By: Bailey Elise McBride

This week, I took a big step in the world of Facebook—I declared myself single.  I had been single, technically, for some time, but finally decided it would be okay to let the Facebook world know I was available.

At this announcement, of course, my “Friends” expressed the necessary amount of shock and anger—replies of sad faces and “oh no!” were some of the first comments I received.

This is a story those of us who frequent Facebook to stay connected to friends see all the time.

Couples get together, people comment how happy they are that their friends FINALLY made it “Facebook official” and congratulate them on their newfound love.

In most cases, a few months, and sometimes a few weeks later, that darn “so-and-so is single message” appears again, with comments from the same friends who initially endorsed the relationship now saying “good riddance” and “OMG! What happened?!”

Being a middle-class girl raised in the Midwest and South, I have felt a lot of pressure to be in a relationship on track to get married since I was in high school.

All around me, and really most of us here, our friends are dating, getting engaged, or getting married—it seems I can’t get online sometimes without seeing a shiny new ring on someone’s finger.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not really in a position to cast judgment on anyone’s decisions in their own life—if you want to get married and have kids and not even legally be able to drink at your wedding, go for it.  Lots of people do.  I just advocate taking a step back from it all to look at the bigger picture.

What, really, is a relationship, in the sense of what we see on Facebook?

It’s a commitment—of time, of attention, and of exclusion (in most cases).

It’s a public expression of what you feel for another person, an explanation of sorts.

It’s a commitment to give your time and energy to someone, in lieu of literally everything else in the world you might be doing.

It’s a big commitment, to say the least, and, because of that, it’s one I haven’t really made in college. Many people don’t.

In my case, I don’t think I have missed out on a lot.  Just because no one “put a ring on it,” per se, doesn’t mean I have missed out on making real connections with people.

More than anything, I appreciate the wide variety of bonds I have been able to make with people that if I were committed to someone would have been unlikely to form.

Through figuring out who I was in relation to others, I have been able to come to terms with who I am, and who I am not.

It was psychologist Carl Jung who suggested that “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

I have explored ideas and places I could be in the future, and found out they just weren’t right for me, and I have been able to develop a true sense of what I want and value in life through my lack of singular commitment, and I in no way regret it.

It goes back to the old idea that “Sometimes you have to stand alone to prove that you can still stand.”

Without knowing who you are when you’re alone, how can you know who you are with other people?

If you think about it in a legal sense, the true definition of single is just that you aren’t married. “Single” would describe the majority of this campus, in fact.

It doesn’t mean you have to go out and find a different guy every weekend, and it doesn’t mean you’re scared of commitment—in my case, it just means that I haven’t yet met a person whose companionship is worth compromising what I want.

They say it takes half the time you were in a relationship to get over it after the fact—so if you date someone a year, you won’t really be over it until 6 months later, and so on.

Statistics also suggest that 60 percent of marriages between people under the age of 25 end in divorce.

It seems to me I’m on the better end of that spectrum, just waiting it out for the right moment.

Finally, what would a column about the single life be without advice from “Sex and the City” character Carrie Bradshaw?

“Being single used to mean that nobody wanted you,” she once said. “Now it means you’re pretty sexy and you’re taking your time deciding how you want your life to be and who you want to spend it with.”

Though the sexy part might be a bit of an exaggeration, that’s pretty much my plan.  To all my friends out there dating and engaged to be married, I wish you nothing but the best in your endeavors.

But to all my single friends out there, I leave you with the lyrics of Natasha Bedingfield’s “Single”—“ Everything in its right time everything in its right place/I know I’ll settle down one day/But ‘til then I like it this way—it’s my way.”

Bailey Elise McBride is a junior anthropology and journalism major and the News Editor of The Arkansas Traveler. Her column appears monthly.