There’s a recurring thread I’ve seen lately online, whether it’s in the comments here or in a few of the other forae where I lurk: an increasing sense of desperation for a relationship.
As we’re running headlong into the holiday season, it’s only natural for the singletons amongst us to look around at all of the happy couples with a certain level of bitterness and envy. When you’re single and alone in a season that celebrates relationships and togetherness1 it’s hard not to feel an empty hole in your life that can only be filled with the sort of love that’s only found in coffee commercials.

But because the strongest force in the universe is irony rather than gravity, it can seem that the harder you strive for finding that special someone, the more it slips away from you. This in turn makes you even more determined to find it… and so the cycle perpetuates itself. As this goes on, you become increasingly bitter and upset, complaining about the “impossible standards” of others while simultaneously trying to meet or exceed those standards because you know that your life will be incomplete until you find that special someone.
The problem is that you’ve fallen into a classic trap: you’ve started becoming desperate and needy.
And neediness is the antithesis of attraction. It is the magic formula to make relationships disappear and drive off potential life-partners. It is the magical formula to make sex disappear.
- and is immediately followed up by the Lover’s Day of Holy Obligation – an equally shitty time to be single [↩]