A great time in my life was being totally single and actively not

In the ledger of seasons, there is a bright chapter where a person chooses spaciousness over entanglement and calls it joy. So speaks Michaela Watkins: “A great time in my life was being totally single and actively not dating. Just saying, ‘I’m gonna not be in a relationship. I’m gonna not date.’ That was a super fun, awesome time.” Hear the defiance that is also delight. The world so often treats coupling as the calendar’s crown, yet this sentence raises a different standard: freedom as festival, self-knowledge as feast, quiet as a kind of thunder.

To name oneself single—not as lack but as liturgy—is to reorder the room of the soul. In such a season, mornings begin without negotiation; evenings close without apology. The hours are gathered, counted, and spent like coin on one’s own becoming. The vow to be not dating is not bitterness; it is boundary. It says, “I will not rent out the sanctuary of my attention to passing caravans. I will furnish it, sweep it, sing in it, make it radiant.” The refusal of a relationship for a time is not a fist; it is an open palm placed over the heart, feeling its metronome until the dance returns as choice, not compulsion.

There is an old precedent for this new courage. Henry David Thoreau stepped away to a pond’s edge and called his retreat an economy of truth; yet even before him, desert mothers and fathers learned that solitude could be lush with conversation—the kind one has with the self when all other voices fade. Their experiment, like Watkins’s, was not a rejection of love but a refinement of it: to love the world better by first learning not to leak one’s days. The woods of Walden, the cells of the early monasteries, the garret rooms of painters and poets—all testify: there are hours that ripen only when one is single on purpose.

Let a humbler, modern story walk beside the ancients. A chef named Alina ended a years-long entanglement and, trembling, declared a year of not dating. She wrote a covenant on a napkin: “Cook for friends. Save money. Sleep on time. Study spice.” The first months felt like winter—quiet, spare. Then new harvests: a pop-up supper that sold out; a paid apprenticeship she’d never had time to chase; Saturday mornings that belonged to the market and her bicycle. When an admirer arrived at her counter with bright eyes, she smiled and passed him bread without promise. By year’s end, she knew—deep in her wrists, her breath, her ledger—that the season had been, in Watkins’s words, “super fun, awesome”: not because it lacked love, but because it was filled with it—love for craft, for kin, for the self she nearly forgot.

Watkins’s line is also a lesson in sovereignty of language. To say, “I’m gonna not be in a relationship. I’m gonna not date,” is to draft one’s own treaty. The double negative is not confusion; it is emphasis. It turns a whisper into a bell: I will not drift into someone else’s storm. And note the fruit named: fun, awesomeness—words the world tries to reserve for romance. Here they are reclaimed for solitude: hikes that need no coordination, jokes told to friends who never weaponize them, projects finished because no one interrupted the long gold of a Sunday afternoon.

What, then, shall we pass to the apprentices of this art? First, that abstaining is an action, not a vacancy. Second, that a season of being single can be as formative as any vow exchanged beneath flowers. Third, that boundaries are instruments, not barricades: tuned well, they make music of your days. The point is not to despise bonds, but to cease treating them as the only spindle upon which a life can be wound.

Take these provisions for the road. (1) Declare a duration—forty days, three months, a year—of not dating, and mark its beginning as a festival, not a famine. (2) Draft a “joy list” to fund with your freed hours: skills to learn, rooms to tend, friendships to deepen, books to finish, places to walk. (3) Build rituals of self-keeping: a weekly solo meal you plate beautifully, a standing date with your journal, a Sabbath from screens. (4) When lonely weather comes—and it will—treat it like rain: expected, temporary, best met with shelter and tea, not with hasty vows. (5) When the season ends, choose again—yes or no to pursuit—but choose as a sovereign, not a supplicant. Do these, and you will discover what Watkins found: that a deliberate pause is not the absence of romance, but the presence of freedom—bright, playful, and strong.