Waiting to Exhale
The Burdern of Possibility
I haven’t written in a while and, quite honestly, that’s because life has been heavy. Not in a series of unfortunate events type of way, but in an existential one.
I feel like I’m at an airport, waiting for a flight I’m not entirely sure I want to board, but knowing with absolute certainty that I do not want to return home to the bleak ordinary.
What makes airports bearable is the promise of arrival. The belief that eventually the waiting will end and you’ll be somewhere else. Somewhere warmer. Somewhere better. Somewhere that makes sense.
Lately, I’ve been wondering whether much of adulthood is spent in a similar state. Waiting for the next thing. The relationship. The promotion. The house. The child. The life that will finally make all the disparate pieces fit together.
I think about this most in relation to marriage and children.
Not because I spend my days pining for either, but because I have realised how much of my present is organised around the possibility of them. Decisions about where to live, what work to pursue, how much risk to take, how much space to leave. I am constantly consulting a future that has not yet arrived.
If I met a man tomorrow, he wouldn’t just be a man. He would be a potential father. A potential postcode. A potential school catchment area. A potential future. Before long, I am six chapters ahead of a story that hasn’t even begun.
And recently, I have found myself wondering something that feels almost taboo to admit.
What if certainty would be easier?
If God came down today and told me I would never marry and never have children, a wave of relief would wash over my body. I could finally exhale.
Not because I don’t want those things. I do, almost painfully so. Rather, the weight of wondering whether I would ever encounter them would disappear.
There would be no need to save for the spacious family home. A respectable one-bedroom flat, decorated with bespoke canvas art and parquet flooring throughout, would do just fine.
There would be no need to keep climbing the ever-growing corporate ladder in pursuit of a financial stability I imagine future children might require.
And perhaps most uncomfortable of all, there would be no need to maintain relationships I have long outgrown in the hope of one day assembling a village for children who do not yet exist.
A life where I stood at the centre, not waiting to be centred.
There would be something freeing in knowing I would never live the fairytale. Not because the desire would disappear, but because the possibility would. In its place, certainty would be born.
I don’t experience the unlimited possibility that supposedly comes with singledom as freedom. I experience it as disorientation.
I liken it to playing Sims without a storyline. Whilst everyone else’s story arc appears to be progressing — perhaps not perfectly, but progressing nonetheless — mine often feels suspended between possibilities.
Trying to move the plot along through dating only seems to make matters worse. After enough false starts, you find yourself completely out of breath before you have even reached the starting line.
“Don’t give up,” they say.
But what if that is, in fact, the healthiest thing to do?
At some point, it seems more damaging to continue pursuing an outcome that is clearly avoiding you.
Perhaps the distinction between acceptance and giving up is simpler than I initially thought.
Giving up is becoming closed to possibility. It is deciding the outcome before life has had the chance to reveal itself. It is meeting someone kind and dismissing them because you have already convinced yourself that nothing good can happen.
Acceptance, on the other hand, is accepting the limits of your influence.
It is acknowledging that there is no sequence of actions that guarantees love. No amount of self-improvement, strategic dating, manifestation, healing, or optimisation that can force another person to arrive. You can make yourself available to life, but you cannot negotiate an outcome with it.
I think where hope becomes dangerous is when we begin planning our lives around contingencies. When we build today’s life in service of a tomorrow that may never come. Not because hope itself is harmful, but because certainty was never promised.
If I’m honest, there is a quiet grief in that thought.
We are constantly told not to put our lives on hold for love, but very few people show us what that actually looks like.
The examples we are given often feel exceptional rather than ordinary. There is always a Tracee Ellis Ross figure held up as proof that a woman can live a rich and fulfilling life outside of marriage and motherhood. And whilst I appreciate the sentiment, some of us are going to be aunties and not-so-rich.
We are not jetting between film sets, buying holiday homes, or spending six months in Tuscany finding ourselves.
What does it look like for ordinary women?
Much of the advice around decentring men, which I am not opposed to, also seems to assume the existence of other equally sustaining relationships. We are told to pour into our friendships, our communities, our hobbies. But friendship in adulthood is not friendship at sixteen.
At sixteen, you can spend every afternoon at your friend’s house. At thirty-three, everyone has somewhere to be, someone to answer to, something demanding their attention.
The uncomfortable reality of adulthood is that most people eventually become somebody’s priority. A spouse’s. A child’s. A family’s.
And if you are single, there are moments when you realise that whilst you may be deeply loved, you are not central. Not because anyone has failed you, but because their lives have expanded in ways yours has not.
Humans are social creatures, yet there seems to be an age at which dependence becomes embarrassing and solitude becomes expected.
We are told to enjoy our freedom, but rarely shown how to construct a meaningful life from it.
To be fair, I have come across a few women who have helped me imagine what an alternative life might look like.
One is Claira Hermet, who has spoken openly about being single and child-free in a way that feels grounded rather than performative. The other is a creator I follow, Sai Ma, whose content centres around building a soft, meaningful life in her forties.
What I find compelling about both women is that neither seems to be waiting for life to begin.
They are not selling singleness as some glamorous act of rebellion. Nor are they framing it as a personal tragedy.
They seem to have arrived at a place I am still trying to understand: a life that is not organised around waiting.
That doesn’t mean I want their lives. If I am honest, I still want marriage. I still want children.
But when I look at them, I am reminded that there are other ways to inhabit adulthood beyond endlessly preparing for a future that has not yet arrived.