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What It Took For Me to Be a Happy Single Person

I don’t mean content. I don’t mean not frustrated. I mean happy.

Vanessa Torre
5 min readApr 12, 2020
Photo by Brittani Burns via Unsplash

The short answer? Time. It took 30 long months. Months that seemed like they would never end. Months of questioning everything, including myself. And then came the answers.

I like timelines. They’re a solid metric of how our lives have moved forward or remained stagnant. As I was having my morning coffee, I did some math on my past.

I started dating my second husband 27 months after divorcing my first husband. I jumped into that relationship. I wasn’t happy being single. I had forgotten how to do it. Instead of figuring out how to be happy as a single person, I assigned the job of creating my happiness to someone else. I ended up firing that guy and went back to square one.

When I got divorced a second time, adjusting to being single in my mid-forties wasn’t easy. Being the divorcee was rarely ever fun even though I knew it should be. This is now the longest period of time that I have been single. I’ve settled in.

It doesn’t mean I’ve given up hope. This isn’t resignation. It’s not a statement of “I’ll just be alone for the rest of my life. It’s fine.” It’s recognizing my own happiness completely outside of any romantic involvement with someone else. This…

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Vanessa Torre
Vanessa Torre

Written by Vanessa Torre

Top 10 feminist writer. Writing, coaching, and relentlessly hyping women in midilfe. linktr.ee/Vanessaltorre Email: vanessa@vanessatorre.com

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