Our entire life, we’ve wrestled with the too-often told “you should be lucky you are single, you’ve never had your heart broken”
Two 21-year-olds who have never been in a relationship reveal what it’s like to long for heartbreak.
My name is Flore, and I am what you like to call an international kid, having moved from one country to another five times. I was always known as “the new girl”, the one who sat on her own, the one who didn’t raise her hand in class. Needless to say, boys never looked at me twice, and the only time they did was to ask me for help with their homework. I lived the basic trope of the shy girl liking the bad boy, and we all know that never ends well. Now, the opposite is happening: guys are intimidated because I’ve grown into someone who knows exactly what she wants.
My name is Yasmine, and growing up, I always felt like the DUFF (designated ugly fat friend). I was the shy, socially awkward one who disappeared into the background while everyone else seemed to thrive. I wasn’t the person people had crushes on or confessed their feelings for. Instead, I was the one who was, and still is, listening to my friends’ relationship drama, offering advice on experiences I’ve never had.
Being single our entire lives lands us with unsolicited advice. “You are single because your standards are too high”, “don’t worry, it’ll happen when you least expect it”. Or, even worse, “you should be lucky you’re single, you’ve never had to experience the pain of heartbreak”. It is the latter that angers us above all else.
While we may never have experienced heartbreak, we’ve had to endure something much more wounding: heartbreak FOMO. Just like heartbreak’s five stages of grief, it comes with all the same hardships and struggles.
STAGE 1: Denial. After being single for 21 years, it still feels as if one day Prince Charming will come knocking. Longing for heartbreak starts with you thinking that you will be able to find a man who will reach your high, or perhaps unreachable, standards. The worst part about this denial is the delusion that these men exist on dating apps. Cue the never ending cycle of Hinge. You begin by creating a profile (thinking a hockey player will match with you) but then delete it two days later. As all you’ve been doing is staring at the ‘rat-looking’ men while the 6’3”, curly haired brunette you sent a rose to has failed to match with you. You then decide you’re better off anyway because you will not meet the love of your life on a dating app.
STAGE 2: Anger. Anger and outrage are two common responses when people discover you want to experience heartbreak. And so you, too, feel outrage in return. Heartbreak means there was love before. It means someone cared about you enough to break your heart in the first place. However, the real frustration? Having to watch people fall in love, break up, and find someone new the next day, while you can’t even get in one relationship. And don’t get us started on, “It’ll happen when you least expect it”. Really? We’ve been “least expecting” it for 21 years now! Can the process speed up a little?
STAGE 3: Bargaining. If you can’t have real heartbreak, just take the next best thing: fictional heartbreak, obsessive crushes, and the desperate search for something close to love. Even if it’s from that one guy who looked at you for three seconds in the library. Everyone has forced themselves to like someone just to spice up their lives. To counterbalance this boring real-world crush, you hyperfixate on fictional men, saving edits of your favourite celebrities on TikTok (149 saved under Callum Turner) or spending an entire evening just watching films he’s featured in (he looks particularly hot as a blonde in The Boys in the Boat). Unfortunately, there is little chance you will end up marrying Theo James or Drew Starkey. It’s that thrill and pain of heartbreak, the desire to feel something even if it’s awful, that we want.
STAGE 4: Sadness. The realisation that you don’t think you will ever find love or be loved the way you deserve to be. If you’ve never been heartbroken, that means you have never been loved deeply enough for it to hurt because love and heartbreak are a package deal. You watch people talk about their exes and their experiences of love and heartbreak, and you realise that despite the pain, you envy them because they had something you wish you could have. All of this has you overthinking. Are you just unlovable? Do you look unapproachable? What’s wrong with your personality, your appearance? And then, finally, the moment of defeat: maybe you should just accept that you’ll be single forever.
STAGE 5: Acceptance. Finally, accepting the depressing idea that you will probably never find the love you dream of, the love you’ve read about or watched in films. In this final stage, you realise you may or may not find perfect love, so is it really worth waiting to find out?