Another Valentines Day single and guess what? I don't care

I'm in my 40's. I have had a lot of relationships and two of them were on the pathway to marriage but it just never happened to get to that point for various reasons that I would rather not discuss. I was kind of torn up about them at the time but in retrospect one of them, well, let's just say that the heartache that I felt for months after the fact would be a drop in the bucket compared to the absolute suffering I would have had to endure had we followed through on our plans.

I live a relatively simple life and while I do not think that I am model quality good-looking, I am actually quite a catch... A DILF if you will and no, I am not going to tell you what that acronym means because you can figure it out on your own.

Valentines Day has never really been important to me even when I was in a relationship but one of my relationships that ended shortly thereafter involved a woman that expected to be absolutely showered in gifts simply because she exists in the world. That relationship was a bad one, and I am not at all surprised that it ended in under a year. But V-Day is one of those days that kind of reminds me about how I have been single for a long time now and while that might bother some people, I take it in stride and don't really care.

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Like most people in their 40's, a majority of my friends are either married or are in relationships of some sort. I am the outlier. When I speak to my friends about what they are going to do for the special commercially created holiday, they kind of roll their eyes and say something along the lines of "wasting a lot of money" or something to that degree. I don't know a single person that is a man that is actually excited about the prospect of this day / night, and most of them lament the fact that it exists at all. When I respond with something like "why don't you talk to the missus about simply not celebrating it? and they kind of recoil in fear like doing so would be extremely detrimental to their lives. If this is genuinely the case then that is just one more reason why I am delighted that I am alone on this day.

I'm not one of those people that feels as though I absolutely must have a partner in life but almost everyone that I know IS that way. I know people that use various apps to find someone to "love" only to be let down by these meetings on a regular basis. I also know people who settled down with just anyone that would have anything to do with them and it is evident when I am around the two of them that this relationship is more like work than it is something both of them genuinely want. Their relationships seem to be a game of cat and mouse where they are both trying to control how the other lives rather than genuinely being involved and interested in the activities that they do together. It all seems so forced and man, if that is what sort of relationships are available to me in my life, thanks but no thanks. I would rather just continue to live on my medium piece of peaceful land with my dogs and carry on improving myself as much as I can.

This isn't to say that I am completely closed off to relationships of all sorts, I just don't feel the NEED for it to exist in my life. I have no fear of dying alone and am reminded of this amazing scene in a George Clooney film that if you haven't seen the clip, check it out here.

Now if you have a wonderful marriage or relationship I am by no means trying to say that any of you are wrong. People think and act differently and the world would kind if suck if we all were the same. I admire you in a way but in my own life, I know of only one, ONE singular person that got married in their 20's, stayed married until now, and is happy with all the aspects of their marriage. The others, have all been married several times, have estranged children, and unfortunately most of them absolutely despise the person that they had that kid with. How unbelievably crazy is that?

This is not the reason why I choose to remain single. I choose to remain single because I refuse to settle or to put up with certain aspects of a partner that I don't like just for the sake of being in a relationship. It stopped being important to me over a decade ago. I have had partners since then but at the end of it all, here I am, single and not at all worried about that being the case.

If you had a lovely Valentine's day with someone that you genuinely love - I'm happy for you. At the same time though, I do not feel sorry for myself nor to I feel that my life would be better simply because someone else was in the same bed as me. Most of the time I have 2 someone elses in the same bed as me, the fact that they have 4 legs and are covered in fur doesn't bother me in the slightest.