Sliding doors

Five years ago I was one of the five women interviewed for a women magazine's feature write-up on single women. My answers gave the impression of a confident and contented single woman in her twenties.

The irony was that I went steady with my current love a few months after the interview. Years later am still with the same man I started out with and we are happy as ever.

We have had some rough patches, actually one, resulted in a break-up. It didn't last, we were back together a few months later and it did us nothing but good, the separation I mean.

These days I often wonder how life would out to be for me if I didn't get into this relationship. I credit many good things in my life now to having spent the last few years with J, sometimes I feel like it's even like, literally like, salvation.

Salvation from the singlehood kingdom, the state of searching, dating, trials and changing lovers for a try....you name it.

I cannot tell if I would be still happy being single as the person I was when I answered the interview five years ago, if I were single today. It sends chill down my spine to think that among my women friends, the emotionally stable and contented ones are mostly attached, if not married.

Fresh out of college and out of my small town, I was a sweet-young-thing, barely twenty - of course I couldn't care for the world if I hadn't a boyfriend, I was happily getting a taste of city-girl life, meeting people and getting choked on my first cigarette passed down by some seventy-year-old girl.

Now, to imagine ten years later, after having lived in the same city, seen more things, travelled to a few places, mellowed down, grown slightly cynical...I cannot say the same if I would preferred to be single now, at the age of 30.

Ask me a question about being happy and I will have much to say because I seem to understand some of the science of it. I ask myself if I were love-less, hanging on to close friends, dating and chilling, I don't know if understanding how happiness work theoretically alone would make a happy single person.

I can tell a single girlfriend to curb her depression in working out in a park and reaching for a great tub of ice cream because these are tested and proven fixes to depression (working out is especially efficient for women), but I don't know if that would give her inner peace and contentment for months and years to come.

Even after reading cover to cover on the science of happiness, I feel I haven't the confidence to say that I can happy, mate or no mate.

Things in my relationship seems to be going well and I like to say that even to the extend of being soul-mates. While I treasure every bit of it I sing the song of Que sera sera in my head, who know what tomorrow will bring?

Sheepishly I feel damn lucky to have someone to love and loves me back, though it doesn't feel right that I don't know what to say to a single girlfriend who is anxious to fill up her void.

SeeMing bought me a little book for Valentine's day about seven years back, titled Jane Wants A Boyfriend (author Craig Fong). According to Craig, you have to be happy on your own before you find that love in your life. In the book Jane breaks free from depression by going for a nice hair cut and starts a gym membership. She met her Jerry in the gym :)

What do you think? Can you be happy on your own?