Good & Healthy Relationship Advice & Tips

1. The art of going to a party alone. Going to a party by yourself can be really scary, but once you've mastered the art and blossomed into the social butterfly you were born to be, you realize you're totally capable of making new friends without anyone by your side.

2. The beauty of solitude. One of the scariest things in the world is being alone with your thoughts. Being single, especially for a long period of time, gives you room to figure out who you are and why you feel what you feel. Once you know yourself better, solitude doesn't have to be lonely. It can be relaxing.

3. You learn the value of friendship. People in relationships have friends, but when you're single, you have way more time to cultivate deep friendships. The beauty of friendship is that it allows you to form emotional bonds that aren't as painful and don't require as much commitment of a relationship. (Plus you can have tons of friends at once and usually you only have one boyfriend at a time.) Basically, friends are the shit, and having tons of friends when you're single is the shit.

4. You get to focus solely on yourself. Having time to obsess over who you are and who you want to be is so important. When you're single, you have the opportunity to make decisions based on your own desires. Figuring out exactly what those desires are and why you have them helps you grow so much as a person. Plus, you never have to feel guilty about putting yourself first.

5. You learn there's more to life than dating. General consensus seems to be that life is more meaningful when you have a partner to share it with. Don't get me wrong, relationships are an extremely dope and important part of life. But having a boyfriend or a husband doesn't have to be the thing that gives your life meaning. And learning that you can be happy without that is the first step to discovering all the things that do give your life meaning.

6. You can finally figure out what you're looking for in a partner. When you date person after person, you sometimes lose track of why you're doing it in the first place. Being single gives you space to figure out what type of person you want to be with. Finding someone to date doesn't need to be high up on your radar of priorities, but figuring out what you want will make it all that much easier to spot them later on.

7. You'll realize you know how to solve problems on your own. Feeling overwhelmed by a problem, not being able to ask for help, and then solving said problem on your own is an amazing feeling. Whether it be fixing your sink or managing a conflict with a friend, doing the task on your own makes you believe in your abilities.

8. You might learn you enjoy casual partners. Not every person experiences this, but being single can, quite simply, teach you how to fuck casually. It turns out, having sex can be fun outside the context of a relationship! But since humans are prone to sometimes confuse sexual and romantic attraction, it can occasionally take you a little time to figure out how to have the best casual sex possible. Bonus: Banging more people helps you learn exactly what you're looking for in bed.

9. You understand the real issues instead of using boy problems as a distraction. So often we can project our deepest anxieties onto the most banal boy problems. Instead of obsessing about whether your boyfriend is secretly mad at you, you can focus on what's actually going on in your life: your career, you personal happiness, and how you actually want to live. And there's nothing more valuable than having self-awareness.