Thanksgiving, the time of year when you stop and be thankful for what you have.
A lot of the time, it seems like when you stop to think about what you’ve got, there is always something you still want.
Being single around this time of year can often be difficult, especially when one has to face their family, married siblings and cousins, or maybe a grandmother who insists on telling you repeatedly that in the old country you would have already had a bushel of children. Do children come in a bushel?
In the wake of the holiday, single people are often left with an empty feeling — regardless of how many portly birds met their fate earlier in the week — like they’re missing a key component.
The most dangerous thing that can happen to a person during the holidays, during their ponderings of things, is asking, “What is wrong with me? Why am I not snatched up by someone?”
This question only leads to more depression, because as you start to ask it, you find flaws, flaws that no one else would necessarily see or care about.
But who can blame anyone for thinking such things?
We’re all so imperfect; some of us carry our flaws very well, but even the best people have to worry occasionally.
A little worry can snowball into a lot, and suddenly you’re being entirely irrational and making yourself all the more susceptible to outside pressures. Suddenly, an activity as simple as looking at an issue of InStyle Weddings can make you weep, or a simple thought of what could have been ruins an entire day, if not a slew of days.
The greatest trick to surviving the Thanksgiving and other holiday blues is to just try to keep positive. Don’t give in to the thought that maybe your grandmother is right, and you’ll never get married because you’ve wasted your youth.
Keep moving forward, and no matter what, keep from letting the thoughts of what you lack take over.
Being without a significant other at the holidays can be a great thing. The holidays are a time of ridiculous stress for couples, with all the family visiting.
Maybe this one time it’s good that you don’t have anyone because even though you’re sad, at least its not shouting matches in the car.
The other advantages of not being attached over Thanksgiving is that you don’t have to worry about the clean up gossip. We all know about the gossip that occurs after you’ve left with your significant other no one approves of, and on your leaving, as the clean-up happens, they insist on talking about them and you and you-and-them.
Maybe being alone at Thanksgiving and the other holidays is just something that a person has to deal with as some kind of a right of passage or a character building exercise. The more holidays you can remember being alone will make the ones to come with someone all the more special.
