“I miss being single.”
It’s a sobering thought if you’re already in a relationship, and can be hard to think, let alone say, even to yourself. Acknowledging it can feel like an admission that your feelings have faded and you prefer your previous relationship status. It may indicate this, although it may also be pointing to something that is even harder to acknowledge.
It is possible that we may miss versions of life that we wouldn’t really want to revive. For example, childhood may be remembered fondly without wanting to return to school, or an old friendship can be mourned despite it becoming unbearable. Yet, singlehood seems not to allow for the same ambivalence. Missing it can feel like a repudiation of the person beside us, as though gratitude for one life should remove all appreciation or attachment to any other version.
Although rather than trying to draw a conclusion on if you want single life or not, maybe a more pertinent question to ask yourself is: What does being single represent to you now that you no longer are?
The single person you remember
For one person, singlehood may represent erotic possibility. For another, freedom from being observed or depended upon. Someone else may miss the sense that their life could still surprise them. The thought tells us more once we understand what singlehood means to you specifically.
Memories of single life can become quite creative if a current relationship starts to feel repetitive. Remembering how lonely Sunday evenings could feel as a single person fades away when met with the imagined history of spontaneity that at the time was not quite as fulfilling as memory would have you believe. This distortion doesn’t make the longing meaningless. If anything, it makes the meaning more personal. We can idealise the part of the past that speaks most clearly to what now feels missing.
You may miss making a decision without first thinking about how someone else may be affected by it. Or missing feeling unknown by someone eager to discover who you are. Potentially even excited to discover parts of yourself in yet unknown scenarios. Singlehood may even have contained the possibility of becoming someone new without having to explain yourself to your partner.
Autonomy in a relationship allows us to feel as though our choices belong to us and don’t need to be co-signed by someone else. Genesse et al. (2025) found that greater autonomy was associated with higher relationship satisfaction. This complicates any assumption that commitment is demonstrated by how readily two lives become one. The strength of a relationship may partly depend on how much separateness it can handle.
The agreement neither of you made
It is quite common for relationships to develop unspoken rules of engagement as they progress. It may turn out that spending every weekend together ends up meaning that separate plans can only be made by mutual agreement. Or a supportive partner over a difficult time unwittingly ends up becoming responsible for maintaining the other’s emotional stability.
This can also be fuelled by the loaded expectation we have of each other and the relationship itself. We may believe that a loving partner should always be available to us, a wish for privacy may be translated into withdrawal, or wanting something different may cause unnecessary discomfort. The wish to protect our partner from emotional harm can feel virtuous, however it can leave us feeling as though we are sacrificing ourselves for something that the relationship may or may not be asking of us.
Yet our partner may never have requested the sacrifice.
They might equally feel stuck in the role this also requires them to play and worried that changing the arrangement could rock the boat. It can leave each person playing a role for each other that neither person is particularly enamoured by.
Psychodynamic relationship therapy describes how partners can recruit one another into corresponding roles that address wishes and fears neither person fully understands. Nielsen (2017), drawing on earlier psychoanalytic work, describes these arrangements as “unconscious marriage contracts.” Once established, the roles seem to take on a life of their own. For example, the more one person anticipates that independence will cause hurt, the more carefully they hide their need for it. Their partner may, in turn, sense a withdrawal without knowing its source and attempt to close the gap by seeking greater closeness, thereby confirming independence is dangerous.
No one is purposely ‘doing’ it to the other. However, each person may feel unconsciously recruited into maintaining a particular role out of fear about what a change in dynamic could lead to.
Some relationships however, are actively restrictive, and a partner may well respond to autonomy with punishment or contempt. This type of dynamic requires a separate conversation. But in the more ordinary sense that we are talking about here, it is worth asking whether the feared consequence of asking for more freedom belongs mainly to expectation or experience. If the fear carries no evidence, then maybe it can be thought about together to understand where it may be coming from so it can be worked through and put down.
The excitement of not knowing
Single life can feel alluring because it can suggest boundless possibilities when it comes to sexual or romantic encounters. A first date can hold excitement and anticipation about who we may meet, what might happen and what side of us may be drawn out in the encounter. We have yet to learn the other person’s habits or the limits of their interest. If we will be delighted or disappointed by them. The future is not yet written.
A long-term relationship offers a different kind of pleasure. Knowing someone deeply and feeling equally known by them can create a sense of safety and comfort. However, this is the very thing that can feel restrictive if that knowledge doesn’t leave space for discovery. If we anticipate the reply before asking the question and assume that our partner already knows what we will say, eventually there seems little reason to ask.
This is where long-term love may start to lose its thrill. Desire often stirs when something remains somewhat enigmatic. Established relationships so often lose this, and partners can treat each other as familiar characters with pre-determined story lines. Singlehood, then, can come to represent a life unscripted.
Research on personal growth suggests that experiences outside of an established relationship can sometimes bring vitality back into it. In two studies, Carswell et al. (2021) found that daily increases in personal growth were associated with greater positive emotion and romantic passion. However sustained personal growth separate from the relationship was also associated with lower passion through reduced intimacy if it could not be incorporated back into shared life.
This, then, highlights a relational tension. When it comes to committed relationships, people need enough freedom to remain interesting to themselves, without creating so much distance that our partner is only interesting to us from afar, when we have less access to them. The task is to create room for experiences that can change each person without requiring the relationship to prevent change from happening or needing to deny that it has.
Who wrote the rules?
Consensually non-monogamous relationships rarely form based on preordained expectations in the way that monogamous arrangements do, which means there is a greater requirement for relationship agreements to be explicit. Rodrigues (2024) describes how monogamy functions as the cultural default in Western societies, therefore many of its expectations go unsaid. In CNM relationships, partners may rely on open communication to establish relationship agreements beyond what is culturally assumed.
This isn’t to say that CNM relationships can’t become restrictive or go unexamined in their own ways. But there can often be an openness around establishing joint agreements that make space for what each person wants from the arrangement.
Monogamous couples may have fewer obvious reasons to ask. Conjoined lives can often be treated as a fait accompli, leaving little room for discussion about how much independence either person may wish to retain. There may be no prior discussion around what privacy means, how much togetherness feels loving versus smothering, or whether a change of mind is permitted without being experienced as a change of heart.
The statement “I miss being single” may in fact reveal the quiet discomfort of a partnered person who wishes to reclaim some freedom or some aspect of themselves without this needing to threaten the relationship. It may be whispered as a statement, but it may actually be a question: can this relationship make space for me to change, to be different, to reveal different sides of me that have not yet found a place to settle between us?
Sometimes the answer will expose a life that has become too limiting. Sometimes it will reveal that both people have been waiting for permission to change an agreement neither remembers making. Commitment remains a choice only while the life created by it can still be questioned.
References
Carswell, K. L., Muise, A., Harasymchuk, C., Horne, R. M., Visserman, M. L., & Impett, E. A. (2021). Growing desire or growing apart? Consequences of personal self-expansion for romantic passion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 121(2), 354–377.
Genesse, D., Brassard, A., Vaillancourt-Morel, M.-P., Muise, A., Raposo, S., & Péloquin, K. (2025). Being me while loving you: The role of autonomy in the association between insecure attachment and relationship satisfaction. Journal of Marital & Family Therapy, 51(4), e70079.
Nielsen, A. C. (2017). Psychodynamic couple therapy: A practical synthesis. Journal of Marital & Family Therapy, 43(4), 685–699.
Rodrigues, D. L. (2024). A narrative review of the dichotomy between the social views of non-monogamy and the experiences of consensual non-monogamous people. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 53, 931–940.
Ms. Segal: You always have a way of picking at some repressed emotion or state of being that I’m unable to express outwardly. Thank you for that. Great article.