Since I entered my adolescent years, I have always believed that I was more than my penis or my ability to procreate. I am above marriage, and I am destined to be bigger than being just a father of three and a husband. And for years, I have lived by that principle. Whenever people ask me why I have never been in a relationship, my answer’s simple: I’m just not interested.
And I can’t tell you the number of times people have told me that I would never know. What if someone comes along and makes you fall in love?
Oh dear, don’t say that. You don’t know how much fun it is to build a family and have kids of your own.
And what they don’t understand is a very simple philosophy that I have in life:
it’s not that I am closing my door, it’s just that I don’t actively seek romantic companionship. And that’s as simple as it sounds. If someone were to come along, then so be it, they are
very much welcome. And building a family, having kids of my own, is fun, too. To me, however, those things feel shallow to my existence, and there’s more to life than falling in love with
someone.
The world as we know it is cruel
Thge society we are in right now is tedious and exhausting to live in. Just recently, a mother and her son were killed by a policeman who went rogue. The pandemic that just hit us made our lives miserable for a whole year has now mutated to be more infectious. The Black Lives Matter movement happened in the modern era when we’re supposed to be living in an equal and advanced society (but the opposite is happening, and hundreds of black lives are killed everyday by systemic racism). Transgender people are being killed every single day for just being who they are. All of these are happening right now. I myself am kinda just crawling through every single day like a soldier would in a war. This type of life isn’t any good. There’s a couple of sunshines here and there, but this era is exhausting.
And to bring a whole another person into this cruel and unjust world? To me, that is inhumane. Just thinking about the million things that could happen: what if my child is born with disabilities? The world is cruel enough to abled people, how much more to the disabled? What if they were gay or transgender? I wouldn’t want them to face the discrimination that endangers countless of lives today. Building my own family in this day and age would be cruel to my children’s existence. I myself have though countless of times that I don’t wanna be here anymore.
Families are expensive
I am a breadwinner in a family of four. I know how it is to support a family. And honmestly, I don’t want to do this for the rest of my short life. My brothers would hopefully one day settle down and have lives of their own, visit me and my aging aunt once a month for a potluck or something. And I get to spend my time doing things that I love—writing, pursuing music, going to the movies on my own, travelling the world with my aunt, and so much more. But right now, those things are virtually impossible for me. My salary is mostly distributed out to pay the bills, pay for food, and pay for debts that I incurred because my salary wasn’t enough.
“What if someone comes along?”
I would love that! I have been into a few crushes and flings before, and the feeling is exstatic. I would say the inevitable drama that comes with it isn’t worth it, but I am always willing to try. But let that never distract me from the goal. I date to marry, not for fun. When people do the latter, it hurts people, and it pulls the person who had invested more emotions into more pain. So I tend to hesitate when someone actually does come along. It’s always the feeling of not being enough, or the fear of being enclosed in a tight box of commitment. But thre’s always room to grow, and I am willing to do the work.
The goal is not to marry, but to be happy
As I am writing this, I am 21 years old. I just entered adulthood. And it’s too early for me to be thinking about families and marriage. But I have already received a not-small number of
unsolicited opinions and advices about how I should lead my life, and most of them involved building a family of my own, or having a girlfriend. I have even been told one time,
You can’t be single your entire life! Your hands will be tired
.
These types of statements, while well-meaning, leave an unpleasant taste to the mouth.
I have seen time and again how families have been built, nurtured, and broken down to its irreparable units of mostly broken people that struggle to just get by everyday until they, too, build their own families and repeat the cycle once again. Does it mean that marriages always end in tragic outcomes? Hardly. We cannot ignore the countless couples that stood by each other through thick and thin. There is still hope for families.
People say that the essence of life is building a happy family. I guess we were led to believe that way because of our biological nature to procreate. Our primitive primate DNAs command us to stick our dicks in people’s holes so our genes live on for another hundred years. But we are civilized people. We are intelligent. We have the ability to outgrow our biological tendencies and follow a course of our own accord. I choose to do so.