Getting Thrown

A Valentine’s Day Dispatch from Twelve Years in the Arena

Singlehood — and its accomplices, solitude and yearning — recurs in my writing for a simple reason: writers return to what they know, and I have known this state for twelve years.

Twelve years is long enough to develop technique. Long enough to study the animal. Long enough to stop pretending you’ve never been thrown. There are things to admire about it. The autonomy. The abundance of choice. The absence of daily compromise or unsolicited critique. The luxury of arranging one’s life without negotiation.

It can feel cinematic. Like driving with the windows down, music louder than necessary, sun collapsing into gold across an empty road.

I don’t drive, which probably explains why I romanticise being single as if it’s permanently golden hour — and not, occasionally, a contact sport.

Don’t mistake me for a cynic. I love love.

It’s just that men — and relationships — have become slightly abstract to me. Well-behaved in theory. Modular. He exists when I want him and disappears when I don’t. He is relentlessly supportive of my independence, yet not dependent himself. He needs me, but sparingly. Taller than me. Muscular, but not in a gym-obsessed way — more in a “chops wood” way. We have separate interests that he admires from a respectful distance. I am selfish about my passions; he finds this charming. Nice teeth — non-negotiable. A body that feels good to meet.

And, crucially, he is mediocre in a crisis. I am exceptional in one. That is my reveal.

This imaginary man has never once thrown me. I designed him that way.

Real life, of course, is less compliant. Singlehood is not all euphoric self-possession or operatic loneliness. Mostly, it is administrative. Practical. Occasionally sublime. Occasionally sharp.

In the past twelve years, I have learned things about myself that do not beg to be liked. Observations formed in the arena — sometimes mid-air, lucid in solitude and slightly suspect when I imagine submitting them to the friction of partnership.

What follows are twelve of them.

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1. I want equality. I’m aroused by imbalance.

I say I want reciprocity. What I respond to is asymmetry.

I like being wanted slightly more than I want back. I like being chosen without being required. I like steadiness from someone who doesn’t need stabilising. It makes me feel generous without ever having to risk too much.

Attraction isn’t morally neutral. It arranges itself in hierarchies whether we approve of that or not.

The question I don’t love asking is this: if I prefer to want less, is that discernment — or is it self-protection dressed up as standards?

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2. “I respect your independence” sometimes means “please don’t emotionally inconvenience me.”

I admire autonomy right up until it produces distance. Right up until you’re busy, self-contained, less available to reassure me.

I want you to have your own life. I just also want to feel like your emotional home base.

There’s a small hypocrisy I allow myself: independence is attractive, but I still want preferred status.

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3. I don’t want accuracy. I want intimacy.

I want to be understood, but selectively. I want to be seen as coherent. I’d prefer my worst traits acknowledged softly, not examined under interrogation lighting.

Radical honesty threatens the version of myself I’m trying to date as.

If you really knew me, you might still like me — but you might want slightly less of me.

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4. Sex is less about bodies than about being chosen.

Technically “good” sex can feel hollow. Slightly awkward sex can feel bonding. The difference is rarely skill.

We don’t want to be serviced. We want to be wanted. We want enthusiasm. We want our insecurity handled carefully, not exposed.

This explains a lot — including why people stay in relationships that don’t make logical sense. They aren’t addicted to technique. They’re addicted to how they feel while being touched.

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5. I don’t just date people. I date the job they perform for me.

He plans; I handle chaos. He grounds; I excite. He’s stable; I’m volatile. It feels balanced. It feels almost mythic.

Until life reshuffles the roles.

What happens when we’re both unmoored? When we both need rescuing? Compatibility can look profound — right up until crisis reveals it was a division of labour.

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6. Social desirability impresses me. Private devotion undoes me.

I’m strangely unmoved by someone “everyone knows.” Performative desirability feels theatrical. I don’t want to be cast in a production of someone else’s life.

What I want is exclusivity without isolation. Intimacy without spectacle. To feel singular in someone’s interior world.

Being publicly impressive is nice. Being privately chosen is intoxicating.

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7. I love being supportive — until it costs me something.

I want a partner who admires my ambition and never competes. I want to expand, not feel eclipsed.

Growth is beautiful until it’s asymmetrical. Then it becomes threatening.

Resentment doesn’t arrive loudly. It begins as a private accounting: I was supposed to be the one accelerating.

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8. Being essential is erotic. Being relied on is exhausting.

There’s a razor-thin line between feeling indispensable and feeling drained.

Competence is sexy. Helplessness is not.

This might explain why desire sometimes fades after cohabitation. The thrill of being chosen slowly becomes the weight of being necessary.

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9. I don’t fear abandonment as much as I fear becoming unsurprising.

Routine doesn’t kill desire because it’s dull. It kills desire because it confirms something.

This is who you are. This is how I see you. This is it.

Mystery allows projection. Familiarity edits it.

I’m not afraid you’ll leave. I’m afraid you’ll fully understand me.

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10. Attraction is often emotional regulation masquerading as romance.

We choose partners who calm our anxiety, mirror our chaos, validate our self-image.

“Healthy” can feel dull because it doesn’t spike the nervous system. “Wrong” can feel electric because it does.

Chemistry is real. It just isn’t destiny. Sometimes it’s just two nervous systems finding a familiar rhythm.

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11. The worst part of being single isn’t loneliness. It’s endurance.

When life fractures — the broken boiler, the dead car battery, the email that metastasizes — I handle it. I compartmentalise. I solve.

Strength is clarifying. It enlarges you. It proves your competence in ways that are almost bracing.

But there’s no off switch.

You come home still strong. There’s no one to absorb the static, no one to hold the version of you that’s briefly frayed.

The final problem isn’t the crisis. It’s the part where there’s no one to debrief with.

And the person who needs comforting is the same person who chose this arrangement.

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12. I suspect I will meet someone who dismantles all of this.

They’ll discredit the hierarchy, collapse the self-protection, make me revise everything I’ve just written.

It will be thrilling. Destabilising. Slightly humiliating.

I’m not afraid of love.

I’m afraid of breaking something that finally hums.

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Twelve years alone has not made me anti-love. It has made me precise.

I like my life. I like the steadiness of it, the proportions I’ve calibrated, the muscle memory of solving my own problems. There is a balance here that feels earned. I am protective of it.

Which means that if someone is going to enter it, he will have to be extraordinary. Not perfect. Just undeniable. At this rate, I may have standardised him out of existence.

That possibility makes me laugh. It also makes me wonder.

Because for all my analysis, all my neat theories about hierarchy and nervous systems and emotional jobs, I am still romantic enough to believe I could be surprised. I am still vain enough to believe someone might surprise me.

And if that happens — if someone arrives who doesn’t fit the model, who rearranges the furniture without burning the house down — I hope I have the flexibility to let him.

I hope he knocks the air out of me a little.

Until then, this life is not a consolation prize. It is the arena itself. Fully inhabited. Occasionally lonely. Frequently satisfying. Open, but not frantic.

If love comes, it will find me here —steady but not welded to the saddle.

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If you’ve read this far, thank you. Truly.

Attention is expensive. You could have spent yours anywhere, and you spent it here — in the arena with me.

Every piece I publish goes through more drafts than I care to admit. With each one, I ask the same question: will anyone understand what I’m trying to say, or have I just documented my own neurosis with better punctuation?

So I hope something in this found you. Whether you’re partnered, single, somewhere in between, or pretending not to care at all — I hope a line felt familiar. I hope a sentence made you wince in recognition, or laugh, or sit still for a moment longer than you meant to.

If these words found a home with you, that’s more than enough.

There’s more coming this month:

— Saint Hilary: In Praise of an Accidental Icon — a new essay, out 20 February 2026.
— Alice, Chapter Two — the next instalment of my short story, arriving 28 February 2026.

Until then — wherever you’re standing this Valentine’s Day, I’m glad you’re here.