how i learned to love being single ( why you should too)

[Music] so step number one is buy a vibrator and that's the whole video thank you guys so much for watching I'll see you guys next week bye no unfortunately things a little bit more to this video although honestly buying a vibrator is not a bad step for the majority of my life I have been sagal and I took it upon myself every Valentine's Day to feel extra bad about myself and to also let everybody else know publicly how bad I felt about being single I was like oh baby this is humor this is comedy today

I wanted to sit down and do something a little bit different and hopefully a little bit more useful and kind of just act like all the pressures that woman feels to be in a relationship and that I have felt for so long and also talked about like my personal journey from somebody who derived a lot of self-worth from male attention and from being in a relationship to now genuinely being happy being single well maybe not like happy I definitely see therapist but like what I mean is that I have come to enjoy being single it's

definitely the first time in my life where like I would honestly rather be single but in a relationship with the vast majority of people and I'm not like happy all the time obviously but I don't blame my unhappiness or any unfulfilled meant in my life on not being in a relationship if that makes sense also sorry for the wack color correction and youtuber apology video background for this video I film this on like three hours of sleep I've been sleeping on the floor for like two weeks I haven't gotten my whole setup going in New

York yet I am living in chaos but I'm trying to do my job and um I like this video I think I have a lot of useful things to say so I'm enjoy before I really jump into this video though I did want to say there's definitely a double standard between men and women with how we talk about relationships and being single there is both a lot more pressure on women to be in relationships and to get into a long-term relationship earlier in their life and this kind of surface level feminist pressure to be independent

and strong and in order to do that you have to be single where I feel like guys can be in relationships their whole life and they are never criticized for being emotionally dependent on women or not being a strong independent man I didn't want to make this video in like a pseudo feminist way but it's like you have to be single in order to be a strong independent women type of way I wanted to make it in like a here is me trying to like self-actualized like be comfortable with myself and not feel so much

pressure to be a relationship type of way I think at the end of the day our society really does put so much pressure to be in a relationship that's kind of your default state and I just want people to feel comfortable being single because I think it's such an important like skill to have and such an important time of development in your life so first I wanted to talk about kind of my history and how my mentality has shifted over the years first when I was the high school I was very much a quote/unquote career

woman and all I wanted to do was focus on my studies no boys no distractions no shoulders I actually went on a couple dates in high school but I never let it turn into a relationship because I felt so uncomfortable being called somebody's girlfriend I felt like it would make me it would like somehow domesticate me and make me less of a career woman then when I finally got to college I really entered a boy-crazy stage of my life honestly a lot of it was because for the first time I felt like I didn't have

a whole lot of sense of self or like a promising future honestly I felt so insecure about my skills my intelligence my future that I really just wanted a boy to like cling on to and to kind of give me a yeah a sense of self because I just felt like a nobody floating around College our parents generation was kind of the generation that met their significant others in college or in their early 20s so in my head college was the time that I like met my husband and I was like game time ladies I

have two and a half years in college to find a man lock him down and this is like my only window of opportunity so I was really gung-ho about relationships granted I had a lot of fun tinder dates I had a couple relationships which overall I think we're a net positive but I definitely didn't feel completely comfortable being single and every time that I was single I was just thinking of it as like a little gap before my next relationship and that brings me to the summer of 2018 it's so weird to say 2018 like

it was in the past I feel like it's still [ __ ] 2018 that was the summer before I graduated college and for a couple months I lived by myself for the first time in my life I was working on my youtube-channel and I think for the first time since I left high school I felt like myself it's not like I was a fully like self-actualized person and I'm still so far from that but I think that was the first time that mindset that I have right now kind of clicked the best way I can

describe my mindset shift was I used to think my life was of rom-com where my end goal was to get married to some dreamy nan and then my movie ended but now I think of my life as like a sitcom with ten seasons and I'm just at the beginning of season two I have so much time in my life before I figure out who the [ __ ] I am I have so much growing to do I'm gonna have all these different jobs live in all of these different cities and I don't know I'm just

kind of like along for the ride with myself and I feel like that's a good place to be so anyways I feel like it's easier said than done to shift your mindset but I thought it would be helpful in this video to dissect some of the misconceptions that I had in my previous mindset where I felt guilty for being single and I felt like I needed a guy in my life so the first influence which I kind of mentioned before is rom-coms and coming-of-age films now I still to this day love me a good cheesy

wrong calm and I know that they are sometimes horribly written and they have really problematic ideals but I will enjoy it anyways but I don't think I realized until recently how much effect the wrong calm side watched when I was younger had on my view of myself and relationships recently thank the Lord there have been more female directors Greta Gerwig here's just a quick round of applause for Greta girl ribbing Greta Gerwig and also Cersei groaning oh praise the Lord what a power couple but when I was growing up the only context where I saw

a woman be a protagonist was in a rom-com it was in a romantic setting anywhere else she was the sidekick she was love interest so again a romantic setting which probably more than I'd like to admit definitely influenced me to feel like the way that I had control over my life or like kind of my life narrative was to hunt down a man or to be the love interest and that's like not what being a woman or being like a human being is about you know another thing was coming-of-age films which is one of the

few genres that actually features like young people and the traditional coming-of-age narrative is him getting the girl or having sex and especially in college I really internalized that message to mean that growing up and becoming an adult meant getting a boyfriend which is not that's not how I experience coming-of-age at all really I think that my coming-of-age was spending time with myself which you never see in movies and anything going back home to Maryland and spending time with my friends and feeling like really loved in a friendship context really my first relationship like was not

a coming-of-age for me at all but that's not a story that we really see told in pop culture second of all something you definitely contributed to my quote/unquote boy-crazy mentality was admittedly that I derived a lot of validation from male attention that's kind of hard for me to admit because I really really want to be like a really great feminist with no internalized misogyny my entire life but oh honey do any of us I don't know growing up in my hometown girls we're just not cool honestly like our society has a real problem with just

hating teenage girls in general there was definitely an overriding feeling in my high school that girls just like weren't cool they weren't funny and if you wanted to have cool friends you should hang out with the guys Wow hashtag I'm not like other girls no I genuinely like was kind of one of those girls like like I had girlfriends at high school but at the end of the day and uh this like cringy social climbing slash social position anyway I never would go out of my way to hang out with them so that I could

feel cool like I would with guys Brookes gross but I think a lot of people experience this too like our society sets up women to compete with other women for male attention we are told this false narrative is that male attention is a limited commodity and that we have to hunt it down because in order to feel valuable and in order to even like exist as a visible part of society you have to be seen by men this was like a huge problem in Hollywood and in the modeling industry as well where women over 30

kind of just like disappear it's kind of just this unsaid cultural thing where it's like oh you're like over 40 like you and hide in the shadows now nobody wants to see your wrinkles god forbid you offend anybody with your human skin side up but if you guys saw oceans eight one of the most infuriating things about that movie to me was the fact that they like CGI blurred out Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett's wrinkles I mean I wouldn't even say wrinkles like they have aged so gracefully but even like the phrase aging gracefully kind

of implies that if you age in like a normal [ __ ] way where you have wrinkles and lines on your face that that's even a bad thing or that's ungraceful there's no escaping it I have seen kind of the sentiment unlike reddit before it to that like oh you better take advantage of all the attention you get when you're a young 20-something because like you're not hot [ __ ] for your entire life and then it puts like all this pressure on such a narrow part of your life in order to like yeah grasp

all this male attention and feel like you exist before you like disappear into the shadows which is just like a horrible way to have to think about life another aspect of this male attention thing for me was definitely the fact that I looked up pretty late in my life I was just not that cute when I was younger I felt so invisible and I had all these crushes on guys that would just never ever like me back so when I got to college and I first was like oh I guess I can like kind of

cool guys now I got such satisfaction in like satisfaction is a gross word to use for that but I felt so validated even going on tinder and like matching with an attractive guy it was like a type of high because I had never experienced that before I was like holy [ __ ] like if this guy saw me in high school like he literally would not look twice at me and now I'm going on a date with this guy and he's attractive and he's paying attention to me like ooh what a feeling I do think

everybody feels validated in a certain way when I trash is people pay attention to them which is just like biology baby but at this point in my life okay honestly you think the real fix to this problem is you date a hot guy who has a really shitty personality and then you realize that hot guys are not actually all that and kind of a shininess of attractive people where so I think as everybody grows older they become more confident in themselves they've dated more people so a little bit of that I don't say desperation but

kind of internal clamouring to be like validated by attractive people wears off a little bit another fear of mine with being single definitely went hand-in-hand with my fear of aging I kind of talked about this before with the male attention thing but for some reason it really settled in when I was in college that this was like my chance to meet a life partner this was literally when I was like 18 I was like I must find a man that I can lock down before my eggs dry out cuz I'm already getting old baby kind

of counter-intuitively as I've grown up I actually feel like I have more time in my life when I was 18 I felt like my youth would be so short but now that I'm 21 I'm like holy [ __ ] I have nine more years before I'm 30 even at 30 I'll still be really young so I have so much time to figure out myself and to like one day down the line if I want to get married find somebody to do that with wow that was the least romantic explanation of love I've ever heard do

the marriage with me please even with friends that I talk to you nowadays the question always comes up when do you want to get married because it's such a conundrum in this modern day and age where you want to have a successful career you want to be your own person but everybody's magic number is still 30 they're like I want to be married by 30 I want to have kids by 35 and to me it does feel like a really [ __ ] unfair biological trap because men have so much time and they're also told

that they are attractive for so much longer like a guy who's 45 people are still like daddy woman who are 45 and single they're not like zombie mommy what yeah let's take that back men feel like they have so much longer to get married and I think that definitely does give them an advantage in the dating game because they don't feel the same pressure that a lot of young women do to lock somebody down they feel like they have time they feel like they have options and therefore they can shop around more and women are

left with this scares me mindset of like I better pick up all the good men before they're gone before they're taken there aren't gonna be any left what I'm slowly realizing as I get older is that like literally every single year I feel like a different person I look back in myself from a year ago and I'm like who the [ __ ] with that why wish so dumb why was she so insecure and that's great because that means that I'm growing as a human being I have just become a lot more excited about growing

older I hate that women are told that they almost lose value as they grow older it's like what the [ __ ] you gain experience you gain knowledge I'm gonna be smarter funnier better at sex finally figure out how to style my bangs when I'm 30 like I'm just gonna objectively be a better person and why wouldn't somebody want to date that person - I was talking to my friend Damon about this actually he's 27 single traveling the world living in Paris having threesomes with French dudes like Damon is living the life and I think

I used to like in this very conservative mindset almost look down on him and be like oh like I can't believe he's so irresponsible what is he doing at 27 not trying to settle down honestly that was a really judgy mentality so I'm sorry to even but obviously as I've gotten to know him better I've come to respect the [ __ ] out of him I think it's so cool that he's doing exactly what he wants to do something he told me that I actually really liked is that even if you don't get married you

don't die alone this is like something people joke about all the time we go forever alone I'm gonna die alone like no if you grow up in you're single that doesn't mean that you're alone you'd have your friends you have your family honestly I want to be one of those people at like a retirement home with my girls quad stoic gossiping about the latest feminist theory and that would be a great way to grow old so people like Damon have definitely helped me feel less pressure to you know lock it down and get married because

I think no matter how my life turns out I'm gonna have a [ __ ] blast yeah that's a good feeling now another more internal pressure that I felt to be in a relationship was the desire for vicarious success my freshman year in college was definitely my most boy-crazy year the year that I felt the most dependent on relationships and that also happened to be the year that I felt the least sure of my career and myself and whether I would ever achieve any success basically in high school I was blessed with the confidence that

only a 17 year old right after she takes her SATs has and that I like literally thought I could conquer the world I was like I'm the smartest person in all of suburban Maryland I am the best filmmaker everybody thinks I'm gonna win an Oscar and therefore I shout but once I got to film school I was like oh no I knew nothing about this industry I have no idea whether I will ever be successful not to mention even employed literally some of my professors in college said the best way to be in the film

industry was to just marry rich so that you have the time and money to make what you want yeah things I learned in college can't believe that I paid like a hundred fifty thousand dollars for that piece of information thank you if I could have kept my tuition money I could be my own [ __ ] sugar daddy this sounds so gold degree voltage i I think deep down I just wanted like security and that wasn't like ooh let me find a rich sugar daddy I think I just wanted to I think I was just

scared that my future wouldn't work out and I was scared that I literally wouldn't have anywhere to go after graduation and it made me feel like I could maybe have more of a purpose if I just attached my purpose to somebody else that's just like looking back I'm like if I had continued dating my first boyfriend for like all of college and really invested in the relationship and gave it so much time would I have gone out of my way to start a YouTube channel would I have put all of my heart and soul into

that would I be where I am today I want to say that it's possible but I think that at that stage in my life where I was at my lowest career confidence I don't think I would have pushed myself to go out there and make something for myself if I was already at such a young age putting myself in this like housewife mentality I know some women really do want to be like a housewife or a mother and I think those are really important jobs as well but I would say if you're unsure of your

life right now don't settle into like the mindset of being the sidekick or the love interest like you are still the protagonist of your own life even if you're having a rocky time right now give yourself the time and the passion to you know write your own story that sounds so cheesy but like you know what I mean the last kind of flawed influence I had that made me feel so bad for being single was slut-shaming and our fucked-up relationship with women's sexuality something that still frustrates me to this day is the fact that women

are considered [ __ ] if they have sex with multiple men then if they're having the same amount of sex with one man in a relationship and I think that when I was younger especially I really identified as like a good girl I was a rule follower I did all the things that people wanted me to do that made me socially acceptable and maybe classy and so I never really got to have the fun of being single or take full advantage of it because I didn't feel like I could have sex with guys I felt

like I couldn't sleep around and if I wanted to have sex regularly I had to be in a relationship and you know how bad decisions are when you make them when you're horny some of my friends even now will talk about their number as in the number of guys that they've had sex with and keeping that number low I think a lot of women feel pressure to not sleep with that many guys in their lifetime for a long time I did and I felt like every new guy that I had sex with I was ticking

one box off of my [ __ ] like bingo board I only had so many chances in my life so he had to be worth it and now like I don't [ __ ] count like who is counting are you serious if anybody needs to ask you how many guys you've slept with in order to date you or in order to be your friend literally [ __ ] them don't literally [ __ ] them actually because they sound like kind of an [ __ ] cut them out of your life [ __ ] like we

don't need that energy I think it's unfair the way that we talk about casual sex because it genuinely makes it more fun for guys to be single because they can like [ __ ] around and they are congratulated they're more masculine that they're a sexy bachelor and a lot of women don't get to have that same amount of fun so I'd encourage you guys I know it's easier said than done but there is no need to be counting if you want to do something do it and take full advantage of the time in your life

that you have when you're single one of the best advice that I got from somebody who was married was that she wishes that she had sex with more people before he got married because like one day that guy might come around and that's the last guy you'll ever have sex with so [ __ ] carpe diem babyhood before I go instead of just like complaining about the patriarchy for this entire video I didn't want to give you guys some kind of actionable tips that have definitely helped me enjoy being single number one get comfortable going

out alone one of my friends from film school literally will take herself to a movie every week she'll buy herself soup at a restaurant and just sit alone and eat the soup and they go to the movie theater and have herself a [ __ ] blast and I really admire that the first time that I went out alone to a restaurant I was so self-conscious and I was so terrified everybody's like who's that Lane girl eating by herself but at the end of the day nobody cared I got to enjoy a really good pizza and

then I went on my merry way I promise you anything that you can do with the significant other you can plan and do for yourself you just have to take that extra time to put in the effort and go and make like me time for yourself you I hate phrasing me time it's so like wait Pinterest girl but like honestly they're kind of on to something it's nice to have me time sometimes number to get comfortable putting yourself out there and ultimately getting rejected kind of a lot I think a lot of people can be

scared of being single because it does involve so much more like putting yourself out there you're not sure that you have somebody to come home to you're not sure somebody will be there for you at a party but it is also something that is really exciting if you learn how to take rejection honestly the way that I learned is just putting myself out there like so many [ __ ] times it feels so painful at first but then when you're on you're like 50th time where you like are trying to chat with somebody on a

dating app and they hit you back with a do you have coronavirus true story you're just like [ __ ] you and also who next one number three is a little depressing but getting broken up with has actually helped change my perspective on being single so much I've been through three relationships at this point and I've gotten a lot more comfortable being single because I don't view relationships is like life or death anymore and I also know the hardships that come with relationships a lot of the times when you're younger and you just think that

relationships are like Tumblr photos it's a montage of beautiful people kissing at the sunset and it doesn't always feel like that like relationships are hard [ __ ] work too so it's definitely made me realize there are pluses and minuses of relationships and of being single and it's made me romanticize relationships a lot less and make me realize that being single isn't so bad in comparison and lastly and most importantly realize that this is such an important time in your life for personal growth and development and just like figuring out who the [ __ ]

you are being single and realizing that I only have myself to rely on I have to spend this much time with myself and realizing that I have the power over my life to move for I want to change careers to change up my style to be friends with new people it really pushes me to develop as a human being and really think about what I want in life and who I want to be that is like some of the mo just exciting [ __ ] it can be painful sometimes but goddamn it it is a

good feeling so anyway I am running super late so thank you guys so much for watching shout out to all my single ladies this Valentine's Day I hope that you have a fantastic time with yourself or your friends or whoever you're [ __ ] at the moment and I will see you guys next week bye [Music]