Be Kind to the Lonely Hearts

As Valentine’s Day fades into the past, I find myself thinking about love—not the steady love of my female friendships, nor the unconditional love of my mother, not even the love I’ve learned to give myself—but the kind of love that hovers just out of reach. Close enough in dreams, yet distant in reality—the love of a partner.

At 32—almost 33 years old—I have never had a partner. I have walked the entirety of my life alone, building something steady and self-made while everyone around me seemed to build theirs with someone beside them.

There is a quiet vulnerability in moving through life alone. It is rarely dramatic. Most days, it whispers rather than shouts. And yet in that whisper lives a difficult truth: a full life and a lonely heart can coexist.

This is not to say I am unloved. I am supported, surrounded, and seen. There is always someone to call, somewhere to go, a seat saved at a table. I have meaningful work, deep relationships, and passions that fill my days. And still, I feel the absence of a partner—in the mundane and the monumental alike, in quiet routines and in moments that feel as though they were meant to be shared. 

It is in the ordinary that the ache lingers most.

I long for a partner with whom to build a life threaded with commitment, care, shared responsibility, and romantic attachment. But above all, I want a hand to hold while leaping into the unknown.

Leaping alone is frightening. Sometimes terrifying. But waiting for someone to leap with me has never been an option. So I leap alone.

In that solitude, I have discovered my own courage. My resilience. My capacity to build a life that is both full and quietly yearning. I have also realized that you never truly know what someone carries alone.

This is why kindness matters.

Kindness toward those whose lives do not follow the familiar script; toward the ones who arrive alone and leave alone; toward those who smile at milestone events and return to quiet apartments; toward people whose stories unfold in nonlinear ways.

Kindness lives in the questions we ask—and in the assumptions we refuse to make. Not everyone alone is broken. Not everyone without a partner is unhappy. But many of us are carrying burdens designed to be carried by two.

In a society that celebrates the milestones of coupledom, those of us who do not follow that path often go uncelebrated. For those who have already passed these milestones, it can feel as though something has been lost. For those for whom they still lie ahead, they can seem impossibly distant. And if they are never in the cards, they can leave you feeling unworthy.

I have watched the conventional milestones of partnership unfold around me while my own passed quietly and unceremoniously: healing my inner child; leaving an abusive relationship; sitting alone in a fertility clinic waiting room filled with couples; earning three university degrees; running my first half-marathon; giving birth to my first novel the same year my sister birthed her first child—hers celebrated, mine dismissed as if it had not been real work; all the quiet victories, the unseen leaps, the moments that demanded courage I had to celebrate alone.

Sometimes I wonder if I have made it this far because I am alone—unburdened, accountable only to myself. Or would I have gone further, faster, had someone been beside me? Someone to pull me forward, to carry me when I was tired.

And in that question, a darker one lingers: will the only milestone that gathers everyone for me be the one I will never witness—my accomplishments celebrated around my casket?

We glorify beginnings, but endings deserve their own reverence. The closing of a chapter can hold just as much bravery as the start of one. Celebrate the anniversaries of friendships. Celebrate the quiet victories and the unseen transformations. There is so much in life worth honouring. Find what is meaningful to you and to those around you—and celebrate that.

It is with that spirit of recognition that I choose to believe that even if my life looks different from what I once imagined, I am on the right path—though it may be unpaved. And though I sometimes envy the ease and certainty of the paved one, it is along the unpaved road that I have found myself.

So, be kind. Some of us are paving our own road and walking it alone.