You're mentally disturbed because you're single
“You’re mentally disturbed because you’re single.”
This is not the kind of sentence you’re supposed to agree with. I didn’t exactly agree. But I also didn’t disagree.
Which is how I knew it had landed somewhere uncomfortable but real.
When I heard it, I laughed. Not because it was funny, but because it named a feeling I’d been circling for a while now.
This came from an Aunty I’m inexplicably close to. The kind you meet once at a wedding, stay with for three days in Amritsar, and then somehow keep forever.
We speak in a confused but effective mix of Punjabi and Hinglish about once a quarter over long phone calls. The comfort level is suspiciously high.
This time we did the usual warm-up. Health. Weather. State of the world. Her daughter. My family.
Then, casually, inevitably, she asked, “So… did you meet anyone?”
I laughed. Hesitated. Said, “I don’t know how you’ll feel about this, but I want to fall in love before I get married.”
She laughed too.
“So have you fallen in love yet?”
Silence.
She waited a second and then said, very matter-of-factly, “You may think I’m old-fashioned, but whether it’s a boy or a girl, if you’re unmarried beyond twenty-six, twenty-seven, you eventually become mentally disturbed.”
I was still processing the phrasing when she continued, as if clarifying, not correcting herself.
“You can have a hundred friends. A good job. Money. You can even live with family,” she said. “But still something feels missing. There’s a loneliness that creeps in. You keep wondering what is wrong. Nothing is wrong. It’s just that at different stages of life, you have different needs.”
She paused, then added gently, “Right now, this stage is for partnership. That’s why there is no sukhoon.”
That’s when it clicked. Not because I believe singleness is a disorder—it isn’t—but because she named the quiet disorientation of doing everything right and still missing something basic.
Not aspirational. Not romanticised. Basic.
The world is quietly designed to expect partnership by a certain age, like brushing your teeth twice a day. The systems assume it. The weekends assume it. The future assumes it.
And when you don’t have a partner, there is a very real grief—not of desperation, but of misalignment. You can enjoy your life and still mourn the absence of a shared one. You can be whole and still lonely. You can be okay and still ache.
Two things can be true. And that ache doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy your company or don’t know how to be single. It just means you’re paying attention.
What we rarely talk about is the actual cost of not having a partner, not emotionally, but materially.
My married friends admit it openly, often without realising how revealing they sound. There is the obvious emotional support, yes. But there is also something quieter and structural.
Someone who automatically shows up in hospital waiting rooms. Someone whose income cushions risk when jobs wobble or health scares appear. Someone who absorbs life’s relentless admin: planning, paying, deciding, remembering.
Someone who witnesses your life daily, not retroactively over voice notes and catch-up calls. But in flesh.
This isn’t about romance or grand gestures. This is what a partner is by definition: Shared load. Shared risk. Shared life maintenance.
And while we’re at it, having a human weighted blanket during your period, a body next to yours every morning when you wake up, and someone squeezing your thigh under the table at boring dinners? I’m sure all of that is fun too.
I understand decentring romance. I grew up on rom-coms that sold love as the ultimate happy ending, especially to women, and I know better now. Love isn’t an ending. It isn’t salvation. It isn’t even stability, necessarily.
But knowing all that doesn’t cancel the grief.
I like my life. I am proud of my independence. I work, I write, I maintain friendships, I take care of myself. I am not waiting in stasis for a man to arrive and begin my life for me.
And still, I grieve the absence of partnership. Increasingly since my mid-twenties. It shows up in small, almost embarrassing ways. In brief dating periods where you get a glimpse of a parallel life and then have to return it.
Travelling together. Waking up and falling asleep next to someone who might snore or kick in their sleep but still reaches for you the moment they wake up. Going grocery shopping together. Showing them your investment portfolio while they show you theirs and you compare strategies like it’s foreplay for adults.
Them knowing your medication side effects and staying in bed with you when it gets bad. Listening to work rants and disliking people they’ve never met. Remembering to wish your mum on her birthday.
Wearing their T-shirts when you haven’t done laundry and realising you suddenly have access to an entirely new wardrobe. Having them make you a sandwich and coffee when you’re feverish but still have a deadline. Them stocking their house, without discussion, with the mosquito repellent you can’t live without, the wine you like, the snacks you crave.
These moments start to feel like things you want to romanticise and write poems about, because yes, you’re a writer, but also because this was supposed to be normal. And it isn’t.
These brief dating experiences begin to feel like a familiar millennial joke. We can’t afford houses, so we live in pretty, expensive Airbnbs. We can’t afford children, so we buy plants.
We can’t afford a shared life, so we keep renting fragments of it.
What that conversation with Aunty did wasn’t offer reassurance or false hope. It did something rarer—it acknowledged my present.
It didn’t promise me a future partner. It didn’t tell me I’d “find someone.” It simply recognised that moving through a world built for couples without being in one is destabilising, and that there is nothing wrong with naming that.
So no, I am not mentally disturbed because I am single. I am mentally disturbed for many other, far more interesting reasons.
But the disturbance she pointed to—the low-grade disorientation of misalignment—that part is real. The grief is proportionate. The ache is sane. And naming it is not a personal failure.
Single and mentally disturbed, yes. But still okay. For now.
Wow loved how you wrote this .
Another interesting read. Thank you for writing this :)