We’re living through some difficult, tumultuous times — and it can feel even harder to be living through them as a single person. Whether it’s navigating housing, health insurance, or the social scene, it can feel like everything is harder and more complicated when you don’t have a partner. There are some material challenges to being single — which is why it’s so important to develop a real commitment to self-care as a single lesbian. What does self-care actually mean, outside of getting massages or ordering delivery? Here’s what I recommend for single lesbians trying to take care of themselves in meaningful ways.
Get comfortable with being alone
If you’re used to being in a serious relationship, especially if you were living with a partner, one of the hardest things to get used to is just the fact of being by yourself most of the time. It can feel weird to be in the apartment alone at night after a breakup, or lonely to come home after a long day of work to an empty space.
It’s normal for there to be an adjustment period, and living alone can have its challenges. But one of the greatest things you can do for yourself — single or not — is to learn to actively enjoy your own company, and like being alone rather than enduring it when you feel like you have no other choice. Notice how you spend your time when you’re by yourself — are you treating it like time to kill, swiping mindlessly on your phone or just letting Netflix play while you shop online? These aren’t inherently bad activities, but the message you send to yourself is that time alone is something to try to pass as quickly as possible until you get to something really worthwhile: time with other people.
What would it look like to be purposeful about your alone time? You may have heard about “dating yourself,” or organizing outings or activities to do alone with the same level of intentionality you would bring to a date with a romantic partner. This is a great practice, but you can learn to enjoy time with yourself even outside of “date night.” Instead of just white-knuckling through the hours between the end of your workday and your bedtime, can you think of something you’d actually enjoy doing? Can you take the time to plan and cook a nice dinner for yourself just because you deserve it, even if it will mean doing a few extra dishes? Are there projects or hobbies you can take on doing by yourself, even if they’re something small or trivial, like watching every romcom made the year you were born?
When we’re not able to enjoy our own company, we end up making choices out of desperation for relationships with others — we end up on bad dates or endlessly swiping on the apps not because we actually want to, but because we can’t tolerate a night alone. On the other hand, when we learn to feel genuinely satisfied and fulfilled by our days and nights as single people, it shifts our perspective on dating in radical and healthy ways — we’re no longer looking for just any partner, but a partner who offers something concrete that’s better than our enjoyable solitude.
Explore self-regulation
One of the reasons it can feel so hard to face down being single long-term is the prospect of emotional aloneness — having to go through ups and downs without someone there to comfort you or calm you down.
This is completely reasonable to feel bummed about; many people rely heavily on their romantic partners for emotional support. However, if you’re feeling not just lonely, but panicky about managing your emotional highs and lows on your own, that may be a sign that it’s time to dedicate this single period of your life to working on self-regulation.
Many of us rely heavily on co-regulation with romantic partners: emotional management via closeness and shared experience with another person. The instinct for co-regulation dates back to our childhood along with our attachment styles, when our parents would rock us or coo at us when we cried; with partners or friends, it may look like cuddling, verbal processing, or doing a comforting activity together like a movie night.
None of these are bad things to do — co-regulation is healthy and great! The only trouble is when you only know how to manage your emotions via co-regulation, and have no self-regulation skills: calming your emotions and getting back to baseline on your own. This can make you overly reliant on others, and make you feel that you simply can’t function outside of a romantic relationship. To use self-regulation skills more confidently, practice noticing and naming your emotions, including noticing how they show up in your body — does anxiety make you feel hot and antsy, while depression makes you feel slow and drowsy? Look into somatic tools for regulating emotions to help manage these feelings even when you’re by yourself.
Invest in your friendships
Self-care and self-regulation are foundational to wellbeing — but no amount of self-care can totally replace community care. Humans are social creatures, and we live in a challenging, unfair world that was in many respects designed for straight cis men who had a full-time stay-at-home spouse to manage most aspects of their lives. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to really go it alone. No matter how self-reliant or independent you are, there are times when we all need someone else’s help.
For single people, this can feel defeating — not having a partner can feel like a verdict that there will never be anyone to pick you up from the airport, get you groceries when you’re sick, go to family events with you, or help medicate your sick cat. You can choose to stick all these things out on your own, or you can choose to invest in your friendships instead.
Investing means a few things. It requires both pouring intentional time and energy into your friendships, to deepen the new ones and maintain the stable ones — remembering your friends’ big personal events and following up to ask how they went, taking the initiative to make social plans, offering to plan birthday parties or make dinner. It also requires actively enacting the shared life you want to live with your friends. If you want to have the kind of friendships that pick you up from the airport or from surgery or from the bar when you can’t drive, you need to be offering those things to other people — and developing the vulnerability to ask for them when you need them. It sounds hard — and it can be! — but it’s also incredibly rewarding to build a community that can provide real, tangible support for each other, regardless of your relationship status at any given time.
Recommended Books:
How to Be Alone: If You Want To, and Even If You Don’t
Becoming Safely Embodied: A Guide to Organize Your Mind, Body and Heart to Feel Secure in the World
The Unexpected Joy of Being Single
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