It's Not You

Outstanding!

Although this book seems to be geared towards a female audience, I found it to be most relevant to singles in general. It was so delightfully wonderful to know that so many other souls out there feel and fear so many of the same things I do. I relished in the references to the married people who feel that the marriage license they obtained now provides them with a signed warrant from a judge allowing them knock the door to a single persons life off the hinges with a battering ram and accost said singleton with intrusive questions like “why are you still single?” or “what’s wrong with you?” The mere thought of intruding a married persons life with questions of why they got married in the first place is so far beyond the pale of acceptable conduct in a polite society. Not so much for the single person though. Everything from surgical scars to what your like in the morning is all up for public scrutiny.

She reminds us that you don’t have to “get right with yourself” or complete the “I’m ready for a relationship checklist” in order to have love in our lives. If there really were pre-love criteria that had to be met in order to have love in ones life, the human race would’ve ceased to exist long ago.

It’s one of the only books I’ve read that honestly left me with a lasting feeling of “maybe there’s nothing really wrong with me at all” that instead of wondering what I’ve been doing wrong all this time, maybe I’m actually doing it right. I’m wise enough to know that there will still be times that I question “why” and the doubt will creep in. The pain associated with yet again being told I’m too nice, or that I deserve someone better. Obviously excuses to hide the fact that they’re just not interested. Those tidal waves of familiar pain will decimate any of the temporary light that broke through the dark clouds. Only now, with the experiences she shared I’ll know that “it’s not me” it’s just how I feel at the moment, and why wouldn’t I. They are my feelings and I don’t need anyone’s permission to have them. So I’ll have them, all of them. I’ll wrap my arms around them and squeeze every drop of emotion I can get out of them. I’ll feel everything, and then I’ll move on, and I’ll be ok.

This book is great. The general message reminded me of a quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Ted Talk "We Should All Be Feminists," which recently gained popularity when it was featured on Beyonce's new album. "A woman at a certain age who is unmarried, our society teaches her to see it as a deep personal failure. And a man, after a certain age isn’t married, we just think he hasn’t come around to making his pick." Being single is not a failure. It just is, and this book hammers home that point, complete with mental rebuttals for all of those really annoying but well-meaning pieces of advice: You're too picky, you're too available, you're too intimidating, pretty much all of the you're too this and that of every extreme. You're not too anything. You're just you.