Do you have a backup plan?

What if you are single forever? This is a question I had to face a few years ago, after a friend of mine took his own life and we later found out why. At the time, I was recovering from a permanent injury I had sustained in the gym. I had been training far too hard, sometimes three times a day, because I thought changing my body would make me more attractive to other people. It did not work. By that point, I had been rejected many times, and when people did give feedback, a lot of it came back to how I looked. So I figured I was the variable that needed changing, and instead of acting with care or intention, I reacted from pain. That was my greatest mistake. I was breaking myself for people who were not interested, and sometimes for people who could not simply say “no thanks” without adding a cruel comment. I did not know any better at the time. Life teaches you. We later found out that my friend had been hiding severe depression and despair. Like many men do, he had kept it bottled up until the very end. He had also faced rejection over his height, even though he was around average height, and unlike fitness, height was not something he could change. So the despair grew with each new comment from strangers, each rejection, each reminder that something he could not change was being treated as a reason he was not enough. The fact that these two things happened around the same time probably saved me, though I dearly wish they had not happened that way. It made me step back and realise I was also circling the drain of despair, moving through a dark tunnel that only leads to darker places. I began asking myself whether this was all life was: obsessing over finding someone, hurting myself in the process, and treating a lack of romantic success as proof that my future could not be bright. I had put too much of myself into the search. Too much time, too much money, too much focus, and too much of my identity. I had hurt myself permanently, lost a friend, and was beginning to loathe myself. The modern world does not help with this either. It swirls around these self-destructive thoughts and behaviours, and the algorithms know exactly how to make them worse. From talking-head videos to supplements, products, dating advice and grifters, one whiff of your insecurity and suddenly you become very marketable to algorithms. It took over a year, but eventually I started finding other things to work towards. I would still like to find a partner, but I could not let that decide my value anymore. I had already invested far too much in that belief, and nothing will cripple you like despair. My backup plan became something else. I would rededicate myself to learning, to new languages, new skills, books and ideas. I would travel, explore other countries, create more, and be the best uncle I could be. Not as a consolation prize, and not as a way of pretending love does not matter, but as a way of refusing to let one missing part of life swallow the rest of it. I would put down the phone and step away from its artificially constructed world. I would stop letting strangers, apps, algorithms and rejection decide the value of my life. I would go and find self-worth and self-love somewhere more real. Because if the question is “what if you are single forever?”, the answer cannot be “then life is over.” The answer has to be: then I still have to live.