Lies Single Ladies Tell Each Other

8 Comforting Lies We Tell Each Other About Being Single

Every one of them is built to make you feel better in the next ninety seconds

It is eleven at night and someone in the group chat says the third guy in a row has gone quiet. Within four minutes there are five replies, and all of them are kind and not one of them is true.

I have four close friends, and we have been doing this to each other for years. One is engaged to a man who is reliable and a little boring, and she is happy. One has been into something for two years she will not put a name to, and she defends it in the chat. One ends things fast, every single time, and calls it knowing her worth. One is not dating right now, and she is the calm one.

We love each other. We also hand each other lines that keep us exactly where we are, and we say them with total confidence, and we have never once called it what it is.

Here is what I have started to notice about the nice things we say.

“He was intimidated by you” is the easiest breakup story to keep

Advice a friend gives cancels the advice they gave you last week

Long list of standards is usually covering for

And 5 more which I’ll share below where I think each one leaves you.

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1. The one where he was intimidated

A friend said this to me at twenty, and I kept it for two years. He had ended things after a few months and I could not find a reason, so she gave me one. He was threatened by you. You have your own place, you have a job you like, you talk a lot. It fit, so I took it home.

Here is what I think now.

Aman who is doing fine does not walk away from a woman because she is doing fine too. The version where he was scared of me is a story where I am impressive and he is small, and it is a much nicer story than the real one, where he met me properly and decided he did not want it.

That is allowed. People get to not want you.

Any breakup reason that makes you the impressive one is worth holding up to the light before you keep it.

I did not want people who were perfectly good, and nobody sat them down to explain I was intimidated. This line costs nothing to believe, and it lands like a compliment. Those are the two things that make a story hard to put back down.

2. When every man out there is trash

The friend who will not name her relationship says this about once a month, and every time, I think about counting.

Two bad men is two bad men. Nine bad men is a pattern, and a pattern is being picked by somebody. I am not saying she earned any of it. I am saying she keeps walking into the same building and getting surprised by the same stairs.

I want to be careful, because this line gets turned into a weapon. Plenty of women have had genuinely awful things done to them and then been told to look inward, and that is cruel. Being lied to is not a character flaw.

Still, one man behaving badly and a run of them are different sizes of information. Nobody in a group wants to be the one who says so. I have sat quietly through that exact conversation more times than I want to admit.

3. The idea that you were too much

This one bothers me more than the rest, and it took me a while to work out why.

It sounds like it is on your side. Underneath it sits the idea that being yourself is a volume problem, and somewhere out there is a man with the patience to survive you. That is a grim way to think about your own personality, and my friends pass it to me like a present.

The version I believe is duller and kinder. I am a specific person. Loud about some things, quiet about the things people expect me to be loud about, bored by a lot of what other people find fun. Some men like it and some do not.

Not a match is a whole sentence.

The ones who walked did not fail a test. They met a specific person and picked a different life, and that reads as smaller and less dramatic than my friends want it to be. It still fits the facts better than a theory about volume.

4. You are better off single anyway

They say this within about four minutes of me sounding sad, and I have said it to them faster than that.

It is a reflex, someone you love is hurting so you grab the nearest thing that shrinks the hurt, and the nearest thing is telling her she did not want it anyway. I get the pull. I have done it while cooking, while half listening, while thinking about my own week.

The problem is it ends the conversation. She was about to say something real about what she saw and let go of, and now she has to agree that she is better off, so she does, and we move on to work.

I have started saying nothing instead. It feels terrible for about a minute. Then it gets better, because she fills the quiet with the thing she called to say, and I find out what she has been carrying around all week.

5. The list you keep calling your standards

I believe in standards. I also think most of what we call standards is a list, and the two are not the same.

A standard is something like this: he tells me when he is upset instead of going cold for three days. It is about how a person runs, and you find out inside a couple of months. A list is a height, a job title, a salary, a kind of humor, a car.

A standard is about how a person behaves. A list is about how they look written down.

The women I know with the longest lists are not picky.

They are scared, and a long list is a good way to never get close enough to be hurt again. I did the same thing for a year, after I left the relationship, I should have left a year sooner. It felt like taste at the time and it reads as fear now.

6. When you two only had bad timing

Timing is the most popular excuse in my phone and I have used it twice.

Sometimes it is real. Someone is deep in a parent’s illness or a job that is eating them, and there is nothing there to build on yet. That happens and it is nobody’s fault.

Most of the time, when I said it was timing, what I meant was he did not want it enough to move anything around. That is the same information, handed gently to myself, in a way that let me keep thinking about him for another month.

People make time for what they want. I have made time for things I wanted while my life was on fire. So has everyone reading this, and that is the part of it nobody enjoys saying out loud.

7. Being told to put yourself out there

I have been out there. I am out there now. I have been out there in a coffee shop on a Tuesday with a man who talked about his ex for forty minutes.

The thinking behind this one is that dating is a numbers game and the answer is more. More apps, more yes, more coffee. I tried that and what I got was tired, and tired makes you worse at it, so the volume worked against me.

Nobody mentions the cost of the numbers game to a person whose time is already spoken for. A shift that starts at seven. A parent who needs help on weekends. Telling those people to do more is not advice. It is a shrug with good manners.

Fewer and slower has been better for me. Has more ever worked for you, or only left you worn out?

8. It happens when you stop looking

The last one, and the hardest to argue with, because it sounds like wisdom and it cannot be tested.

You cannot stop looking on purpose. The second you try; you are looking with an extra step. It is the dating version of being told to relax, which has never once caused a human being to relax.

I think people mean something reasonable by it. Wanting it badly is visible, and it changes how you sit across a table from a stranger. So, say that. Say it comes off as pressure, and pressure is hard to sit near for an hour.

Instead, they hand you a promise about the universe. Now the woman hearing it has one more thing to fail at, on top of everything she already walked in carrying. That is a strange gift to give someone who called you sad.

What I think is going on with all eight

Here is the pattern when I lay them side by side.

Every one of these is built to make the person feel better in the next ninety seconds, not in a month. And they work, which is why we keep them, and why I reach them the second a friend calls me upset.

I watched two pieces of advice land on the same friend in the same week. One says she is the common thread and needs to look hard at herself. The other says to give him space, pick up a hobby, and let it be. Both are said to be full of confidence. Together they cancel out, and she is left holding two instructions that point opposite ways while everyone feels helpful.

The kind reply helps for about ninety seconds, and that is exactly how long it was built to help.

The one thing my group chat has never said to me is that I might be doing something in month three that I cannot see. Years of this, and not once. I have never said it to them either, so I am not standing over anyone here.

Something in that silence is worth more than all eight kinds of lines put together. None of us has offered it yet, and I think we know it, and we keep picking up the phone anyway.

-Jorry