A Single Revolution: Don't look for a match. Light one.

By Shani Silver

Shani Silver is not an advocate for singlehood. She's an advocate for single women feeling good while single—and there's a difference.

A Single Revolution is one book for single women that won't approach you like you're unfinished. It's for those who are exhausted, frustrated, confused, or angry—who want relationships but don't deserve to be miserable in the meantime.

A grueling dating grind isn't a prerequisite for partnership. You can be happily single and still meet someone—that's allowed. It's possible to value your single time so much that you refuse to give it up for anything less than the amazing relationships you deserve. It's also possible to stop searching for them so relentlessly that you ignore every other aspect of your valid, beautiful life. This isn't a book about dating. It's a book about living.

You can choose how you feel about being single. You can choose to feel wrong, or you can choose to feel free.

A Single Revolution isn't about changing yourself—it's about changing your mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781544525327

Book preview

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A

Single

Revolution

Don't look for a match.

Light one.

Shani Silver

copyright © 2021 shani silver

All rights reserved.

a single revolution

Don't look for a match. Light one.

isbn

978-1-5445-2531-0 Hardcover

isbn

978-1-5445-2530-3 Paperback

isbn

978-1-5445-2532-7 Ebook

In loving memory of Doris Silver Kahn

Don’t tell me truth hurts, little girl. ‘Cause it hurts like hell.

—David Bowie, Underground

Inclusivity

I am a cisgender, straight, white woman who was raised in Ashkenazi Jewish culture. This book was written from my perspective. Singlehood happens to everyone, from every background, of every ethnicity and identity, everywhere in the world. The single community includes everyone, and every member of it is welcome here. Throughout the book, heterosexual scenarios will be used and referenced, but they are never intended to suggest that heterosexual scenarios are the only ones that occur within singlehood. This book is written in acknowledgment of what single women in search of relationships with single men experience in the modern dating space but not exclusively so. When the word woman is used, it includes all who identify as women.

Safety

Throughout the book, I will reference the agency and choice that we have as single women over the ways we participate in the dating space. This does not, in any way, include incidents of sexual assault, rape, or any other physically and mentally unsafe situations or outcomes stemming from dating or any other situation in singlehood. This book is in no way intended to serve as or replace qualified resources for depression, anxiety, trauma, or any aspect of mental health. I am an advocate for singles seeking qualified therapeutic mental health care, and I’m a proponent of resources that make these services financially accessible to all.

Respect

I am very direct. In a world that doesn’t hold single women in high regard, I see no logic in passive language, as it delays the road to reframing. Basically, I want you to feel better, faster, so sometimes what I say may be hard to hear. At one time, it was also hard for me to say it to myself. But I did, and I learned, and now I’m sharing that knowledge with you. At no time am I presenting my work in an accusatory or demeaning tone. Everything that is said in this book is said with the utmost love and respect for single women—and comes from a woman who has lived every aspect of singlehood that is within her perspective. My work is presented here in the hope that it will lead to single women feeling better, as well as to much more respect for single women and their experiences in the future.

Contents

Introduction

1. The Wrongness

2. More or Less

3. Single Is Not a Vengeful God

4. Paying for Maybes

5. A Prologue Life

6. Why Are You Single?

7. It’s Not Your Job

8. Earning It

9. In Comparison

10. Scared Away

11. Shani’s Singlehood Suggestions

12. Window-Shoppers

13. Delete Your Dating Apps

14. The S Word

15. New Year’s Eve

16. You Will Not Be Single Forever

17. Free

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

We don’t have to hate this. We don’t have to hate being single. Has anyone ever told you that’s allowed? Being single doesn’t have to be a thing we fear, despise, or have shame about. It’s possible to love this single life, to arrive at a place in your mind and heart where you value it so much that you refuse to give it up for anyone unworthy of you. I know it’s scary to think about loving being single, because of the negative repercussions we’ve been led to believe come with it. The good news is, they’re all nonsense. The negative narratives and limiting thoughts we have around singlehood can be rewritten, and you’re already reading the book that’s going to help you.

Don’t be afraid to love being single. It doesn’t mean you’ll be single forever.

You know what being unhappily single feels like: the wanting, the searching, the dismissal, the rejection, the confusion, the exhaustion, the unfairness, the loneliness, the shame, the longing, the jealousy, the sadness, the nothing. The misery of being single—and the knowledge that it will all go away, and everything will be better, when you find a partner. And then you can’t find a partner. No matter what you try, for how long you try it, you can’t find someone. For months, years, or decades. I guess the most helpful thing for me to say from the start is that you’re not alone.

I’m Shani Silver, I’m thirty-nine years old, and I’ve been single for thirteen years. I’m going to teach you how to not wince at that. I’ve been writing, podcasting, and building a community of single women for a long time. I’m in this world, and I know how it feels. I know how low being single can bring us, and what it’s like to be willing to do anything to escape the shame of singlehood. I also know what it feels like when anything still doesn’t work.

There’s a way to feel better about being single that doesn’t require anything other than you—just as you are. Not after you work on yourself, or learn to love yourself. Right now. For extra grins, you should also know that being single isn’t actually bad. (We’ll get into this in detail, but for now, just trust me.)

How do we talk about singlehood? What are the words we associate with this time in our lives? I think of wrong, bad, flawed, sad, pathetic, and desperate, for a start. That’s how we’ve heard singlehood discussed and depicted. Single itself is a negative term, one so baked into our society as indicating lack that those experiencing singlehood believe there’s no other way to see it. Singlehood is an assumed negative in need of repair via a relationship. It’s so easy to casually accept society’s view of singlehood and essentially never give it a second thought—or an original thought. In our society, the default state of single is wrong.

I hope it comforts you to know that there is most definitely another way to see singlehood, and another way to live it. I live happily single every day, while still wanting a relationship and looking forward to one. At the same time, I also don’t feel so compelled to find a relationship that I make myself miserable with the search. It is possible to breathe, to let go, and to relax. If you’re ready to stop being unhappy just because you’re single, you’re reading the right book.

This will all sound new, different, and maybe uncomfortable at first. It’s okay if it takes time and practice to change the way you think and feel about being single. This doesn’t have to be an instant, overnight thing. Whatever pace you’re on is perfect. It took me a decade, trust me—you’re already doing great.

I’m not going to tell you my dating and singlehood horror stories, because you’ve already heard them. You’ve already lived them. They’re not entertainment. They’re not dinner party conversation. They’re tiny traumas that add up over time, and we don’t deserve them. We have so much more to talk about than the terrible things that happen in the dating world, but for some reason, singles as a community never really talk about anything other than dating. So I’m in a bit of a rush to get started.

Imagine the deepest, darkest pit of singlehood despair, and then imagine living there for a decade. That was me. When I say I understand, when I say I sincerely needed to hear everything I’m about to tell you, please believe that I’ve been through it—because I believe you.

If you’re a single woman of any age, but especially over thirty, on one side, there’s societal single shaming, and on the other, there’s an exhausting, belittling, and punishing dating culture. Single women are stuck in the middle. That is, quite frankly, fucked up.

Single women are not less. We are not lower status or class. We have the same value as any human being currently coupled. But the world tells us something different, every day, so we feel low. We come to understand that the only way out of singlehood unhappiness is finding a partner. But what if it’s not?

For ten years, I hated every waking moment of my single, swiping life, until it exhausted me to the cliff’s edge of madness. Instead of losing it, I decided to change my mind. I decided to find a way out of single misery that didn’t involve finding a boyfriend. I found it, and I’m bringing single women with me, because swiping isn’t working for us—but this is.

This book is designed to set us free from societal single shaming on one side and an impossible dating culture on the other, without needing a partner first. This is not a beach read; it’s a guidebook. (Though feel free to read it on the beach or any other place you enjoy your free time. Oooh, that’s one of my favorite things about singlehood: free time.)

A Single Serving Podcast, my podcast, launched in April 2019 because I wanted more content created for single women that was not about dating, and I couldn’t find it. Everything was about the horror stories, the dating advice, the fucking B*chelor—everything came at singlehood as if it were a negative state of being that required dating and partnership in order to correct it. I believed there was much more to talk about, and much more respect due to single women, so I try to give us that once a week. If you’d like further support after reading this book, check it out.

Removing the shame and stigma of singlehood for yourself is thoroughly life-changing. When we love our single lives, we stop exhausting ourselves by treating every waking moment as an opportunity to find a relationship. We stop staying in relationships that aren’t working, because singlehood is no longer something that sounds worse. We stop feeling crushed when a match or a first date doesn’t turn into more, because we’re not hanging every hope we have on them. We don’t force ourselves to have feelings for people we feel nothing for, because we don’t have to. We set ourselves free in countless ways, and we begin to live a life unburdened by the negative narratives of singlehood.

I’m often asked for my lightbulb moment, the second I knew I wanted to change the way I thought and felt about being single, as if a switch flipped and suddenly everything changed. In reality, it wasn’t just one moment—it was a series of moments that took time to come together into a completely changed way of looking at single life. You’ll read about a few of them in a little while. For now, if you want to know the first time I ever considered that feeling better was possible, imagine this:

I was visiting home in Fort Worth, Texas, sitting in the backseat of my mother’s SUV. We were running pre-Thanksgiving errands. There’s nothing like sitting in the backseat as a thirty-something to spark contemplation of your entire life. At that point, I’d been dating to zero avail for six or seven years at least, and I was in a pretty low place mentally and emotionally. Squished in between the dry cleaning and the bulk artichoke dip from Costco, a thought rose up in my brain like a weather balloon.

You don’t have to find someone for your life to start.

There it was: permission. Permission to live fully, to live real. I’d never had that before. Until that moment, I never thought I was a valid adult, because I was single, and therefore missing a key component of adulthood—a relationship. It would take several more years and several more lightbulbs, but I got there. I changed my perspective, and I found a life I love without having to find someone else first. Hopefully by gathering it all in one place, I’ll have made things a little more streamlined for you.

I wrote this book for all single women who are so damned sick of feeling ashamed, helpless, and exhausted all at the same time. We deserve wonderful relationships, and we don’t deserve to be miserable until we find them.

Through single shaming, social (media) comparison, and a dating culture akin to a festering bog of chemical waste, single women receive nothing but messages telling us that we’re wrong. Every product, television show, movie, song, or piece of content created for us relates to solving singlehood via dating and partnership. It’s society’s way of reiterating to us, over and over again, that we’re not real yet.

Our dating culture and single-shaming society both tell us that our singlehood is a problem that’s all our fault, while passively watching dating itself get continually more trash and honestly, a revolution is the very least we can do.

Blame isn’t working for single women. All of the this is why I’m single memes aren’t helping anyone, and honestly, they weren’t funny to begin with. I don’t like limiting my beliefs about singlehood and dating so much that they can be attributed to or blamed on anything, and certainly not solely on single women, who bear the brunt of what dating culture has become. Modern singlehood can be a miserable experience, and a lot went into crafting this culture. My personal theory (just one of them—I have many) is that dating advanced from a technological and cultural standpoint much faster than societal views of single women did. The words used to describe us are relics of a very outdated way of thinking about being single. We’re dating in the present and being shamed in the past. Seems fair.

My fear is not that single women will end up alone. I’ve yet to see a clear indication of when end up actually starts. Instead, my fear is that single women will continue to focus so narrowly on finding someone that they restrict the aperture of their lives down to a pinhole. We are sitting on the freest, most potential-filled parts of our lives. Let’s reframe the way we think, and therefore feel, about being single. Let’s learn how to let more light in—and live.

This is not about data and numbers. This is not yet another tool to scare single women by feeding us stats about how many more women than men attend college or whatever else people want to turn into clickbait today—while at the same time not giving us any sort of coping strategy or solution. I can’t solve the numbers, but I can help you feel better no matter what they are.

This is about the day-to-day reality that affects the lives of single women and their self-worth, and how to feel better as we move through the world. Understand that you deserve to feel better about your singlehood, and feeling better is within your capability. There is value in you, just as you are right now. I’m sorry that societal single shaming and a dismissive dating culture have tried to cloud that value from your vision.

I will not simply point out a problem. I will provide an actual solution that’s achievable, without reliance on anyone or anything outside of ourselves. Dating sucks? No shit. Let’s stop sending screenshots to our friends and posting rants on social media and start actually fucking doing something about it. As mentioned, I’m quite direct. I hope you’re on board.

A Single Revolution will offer more support, comfort, and strategy than an Instagram meme where the joke is made at our expense. More than a dating show that treats singles like modern-day gladiators. More than a dating coach who wants to take your money but still can’t tell you when and where to meet your fucking husband. In order to help single women open up to new narratives, we need to reframe everything we’ve been groomed to believe about single life. It would also help if the book outlining that reframing wasn’t embarrassing for single women to hold on public transportation. That’s why this book’s title and cover reflect the fact that we don’t need another piece of work that assumes we are inherently less than, self-deprecating, or in need of repair. You are not less because you’re single; you are infinite because you are.

The way out of single shame involves self-worth and acknowledging a valid life full of freedom and possibility, instead of shrinking our desires and self-esteem down to crumbs because the world tells us we’re lesser beings. The world is either lying or moronic, and I have no patience for single shaming either way. We have agency over what we do and how we feel, and we don’t have to do or feel as we’re told. We can choose to stop lowering our standards, and instead require that the rest of the world simply rise.

This book is a shame-eradicating feel-better guide for every single woman who’s sick of this shit. I know how to change your perspective on being single, how to shed the shame, and how to see the real value of singlehood, rather than holding on to how flawed and in need of fixing the world wants us to believe we are. I know how to feel better—to feel really good—about your single life every day, and I love this community too much to keep it to myself.

We as singles can debunk the bullshit, reframe the reality, and see the value in our singlehood before it’s gone. That is possible, and that is allowed.

You don’t have to exhaust yourself and your sanity trying to find a relationship. You don’t have to wait for a partner for your life to start. You don’t have to stop wanting a relationship to start loving your single life. And you don’t need a match to burn the negative narratives of being single right down to the ground.

Welcome to A Single Revolution.

1

The Wrongness

You’re not wrong. Being single is not wrong. It’s important for single women to hear that, if for no other reason than a nice change of pace. In this moment, you are living and breathing and you’re worthy of existing, exactly as you are. You don’t need to fix anything about yourself before you’re allowed to be worthy of love from another person or from yourself. You don’t need the world to forgive you for being single in order to have permission to move forward with your life. Heavy shit to start with, no? I figured we’d take care of it right up front.

The most fundamental part of reframing the way we think about our own singlehood can also be the most challenging. There is nothing wrong with you, and you are not doing anything wrong—but more than anything, you are not wrong. It’s hard to believe these truths because we’ve never believed them before. We may never have even heard them before. But the archaic beliefs around singlehood—the assumed wrongness—have to be challenged, because they’re making us feel bad. We don’t deserve to feel bad simply because we haven’t found partners yet in a world where, for many of us, finding partnership is hard.

It’s time for the very notion that singlehood is a wrong state of existence, reparable only through partnership—no matter what women must endure to get there—to face its music. I can’t let it get away with this anymore. The idea that being single is wrong isn’t true just because society needs someone to shame. We’re not kids in a schoolyard; we’re grown adults, and I don’t need the popular girls to like me anymore. The only actual consequences for being single have been invented by a) a culture that’s more comfortable with partnership because it’s viewed as settled down and you can glean alllll the patriarchal messages you want from that, and b) a social media space full of people who don’t feel fully good about their lives unless other people are watching. Yeah, I said it.

I’m calling the wrongness on its shit. I can see what’s happening to single women, because I’m one of us, and I can’t sit silently while we absorb the societal shame of singlehood on one side and a punishing dating culture on the other. This isn’t me being brave—this is me being fed the fuck up.

For ten actual years, I made certain assumptions about being single, because I didn’t know I could think about being single any other way. I assumed that being single was a wrong state, that being in a relationship was a right state, and

Reviews for A Single Revolution

[Sandy Jones · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fucking fabulous. Thank you. I enjoyed every second, this is gold.