CHAD's Notebook.

Lets get something out of the way right now.

Single is not the waiting room. Single is not the rough draft. Single is not what you are doing while you wait for the real thing to start. If anybody has ever made you feel like your life is on pause until you find a partner, that person needs to read a book. Preferably a good one. Possibly while alone. Possibly with a great cocktail or mocktail in hand.

Because here is the truth nobody puts on a wedding invitation: a lot of people are genuinely, deeply, unshakably happy single. Not "happy for now." Not "making the best of it." Happy. Period. And the science backs it up harder than your group chat backs your bad decisions.

The Research Nobody Talks About At Brunch

Dr. Bella DePaulo is a Harvard-trained social psychologist who has spent decades studying single people. She surveyed more than 20,000 people from over 100 countries. Her finding? There is a whole category of humans she calls "single at heart." For these folks, single life is not a phase. It is the main event. Single life is how they live their most meaningful, fulfilling, psychologically rich, and authentic life. They are flourishing because they are single, not in spite of being single.

Read that again. Because of. Not in spite of.

And it gets better. A ten-year study of more than seventeen thousand people without romantic partners found that, over time, the people who were not looking to unsingle themselves were becoming happier and happier with their lives, while those who were pining for a partner were becoming increasingly dissatisfied.

So the variable that mattered was not single versus partnered. The variable was whether or not the person was at peace with where they were. The pining was the problem. Not the singleness.

That is huge. That changes everything.

What Single People Actually Get That Coupled People Quietly Envy

Here is what the research keeps finding when you actually study single people instead of just assuming they are sad.

More time and a clearer head. In a large 2022 study of single people, participants reported that the number one benefit of being single was getting more time to yourself. When you're single, you don't need to plan your life considering someone else's time and schedule. Your calendar is yours. Your Sunday is yours. Your random Tuesday at 9pm is yours. That is real.

Stronger friendships. One of the benefits of being single is having the time and energy to invest in other important relationships in your life. Strong social connections have long been documented in research to promote good mental health. The friend who disappears the second they get a partner is a stereotype because it happens constantly. Single people tend to keep showing up. And those friendships often go deeper than people realize.

Self knowledge. You may find that spending some time being single gives you the opportunity to get more clarity about your values, dreams, and needs. In a committed relationship, you'll likely spend a lot of energy focused on getting to know the other person. In doing so, it may be difficult to remember the importance of continuing to get to know yourself. You cannot pour from a stranger. If you do not know yourself, you cannot bring yourself to anybody else either.

Mental space. Relationships, even healthy ones, come with cognitive load. There are more birthdays to remember and more slack to pick up. But when you're single, much of that mental bandwidth is freed up. Less mental tabs open. More room to actually think.

Resilience. Research even shows that staying single longer can build resilience, helping people better navigate future challenges in relationships and life. The skills you build alone do not disappear when you partner up. They compound.

The Anxiety Spiral, And How To Get Out

Now lets be real. Some of you reading this are not happy single. You are anxious single. You are doomscrolling single. You are watching your friends get engaged single. You are convinced something is wrong with you single.

Nothing is wrong with you.

The anxiety is not coming from being single. It is coming from a story you have been told your entire life that single equals incomplete. Movies, songs, your aunt at Thanksgiving, the algorithm, all of it. The story is the problem. Not your relationship status.

So here is the move. Stop trying to fix the singleness. Start questioning the story.

The people who are happiest single are not happiest because they are running from love. They are happiest because they have stopped treating their life as a draft of a future life. They are living the actual life. Right now.

Date Yourself And Mean It

This is going to sound corny. Lean in anyway.

Take yourself on a real date this week. Not "I went and got coffee while running errands." A real date. Reservation at a place you have been wanting to try. A movie you have been waiting for. A walk somewhere you have never been. Wear something you feel good in. Put your phone away. Be there.

Sounds embarrassing for the first ten minutes. Then it stops being embarrassing. Then it starts being one of the most clarifying things you can do.

Because here is what dating yourself actually teaches you. It teaches you what your taste actually is when nobody else is voting. It teaches you that your own company is genuinely good. It teaches you that the person you are looking for, you can practice being for yourself first.

Be corny about yourself. Be passionate about yourself. Be the person who knows their own coffee order, their own deal breakers, their own three favorite restaurants in their neighborhood. The person who is rooted in themselves is magnetic. Not because they are trying. Because they are not trying.

What The Couples Industrial Complex Will Not Tell You

The wedding industry is worth tens of billions of dollars. The dating app industry is worth tens of billions more. Greeting cards. Jewelry. Honeymoons. Anniversary dinners. There is a massive financial incentive to make you feel that being single is a problem you need to spend money to fix.

You do not.

Some people are partnered and thriving. Beautiful. Some people are single and thriving. Also beautiful. Some people are partnered and miserable. Some people are single and miserable. The relationship status is not the variable. The relationship with yourself is the variable.

Build that one first. The rest sorts itself out.

So What Now

If you are single right now, here is the move.

Stop framing it as a temporary condition you are trying to escape. Even if you do want a partner eventually. Especially if you do. Because the version of you that is genuinely happy single is the version of you that any decent partner is actually going to want to be with. Desperation is not a love language. Wholeness is.

Take yourself out. Get to know your own opinions. Show up for your friends in a way that makes them feel chosen. Pick up the hobby. Travel solo if you can. Sit with yourself in silence and find out you are actually decent company.

You are not behind. You are not broken. You are not a draft.

You are the whole thing.

Look. I get it. You match with someone, you sit there for an hour rehearsing what to send, and then you panic and type "hey" because your brain locked up. Happens to everyone. But here's the thing. "Hey" is the social equivalent of standing in front of someone with your hands in your pockets, waiting for them to entertain you.

The whole point of an opener is to give them somewhere to go. Something specific. A reason to type back that doesn't require them to start the entire conversation from scratch.

What actually works

Pull from their profile. The guitar in the third pic. The hiking caption. The book on their nightstand. Anything specific. You're not trying to be clever. You're trying to prove you actually looked at who they are.

The two-second rule

If your opener could be sent to literally anyone on the app, it's not an opener. It's a placeholder. Specificity is the entire move. The more specific, the more it feels like a real human noticed them and not just another match in a pile.

"hey" makes them work. a specific question makes you sound interested. pick one.

Try this for the next week. Every opener has to reference something from their profile. No exceptions. Watch your reply rate change. Then text me.