Wedding Dresses Look Good In Your 40s

I promise.

Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.

In my singlehood work, very often but maybe specifically in the last few months, readers and listeners want me to talk about “losing hope,” and why I haven’t, or why I won’t. They’re almost perturbed by my hope, my relentless belief that my human life wasn’t meant to be lived from here to deathbed without romantic love, if romantic love is something we desire. I’ve been asked indirectly and straight to my face how I’m able to have hope, and how I can still believe in love given the current dating landscape and the 15 years I’ve gone without it. Basically a cohort of people calling bullshit. They don’t necessarily have hope for their own romantic futures, so they want the mechanics of how I have hope for mine. It’s not said from a place of genuine curiosity, it comes from doubt. They don’t believe me.

Having no hope is a valid belief, as long as it’s the truth. If you want to live your life thinking that the thing you want “will never happen,” you’re allowed to. But know this: There is no reward for “giving up.” Deciding that the thing you want is impossible for you specifically doesn’t actually make that thing happen. I think people decide to give up hope because being hopeless feels better than endless uncertainty and longing. It’s an understandable strategy, and I respect it. But I will not, under any circumstance, make it mine.