One is the loneliest number

Nearly half my life ago, my then-boyfriend and I came up with a theory: that Hollywood romcoms are to women what pornography is to men, in that both create artificial and potentially destructive expectations of the opposite gender. It's not love, ladies, if the Empire State Building doesn't light up when he kisses you for the first time.

Now, most of us are smarter than that, and most of us are perfectly well aware that relationships take hard work and communication and patience.

I think.

See, I don't know. I mean, I vaguely remember that being true.

I had my first serious boyfriend at 16 year old - we dated for a year and half and loved well and parted with a ground-shaking amount of hurt and anger.

I dated my military boy for three years from 19 to 22, and then from 24 to 26 dated my academic.

And that's about where the serious relationships end. Oh, sure, there have been romantic trysts and traumas in between, but serious relationships? relationships with potential and with love and with that lovely worn-jeans comfort and ease? I peaked on those nearly a decade ago.

I have no lack of love in my life, but I have a serious lack of Love.

Does this bother me?

And, if so, why does it bother me?

Next year, at the ripe old age of 35, I shall be classed as a spinster. According to legal lingo, I am already a spinster, and a spinster "without issue" no less. Poor unmarried, childless thing.

This didn't bother me in the slightest until very recently. I was quite comfortable with the fact that my life decisions - moving every three years, living in Mexico - were not those of someone who sought the white picket fence and plastic-wrapped furniture life. In lieu of Love, I would have pub crawls in Edinburgh and sushi nights in Toronto and mariachis in Mexico - fair deal.

When my brother got married to his remarkable wife, and they produced their first remarkable baby, I actually felt a palpable sense of relief that the pressure was off me. I was, I think, about 27 at this time. I didn't envy their diapers and marital rows, not when the world was at my fingertips.

And then. A few months ago, my dad asked me to write a little blurb about myself on the website for a massive family reunion involving all descendents of my paternal grandfather and his siblings. He had already written his, my dad, which read something along the lines of, "[My dad] is awesomely successful and happy. His son Paul is married to the amazing lady and they have two amazing children. His daughter Erika is the world traveller."

Huh, I thought to myself. World traveller. Well, I suppose that's not a bad label, is it?

And then I read the rest of the profiles:

My cousin Kim (two years older than me) is married with a beautiful son.
My cousin Bryan (one year younger than me) is getting married in two weeks.
My cousin Lindsay (five-ish years younger than me) just got married.
My cousin Erin (eight-ish years younger than me) is getting married in October.
My cousin Jess (about the same age as Erin) is getting married this fall.
My cousin Kelly (got to be a decade younger) is getting married and becoming a stepmother.

The doubt and fear started almost immediately, like that dream we all have wherein you are about to take your final exam but you've not been to class all year: dread washing over, trying to figure out how you can turn back time.

World travelling is awesome but it's awfully chilly company on a cold winter's night, and it really sucks at taking care of you when you're ill or ageing. When I come home from a tough day at the office, world travelling rarely takes me in its arms and reminds me I'll get through this too. And when I received news of my bonus and raise yesterday, world travelling didn't really care (mostly because debt, the close companion to world travelling, was excited enough for both).

I am suddenly shudderingly aware of what I don't have in my life, and scared that it may never come to me.

But!

Wanting to be partnered up is only one part of this issue. The fear and the desperation and the sorrow that is accompanying that desire can only be attributed to Meg Ryan and Reese Witherspoon.

For years now I have been taught that Love is something that comes to you when you're young and beautiful, and it's easy and full of radiant sunbeams and twittering bluebirds when it's right. Maxim tells me men only want girls when they're taut and young and droopy-eyelidded; Sex and the City tells me I should be in my raging prime right now, ravishing handsome boytoys every other evening.

As the years roll along, as they are wont to do, and my body begins it's rightful descent into soft, pendulous, imperfect yet flawless age, I am being hammered with messages that it's too late for me, that my life never caught up to what was expected of it, that the Empire State Building will never shatter into light for me. Meg is the perfect example of this: America's sweetheart when she was in her twenties, now she's in her fourties and can you think of the last time that pitiful, duck-lipped woman was depicted as a love interest? Age is prohibitive to love, Hollywood indirectly screams! And so are independence and experience, whispers Playboy.

But do you know what I think is even less attractive than jiggly bits? Rabid, misdirected, frantic, self-destructive, terrified desperation.

I am bursting with love, with the need to give and receive love. My fingers ache to tousle someone's hair. My arms ache to embrace another. My soul aches to know that it is not alone.

But I refuse to be defined by my lack of love, and to equate being single with being alone, even if every fibre of my body wants to believe it so.