted? Put your thoughts on trial. Know that thoughts are not facts. They’re just thoughts. They will come and go. Don’t get attached to them and allow them to get so heavy and negative that they drown you.

Once you get this distance on your thoughts, you can see yourself as an experiment. You can notice things instead of judging them. This is where you can really get traction.

Your mind is just as important as your stomach. If you feed it shit, you will feel shitty. Treat your mind well by feeding it good things. It’s time to consume what will enrich you as an individual.

Remember, whatever you feed will grow. If you watch nothing but what’s wrong in the world, you will not want to leave your house or have children.

Just Googling shit on the internet isn’t as powerful as reading or listening to books. Books are more than information. They have stories, voice, and perspective. They are personal and will leave a much greater imprint than Google ever will. I’ve learned more from audiobooks than from all my traditional school education combined. They’ve really changed my life. Now I feed my brain by “reading” constantly.

You connect to yourself by treating your mind better. Thread books, audio or print, into your daily life. Books make you better. I promise.

The desire to know your soul will end all other desires.

You can feed your soul by turning your phone off and reading a good book.

This is common in relationships. When we find someone we want to spend all our time with, we do. And we slowly lose our friends. Not having friends makes us disconnect from ourselves. And when we disconnect from ourselves, we also disconnect from our partner. We think we’ve found paradise, but we’ve created our own desert island. Yes, your partner can be your best friend. But he or she cannot be your only friend.

Dance for you and other people will dance with you. Dance for others and you become a show. Not a person.

When you’re single, it’s more important to have good friends than to find a partner.

We were one courageous extraverted decision away from entering any one of the micro communities available to us.

Breaking up with friends is different from breaking up with a partner. There is no breakup. There is only a fading-out. All you have to do is allow people to go their own way, naturally. You start.

Simply put, healthy relationships encourage us to connect with ourselves. Unhealthy relationships prevent us from connecting with ourselves.

When we combine finding our value in someone else with what smells familiar, we get unhealthy dysfunctional love that feels fucking amazing.

Did I mention the sticky feels amazing? That’s because drama, jealousy, control, and chasing get intense and it’s easy to mistake intensity for love.

Your thirties is when you need to take ownership and work through your shit.

All of this drives us to search for love, for “the one.” We approach this search like our life depends on it. It becomes our Holy Grail. But we never learn about the smaller steps in the process, the dynamics of a real relationship and how to have a healthy one. We don’t learn about codependency, attachment styles, and healthy boundaries, or about why we behave the way we do in love. We are just thrown into the forest to stumble around and learn what we can from our fall(s). With no tools or knowledge of what a healthy relationship actually looks like, we love strictly with what we feel and what we’re used to. Love then becomes a knee-jerk response to the other person stemming from our wounds, a way to fill holes in ourselves.

You had come to believe that this was what loving someone looked like—sacrifice. Until you woke up one day and didn’t know either of the people in the mirror. You had been completely oblivious to how you actually felt just because you were too afraid to be alone, and so was your partner brushing his teeth behind you.

Everything that has happened in that relationship, good or bad, is a part of your story and a part of you. If you reject parts of your story, you are rejecting and thus disconnecting with parts of yourself.

Acceptance is the beginning of any healing. When we don’t accept something, it continues to grow, like a virus. We may be able to bury it for a while by distracting ourselves, but it will eventually come back. By rejecting it, denying it, pretending like it never happened, or minimizing its ongoing impact on us, we actually continue to feed it, allowing it to grow until it makes us destructive—to ourselves, to other people, or to another relationship. Whether you’re dealing with a job loss, an illness, or an expired relationship, acceptance is the first and the most important step to getting past it.

As you start to accept what happened, you will naturally start to move on. I’m going to give you another new definition: You are not moving on. You are moving through. Acceptance isn’t a corner you turn. It’s a journey, and journeys take time. But eventually a journey can lead you back to the village a changed person, because with every journey there is a transformation. You have to go through the process. You are grieving. You are sad. You are angry, and you are allowing yourself to be angry. You have looked at the crash and taken ownership for your part. You have examined the black box. Learn the lessons and apply them to your life. You are a better version of yourself because of what happened and everything you learned from it about love, life, and, most important, yourself.

I hadn’t yet learned that relationship dysfunction feels like crack cocaine. And that’s what I was chasing. Not love. Real love doesn’t knock your socks off. Real love holds up a mirror.

People think that when you get into a relationship, the work stops. You’re done. You’ve made it. You’ve found someone. You’ve reached the island. Thank God! You don’t have to “date yourself” (aka work on yourself) anymore. But the truth is, even more self-work is needed when you’re in a relationship than when you’re single. Because now the chances of you returning to who you used to be before you embarked on your self-betterment journey are much greater.

When you’re single, you’re just dealing with your own shit—all your triggers, addictions, unhealthy tugs, thought patterns, and behaviors that keep you stunted and stuck at yesterday. When you’re in a relationship, you’re now dealing with your shit plus someone else’s shit too. Since everyone has shit, this is unavoidable. If you have a story, you have shit. How much of it you’ve worked through depends on how much you’ve worked on you.

Your relationship has expired. It was not meant to last one day more or less. It has run its course. Not because of you or your partner, but for a different reason: your relationship hit its expiration date. You have to believe that.

There’s no way around this one. You must unfriend, unfollow, and unsubscribe. Stop texting and calling. Resist the urge to leave voicemail. You have to let go. Maybe not forever. Maybe the two of you can be friends one day. But that won’t come unless you give yourself space now. If you don’t, you’re just peeling scabs. You’re holding two hostages: your ex, and you. Respect the relationship and what you had by respecting the expiration. Draw firm boundaries.