Is anyone ever really single by choice?

On the awesome Sex and Psychology Podcast, ep 174: When Being Single Is Awesome, guest Yuthika Girme said being single is awesome when, among other things, the person is single by choice.

Which brought up a question I’ve asked before. When is being single a choice? Or, more accurately, when is it ever not a choice?

I guess for the 1% of the population who identifies as asexual or aromantic, singlehood is probably a choice. Then again, a lot of these people are in sexual and/or romantic relationships by choice. I follow an adult creator who is asexual and has a romantic partner. When I first learned this I kinda judged her partner. Who wants to have sex with someone who isn’t into it? Upon further reflection, how different is it really than someone who goes hunting with their partner because it makes them happy, or gives them a backrub? For me, personally, I’d rather pay for a massage or hunt with a buddy. And I certainly don’t want the entirety of my sex life to be with a partner who’s essentially doing me a favor. But that’s me and my preferences.

Anyway, the whole concept of “choice” is complicated. It implies free will, which we still don’t know for sure exists and we certainly don’t know the extent of it.

What the question brings up for me is the inconvenient fact that consent is a spectrum, not a binary.

If I physically force your hand to sign a contract, that’s clearly not a choice. But if I give you a choice between signing the contract and getting shot in the head, it’s still technically a choice, given that free will exists. It’s a coerced choice. If you exist in a system where you can either do sex work or lose your kid to CPS for neglect, that’s also a coerced choice. In that same framework, logically speaking, the choice to avoid doing sex work or face social sanction is also a coerced choice. Any choice where the alternative is punishment is, by any reasonable definition, a choice made under coercion.

But back to free will, we don’t usually get to choose who we’re attracted to. Or, at least, there’s limited free will at work. Maybe, if we had complete control over the situation, we’d choose to only be attracted to securely attached, six-figure-income individuals with perfect mental health. Instead, we find ourselves ignoring those people and swooning over avoidant dirtbags with more issues than Cosmo.

So, in a way, I think everyone who is single is single by choice for the same reason I don’t think “incels” exist. For every person who exists, there exists a person who would date them if given the chance.

This is what makes it difficult for me to say whether I’m single by choice. If I really wanted to get into a relationship, not to brag, but I’m fairly confident that someone would date me. So that’s a choice on my part. But at the same time, I’m not in charge of, I don’t think, whether I’ve met someone I really want to date who really wants to date me at the same time.

When people say they’re an incel or single by circumstance, I think what they’re saying is that who they want and who wants them hasn’t lined up yet. Or, as I like to put it, especially in the case of self-described incels and myself, their/our standards exceed their/our market value.

There are other things that can go wrong as well. I remember reading 

Mark Mansononce write about how if you're attracted to everyone and no one is attracted to you, you're too vulnerable. But if everyone is attracted to you but you're not attracted to anyone, you're not being vulnerable enough.Other things can make it harder to get into a relationship, like being homebound. But since people develop online relationships and relationships with incarcerated individuals, this hardly seems insurmountable.

It seems like maybe finding a good romantic relationship might be a lot like becoming happy. You have to go after it indirectly. Research indicates most people can’t make themselves happy by trying to be happy. We are much more successful if we build relationships, take care of our mental and physical health, find meaning in our lives, and challenge our brains regularly. (I had to re-read the linked post for the five things, SPIRE: Spiritual, Physical, Intellectual, Relational, Emotional).

And these same steps are probably pretty useful to finding a healthy romantic relationship as well.

I think it’s really interesting when people say things that don’t fully make sense to me as if they make perfect sense to them. “Single by choice” is just one example of many. Another from a recent post, is “AI isn’t sentient.” Either I’m missing something, or a lot of us just say things without really understanding what they imply a lot of the time.