So I may just be single forever.

I had a rather startling realisation last night, as one friend threaded cocktail umbrellas through my hair and another bombarded me with popcorn. Looking around Jelly's apartment, crowded with people I love, I realised that I am for all intents and purposes dating my friends. The sex is non-existent, but spending so much time with people who throw Press Gang parties and make lethal sangria and serve smoked oysters and crackers for dinner is making me happy in a very special way. There's little that I find more fulfilling at the moment than sitting around watching Spike and Lynda bicker and snuggling up to my peeps on the couch. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not.

I've always found it insultingly glib when people - usually people who are happily ensconced in relationships - tell single people that love and affection and tenderness are things that you get from your best friends and that if you have those friends, then you're probably not really lonely. It's always seemed like cold comfort to me - a rather patronising way of telling those of us not in relationships to suck it the fuck up, a way of making people who aren't in relationships but find them comfortable and fulfilling look like whiny bitches for mentioning the fact that life as a single person is not always ideal. But recently I've been so wrapped up in friendships, good friendships, that the little drop of wistfulness usually flavouring my day has disappeared. Altogether, I don't know that I miss it.

Somewhat tangentially, it does seem sometimes as though I should feel guilty for not really wanting to be single. I'm not unhappy by any stretch of the imagination, occasionally, sometimes with a strength of feeling that leaves me breathless, I begin to think that not being able to share any of my experiences makes that happiness rather hollow. And you're not really allowed to say that, what with the rah-rah rhetoric of singledom and being an independent womyn and all that. But I do feel that way sometimes, or I did - at the moment I just seem to want to hang out with my friends and forget the battleground that is dating.

Again, it's not altogether a brilliant thing. The more tight-knit our particular little gang gets, the less likely I seem to ever meet anyone outside of our cozy little circle. Why go hang out in an inner city bar when you have dinner and Hitchcock films waiting for you at your best friend's place? Why go on dates at all when you're guaranteed a night in with people who get your ridiculous jokes, laugh at your misfortune and pour your gin and tonic in a 1:1 ratio?

Why, in other words, risk rejection and the corresponding plummet in self-esteem when you're guaranteed a loving, warm, companionable time with people who care about you? The answer, for me at the moment, seems to be that I don't. And I know it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, as well - the more time I spend dating my friends, the less opportunity I have to meet someone, the less I am inclined to give it a try, the more time I date my friends. I don't know, things have been going so disastrously recently in my dating life that that almost seems like a good trade-off.

This is going in circles, isn't it? I guess at the root of everything is that I have a crush on an impossible boy at the moment, and the whole thing just seems too difficult to navigate. Meeting strangers seems impossible. Everything seems to hurt too much. So I curl up on the couch with my friends and eat dolmades and pretend that love and intimacy in friendship fulfills the same function that it does in romance and for a little while, it really does. But if I die a crazy old cat lady, single and alone, that will probably be why.