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

by John Kim

Because there’s more to life than who we choose to love.

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

A thriving relationship is one in which two whole people come together and do life with each other, not at or around each other.

if you muster the courage to start working on yourself instead of just focusing on who you’re going to love, the universe will work through you to make your story bigger than you.

Then, when you meet someone who deserves you, you will only bring more to the table as a whole person who is going somewhere.

My point is, I have a complicated story, just like you do. I’ve been through some shit, just like you have. And I didn’t come out the other side. Because there is no other side. Your journey never ends. It just changes as you change. But the journey only happens if you decide to go on it. There is a call to action. If you decide not to embark on the voyage, you will always live in the past. You will stay muted. Angry. Miserable. Incomplete.

Radical acceptance is the practice of accepting life on life’s terms and not resisting what you cannot change. Radical acceptance is about saying yes to life, just as it is.

yes, you can want a partner, but life doesn’t have to stop because you don’t have one. The more you accept this truth, the sooner you will stop feeling that being single is linked to a lower sense of worth, the less you will tell yourself you need to find someone to be happy, and the more you will be present in your life instead of obsessing about the future.

Instead of meeting someone who will save you from your situation, you will meet someone who can share your current joys.

This is what gave me my power back. Asking myself Where am I going? before asking myself Who is going with me?

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.

We continue to drift further from ourselves, and the more we disconnect from ourselves, the more we crave connecting with someone else.

Read that sentence again. This is why so many of us fall into lukewarm relationships that lead to years of misery and heartbreak. Relationships we know aren’t right but we don’t want to be alone. Or we think we can fix because fixing things is how we find value in ourselves. But we can’t fix other people. And we’ll always only be 50 percent of any relationship. So even if we could be perfect, that would be only half and half is not enough.

What breaks us is not losing a job, or friends, or even a marriage. What breaks us is drifting away from ourselves for too long. It’s not a single event. It’s that gradual drift.

Doing things for the outcome rather than for the joy of the process disconnects you from yourself.

We are not born just to do things. Or just to love other people. Our potency and our path forward are first found in our connection with ourselves. And it’s through this connection, this evolving, growing, expanding relationship with ourselves, that we honestly, genuinely, and meaningfully do things and love people.

Reconnecting with your spirit can be anything that brings you back to yourself, that makes you feel alive and human. That allows the essence of you to shine.

Most people find it hard to pay attention to themselves. Because they haven’t truly dated themselves. They’ve just done a lot of things alone, never particularly noticing how they felt. There’s a huge difference. Like the difference between making love and fucking someone you barely know or like. The movements may be the same, but one experience connects you to yourself and builds self-esteem. The other disconnects you from yourself and drains your self-esteem.

It was a new experience that was uncomfortable and challenging. But feeding your soul isn’t always about doing things that feel good. It’s about doing what makes you feel alive, and alive sometimes lives near death.

The thing about growth is that it isn’t a constant. Just because you’ve done work on yourself doesn’t mean you’re done or won’t snap back into old ways. We are like rubber bands. Working on yourself is a never-ending process, not a onetime thing. We connect and disconnect with ourselves constantly, depending on where we’re at in our lives, what we’re going through, and the quality of our relationships.

this is the one for me.

When you own your part in the breakup, you can start growing again. You circle what happened with a red marker, but you also remind yourself that you’re human. Taking ownership makes you accept the breakup, learn from it, and form a desire to be better. No space for growth can be created when you’re defensive, make excuses, pull away from logic, and tell yourself and everyone else all the reasons why it wasn’t your fault. You’re running away from yourself instead of toward yourself. You’re moving on, but you’re not moving through.

We search for our next ride right after getting off the last one, without giving ourselves any time to really process what happened and how we feel about it. Obviously, it’s uncomfortable to be alone, and we want an easy fix. But love is not an amusement park. If you just keep jumping from one ride to the next, you will only repeat patterns. Nothing will change. I know I said it before but I’ll say it again. The soil for growth is so rich when you’re single. But only if you are focusing on you. Not on finding someone else.

This is why it’s so important to focus on you when you’re single. You will also bring a more whole and authentic version of yourself to the table when you find someone who deserves you.

But working on your relationship with yourself isn’t just about doing things alone. It’s about being alone. On purpose. Sitting with everything that comes up, however uncomfortable. Finally breaking the patterns you fall into to cope and numb when you are alone by noticing what comes up and why. This is the inner work. The hard work. This is what focusing on you looks like. This is where you build the relationship with yourself. It’s an inside-out process, not an outside-in process. As you do this work, you also practice self-compassion and forgiveness. Accept your story, let go of what you need to let go of, and start leaning into your evolution.

Many of us forget that a rich colorful life doesn’t just happen. We have to engage in it for color to appear, and it requires effort and intention.