Hello Sunshine, Hey fam Today on the bright Side, we're kicking off a week of love and romance ahead of Valentine's Day, and today's show is a must listen. Throw out every piece of advice about love you've ever been given, because today we're learning how to be our own best life. Partner with writer Megan Cain. Her new book Party of One is a fearless approach to self love. She'll dish on how to shed the stigma of being alone, build a life you love, and the power of building community.
It's Monday, February tenth. I'm Simone Voice, I'm.
Danielle Robe and this is the bright Side from Hello Sunshine. On my Mind Monday is brought to you by Lareel Paris.
Okay, Danielle, So what is on your mind? Loven Maris? Okay, here's why.
I read a piece in the Atlantic called America's marriage material shortage. Whooh do you think we have one?
Anecdotally?
Yes, right, My friends and I talk about this all the time because it feels like there's not enough good men for all the great women we know.
So but like you said, it's all anecdotal.
So this article says that a lot of young people are not even dating anymore. There's a significant decline in youth romance. There's even a decline in twelfth graders dating. It's fallen from about eighty five percent in the nineteen eighties to less than fifty percent in the twenty twenties.
What is this shark decline about.
It can't just be self love, Like love is such a human instinct.
Yeah, what is this about? I mean, the first thing that comes to mind for me. I can only think about it from a woman's perspective, right, because that's my experience. Women are increasingly living bigger and bigger lives and doing so outside of the context of a partnership. You know, women are postponing child rearing and marriage and all these traditional deadlines that society has imposed upon us.
And I wonder if that's part of it.
If in that shift.
Towards these these bigger lives, women are just deprioritizing and decentering relationships.
Yeah, and I think there's an economic factor here too. Women don't really need a partner anymore. But what's interesting is, like these studies talk about twelfth graders in general, so it's not just women. I don't know it feels like the world is really renegotiating what love and relationships look like, what marriage looks like. And I think it's an interesting topic to think more deeply about as Valentine's Day is approaching, when people are really thinking and focusing on love.
Right, Yes, our guest today is here to flip the script.
She's offering a different perspective on the way we value relationships, and really she's challenging us to rethink everything we know about romance, partnership, and love. She's here to remind us that the most important relationship we'll ever have, the one that shape every other connection, is the one we have with ourselves.
And our guest today just wants to toss out the rule book on love. At a time when everyone is obsessing over dinner reservations and the perfect Valentine's Day plans, She's inviting us to do something completely opposite, to look inward and maybe even redefine what love and relationships mean and look like.
Our guest is Megan Kin.
She's the writer of a book called Party of One, Be your own best life Partner, and she's also the founder of NPR's Life Kit podcast, which brings listeners advice about personal finance, health, and of course, relationships.
After a couple of really rocking breakups, Megan decided to look at her life and approach love completely different. She says, it's really important to spend some time alone.
Yes, and what's kind of sweet about her story is that she now has a partner. So I'm really curious to hear how embracing this idea ended up leading her to potentially the love of her life. Danielle, I know you had a wonderful conversation with her, and I'm really excited to hear.
Absolutely my conversation with Megan Kin right after the break Thanks to our partners at Lorel Paris, because you're worth it.
From skincare to hair care and everything in between, Loreal Paris delivers expert backed beauty that empowers confidence. Discover your perfect routine at Lorel Paris USA dot com.
Megan, Welcome to the bright Side.
Thanks for having me.
I'm so excited to talk to you today, not just because I'm single, but also because you were on a mission to challenge popular conventions about love and relationships, and I think that this message is so needed in our culture. Inciting makes us feel that we have to be in a relationship to feel complete, and you're saying it's okay to be single. What made you want to challenge the conventional ideology around relationships and love?
Why take this on?
Well, in my mid to late twenties, I was thinking a lot about how I didn't have a boyfriend, how I had been in a serious relationship. And now, of course I've had plenty of different types of relationships. I had friendships, I had relationships with mentors and coaches and all these other people in my life, but of course what culture puts on a pedestal is the romantic relationship. So I was really in my head about what that meant.
And even though I knew that being on your own was very valid, there was nothing to be ashamed of it. I had a hard time bridging my head in my heart. I wanted to kind of slow things down and understand where exactly this pressure was coming from, even though I knew about it, How do I actually start to feel in my body that I could take down the pressure and have a calm no matter what my relationship status would be.
I actually think that your late twenties are often the time where you start thinking about that because you've had maybe some good relationships, some bad relationships, some people none at all, and you start really taking stock. I'm curious how things like movies and books and romance novels sort of impacted your view on these relationships. Yeah.
Absolutely so. I'm an elder millennial.
So I came up in the Disney you know, renaissance of you know, the Little Mermaid beating the Beast, and you know, of course there's so much good social criticism about why those are flowed. Right, I'm not making anything new here, of course, it's like your princess that needs to be saved, and then the rest of your life starts at this like adult coronation of a wedding, right, and then again after that, good luck.
We don't know really what happens to you after that.
And you know, but I think by the time I got to middle school, high school, I knew I didn't want to be a princess.
I was like, that's not me. I'm independent.
But then like even movies like the kind of like team rom coms of the early two thousands that were so based on like you're a loser if you're you know, pursuing art, like Rachel Lee Cook and you know, shoes all that and have like glasses in a ponytail that if you are somehow not conforming to the absolute norm, you're seen as an outcast.
Do you remember the moment you realize no one was coming to save you.
I think pretty early in my twenties, I.
Would say I had like needed someone that was like my friend's realm me, you know how it is in your early twenties. And we went on like a handful of dates, if you could even call them that.
Like, it was all very like unclear, and I could.
Tell he was starting to really distance himself and maybe not really fully goes me because we had mutual friends, but be like, this is not happening anymore. And I remember sitting on the floor of my kitchen like just crying, and I was like, I know, breakup suck.
Is this even a breakup?
I don't know.
There was no labels, but I was like.
Oh, I can't depend on other people to make me feel a certain way, because if anyone's ever done a group project, working with other people or depending on other people to achieve a goal can be very hard. So I think that was the beginning seeds of like I need to figure out how this works in my life, in my body, in my psyche, so I can feel at least stable, not even just good, I would say, like stable.
As horrible as breakups are, you know, I don't wish them on my worst enemy. You are broken open in a way that I think there's so much room for incredible growth and self reflection. Would you categorize your relationships as having been good or bad?
Or where do you see them?
When I look back up my relationships in my twenties that I write about in the book, I would not call them bad.
I was not showing up authentically in them. I thought I was because I was.
Feeling like myself in those relationships and that I had chemistry, because there is such an emphasis when you're dating on your chemistry in chemistry's important, right, Like you want to feel that you know that sparkin that flow with someone. But I think I thought chemistry alone would take me far.
And what I didn't realize was I had to I was silencing myself in a lot of ways where I was not saying, actually, I don't like it when we interact in this way, or why did we have this fight, like that's it's weird to me, or do you even want kids?
Like even but like I'm trying to figure it out myself too.
We need to figure that out if we're getting past a certain point, because I need to know one way or the other.
And so I don't think they were bad and necessarily in.
Terms of relationship, I wasn't my full authentic self in them because I was so conditioned like some many of us are, to just see, hey, you check the box.
Great, Now shut up. You're in a relationship. And that's so.
Unfortunate because in the best case scenario it was, you know, for me that like nothing really necessarily bad, cap But in the worst case is that you say, with that person for a very long time or something much darker happens. Right, So it's not to say this is anyone's fault necessarily, But looking back on those relationships, I'm glad that they happen.
I'm glad they're in the rearview mirror.
You mentioned in your book that you feel like you were part of this rare club in your twenties.
What does that mean.
Yeah, so it really feels like between singles and those relationships, there's like this like kind of like divide right where you're like, if you're single, like you're in a waiting room almost, and then like through this door, this magical door is the club of couple people, right. And once I crossed that threshold, I had this ugly confidence about what it meant to be in a relationship. I felt very proud and kind of like, look at us for
holding each other's hands in public. I'm in a relationship, like kind of very performative and like not really focusing on again, things that are actually important in a relationship, just kind of showing off the sense of a relationship for folks. And the club felt like, you know, it's exactly that, it's an exclusion you know, it's an exclusionary right. Clubs are inherently closed off. And what I begin to see is like we don't service anybody when we think
about singles versus married people. Right, So when we turn down the pressure on what it means to be single, when we destigmatize what it means to be single, I think what it does is it has an interesting impact on couples, because what it does is it shows couples, hey, I can think about my own personhood within a relationship.
I can think about how single people are part of my community who would have thought right, and then those single people feel like treated better by people who are coupled off in their life.
So there's less of this like versus each.
Other kind of dynamic, and I think a more colistic community can come into play.
I'm really interested and something that you write about in your book called the haze, and you say that it contributes to the way that we see relationships. What is the haze and how does it play out in the way that we think about what we should want?
So the Hayes is my metaphor for all the societal messages that we receive that can really engulf us and make us think that that's our whole reality. Right, Like, think about driving like a car through fog. It feels like, ah, you can't even see two feet in front of you, and it feels suffocating.
But when reality on the other side of that fog, when you drive out.
Of the haze and the clouds, you see so much around you, like the world gets bigger again, right, And I was trying to think of something that really felt like, something that doesn't necessarily feel that invasive or harmful but it kind of does envelop you and sneak up on you and literally clouds your judgment about.
What you want.
I think what I chose the metaphor of the Hayes is because you can always kind of like poke your head out if you want, right, all you have to do is be aware of it, like the kind of classic therapy talk of name entertainment.
Right.
And so for me, the Hayes is it's just exactly how I felt, was like I feel consumed by all these messages that are telling me you need to have a relationship, you need to have a romantic relationship, you need to get married, without me thinking for myself, well what do I actually want?
Even if I do want.
To have a partner and get married, what does that actually look like to me? Not what everyone else is telling me? And the whole process of the book was kind of just picking off that haze and like stepping through and out of it so I could think, Okay, what do I actually want?
Not just what is right in front of me?
How did you step out of it? Was it therapy? Did you ask yourself questions? Definitely a lot of therapy.
I think what it was the mission for me in this book too, Again was really how do I internalize these messages of living day to day of it's okay to be single, because again I knew intellectually that was the case, but sometimes you just feel sad, right because you feel sad? And I had to think about what was making me over the top upset, and what I kept coming back to was shame.
Was the shame that was.
Being layered onto feeling frustration or upset or that date didn't go well, or man, I thought this was promising. We had five dates, it's not great, and then damn, like everything just.
Bought himed out from me.
And when in fact, you can just focus on I feel sad because I feel sad, you can really boil it down because the layer of shame that gets kind of vacillined over all of the rest of that is the thing that actually is creating the upset. I was thinking a lot about how I also like live in my head right, how we all do, and the kind of story I was telling myself, and how I could you know, rain those back in to get down to reality.
My best friend from college just said something so similar. We were at dinner the other night and she's thirty three. I'm thirty four, and she was like, can you believe this is our life? Like I never thought we would both all three of us were sitting there, single, and she was like, the weird part is that I'm having this dissonance that I'm actually the happiest I've ever been. I wake up really happy, really self assured. I have
a career, I like, I have friends, I love. I don't necessarily feel like I need this thing, and yet I feel like I need this thing.
Yeah, I know, because the conditioning is very, very strong. I think it is.
Great to see that there is such a wave of support for platonic love and you know, really appreciating all the different types of love in one's life. There's this Harvard study that I write about. It's like one of the longest studies on human development. And they tracked like something like seven hundred men over like decades and decades, and they watched their relationships, their work, their health, all these their hobbies, all these different factors.
And one of the biggest things that came out.
Of the study was the key to live happier and healthier is to have good relationships of all kinds. They didn't single out romance or marriage as the magic bullet, right, it was all kinds.
Of all different levels.
Well, as we think about happiness and look to find our own happiness or live within the happiness we have right now, you stress that the validation we're looking for.
Comes from us, not from another person.
What do you think is one thing that we can do for ourselves to start practicing that mindset.
I'm a really big fan of values. I know I've mentioned a few times here.
I think what helps turn down the pressure for yourself about needing a relationship or like you feel like your life can't start until you have a relationship, is to get really clear about what values you have to certain goals. Because the thing about a goal is that it's automatically
past fail right. Yes, if you are trying to be married and that's a goal, well that you're either a failure right up until you get married, and then you're technically a success, and then even that feels like a little backwards.
Right right, And then is divorce a failure or is it a success of however many years in the life you.
Built exactly it's so fraught and like I think, not very helpful, so totally what you could do is think about what values you have underneath that. Well, maybe it's you really value community, right, you want to you want you like family. Once you see those values, you can be a lot more flexible about how those things are expressed.
And I think when you give yourself flexibility about how you show up for yourself and what you want out of life, the world is going to open up so much more than if you think I only need this type of relationship I need to have, you know it.
Also when it comes to career, I need this exact type of.
Job, right, Like, so many things are out of your control about those things.
Whereas if you can think, okay, well I.
Really value creativity, right, Like, you don't necessarily have to wait to get into a certain MFA program and then pay a lot of money out of pocket to like get an expensive degree. You could start an accountability group, or you write together with friends, right, or you get together to draw. Like there's I think just like kind of shrinking down to a smaller scale what your values are can show you all these different paths about creating a ridge.
Life that makes absolute sense.
So you debunk some really compelling myths about marriage and love and there's a few that I love.
One is that marriage has always been for love.
Yeah, it's something I think we all know intellectually when we watch like I don't know, like thrones or anything that takes place in like the distant past. We know that marriages are often a tool for politics and power and money, right, and have been for a long time.
But we think we're very evolved and that it's you know, marriage.
Is only for love, But we forget that it was a kind of recent ish invention to marry for love. This idea that love is the only reason we marry is relatively new, and so you know, especially in American and Western life, romantic love and moderate or in love marriages as they're called, didn't really come about until like
the Victorian era. This interesting thing happens in the Victorian ERAa, where the Industrial Revolution meant that you could leave your families farm right and create get a living wage outside of your family. You didn't have to worry about marrying into another family as the main way to combine and gain resources. You could actually be a little bit more independent. And so I think that plus kind of pop culture sensibilities kind of made it so that love marriages kind
of became the new thing. And then there's this also this fascinating idea about how this.
Idea of traditional marriage.
Traditional two of course, you know, is how it was always meant to be that kind of leave it to Beaver style type of marriage, where we have the nineteen fifties housewife at home with the two kids in the white pig defense husband goes off. But what was so helpful to learn from this historian symphony Coots is that was actually a complete blip in the timeline of marriage, especially in America. It was right after World War Two, when wages were actually pretty.
High and men were coming home for war and there could be one breadwinner at the home.
And actually women were getting married at a slightly younger age around the nineteen fifties than they were even sixty years prior. And I think it's really telling that from nineteen sixty on in America the age of a first marriage has steadily gone up. It has not gone down since that time in the fifties. So it's a good remind that what we think of as quote unquote traditional
is never that, it is always evolving. In fact, that very specific view of marriage was such a small timeline in the history of marriage, and I think knowing that is really powerful because it is marriage and how we love and decide a partner is always evolving and changing and bumping up against structures.
It is not a vacuum.
We have to take another short break, but we'll be back in just a minute.
Don't go anywhere, and we're back.
So you really advocate for taking yourself out on dates, and I have to tell you, the want to do that run the gamut.
Some people love it.
And they're so good at going to a restaurant by themselves. Some people are like, hell, no, I would never do that. I'm okay going to a restaurant by myself. I don't know if I don't go to a movie by myself.
Oh that's interesting.
I feel like the thing about dining alone is that's almost like the quote unquote most vulnerable. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I find most people like have that. For me, I loved going to the movies by myself because you don't have to talk with anybody.
You just sell us staring at a screen. You know that's true. Yeah, And you get the snacks you want. There's no compromise. Well.
One thing to always remember too, is like I've never been out in the world and saw someone just on their own and thought, oh my god, they're so sad. It doesn't even cross my mind.
I kind of look at them and think, oh, they're so awesome.
Yeah, exactly, So like you could be that awesome person too. So I love taking.
Myself to the movies, I love reading in public. I'm going to go out because I'm a creative person.
I need more input.
This is the idea of the artist state, is like giving yourself more input for your creativity. So that could be going to a arts and supply store just seeing what they have new they're browsing, doing that, go into a bookstore by yourself, going to a museum exhibit by yourself.
Oh I like a museum alone. There's this really interesting statistic that I want to ask you about. According to a twenty twenty three US Surgeon General's Advisory, half of US adults reported some measurable loneliness. Yeah, but you say, there's a big difference between loneliness and being alone. This is a topic that is close to my heart. First of all, what is the difference between loneliness and being alone.
Well, you know it's interesting too because in that same Surgeon General's advisory about loneliness, they even point to the idea of alone versus lonely that like chronic loneliness poses serious health threats, there is no getting around that that is an epidemic, but adoptive loneliness and like basically being I don't know a human that said, sometimes feel alone can be either helpful and be even.
Restorative at times.
I know that sounds a little counterintuitive, but here's what I mean by that. The difference between alone and lonely is alone is just the state of being alone. I'm alone in my apartment, safe for my tiny barkie, but I don't feel lonely because I'm connecting with you. Because loneliness is when you're dissatisfied with the state of being alone. And so I think that distinction is helpful because there's plenty of times I feel alone but not lonely.
But there's also times where I'm around other.
People and I feel lonely, right like people who I don't really connect with, or I feel like maybe an outsider in some way, And so I think it helps give us more.
Language about what we actually need in those moments.
But the problem with loneliness is that we get stuck in a spiral and sometimes it is hard to get out of that. We see other things as threats, Like when you do feel lonely and you see that couple holding hands walking down the stair, you're like cursing up a storm in your head, like there's always all these couples for in another day that might not cost your mind at all. Right, So I think that helps just
destigmatize what it means to be lonely. If this is such an epidemic, I think it gives us the tools to say, oh, I noticed something is changing.
I'm feeling lonely. I should make plans for this weekend and I look forward to I should text her friend.
I should just call this friend. I should check on in my mom. You know, I've friend who's going through a hard time. Maybe I can like make them cookies or something. And then, you know, all these things that how can even happen in a state of being alone can help feed that sense of connection. So you can nurture that sense of connection even if you're on your own that.
Day, I'm going to share a story my whole job in Ethos is really around connection. A few months ago, I started with a new therapist because my therapist who I love retired. We were just a few sessions in, so she's starting to get to know me. And I was dating this guy and I was like, do I break up with him?
Do I not? And she said, well, what's the fear.
I closed my eyes and I like put my hand on my heart, and I said, it's loneliness. I think I have a core fear of loneliness because when I think about the saddest moments of my life, they are when I was lonely. And she goes, well, that's so interesting because you've built a whole career around connection. And I realized that we're all sort of like chasing whatever. That core wound is mine was loneliness, and I've really worked on it, and I think there are ways that
you can be alone and not feel lonely. But it's about meeting your emotional needs, yes, and no one else is going to meet them for you. If you're in a relationship, it's a band aid to that exactly.
Yeah, as I was writing this book, I mentioned I got into a serious relationship and it was really interesting too in the process of writing the book, having that happened because I was like, oh, yeah, I'm still anxious. I'm just anxious about different things now. Like you know, as supportive and as wonderful as my partner is, he can't process my emotions for me, and I can't process his emotions.
And I think understanding the.
Tools that we have to regulate not to necessarily be happy all the time, because that's not the goal and not really possis the belever to understand how to ride the waves this real emotional maturity and safety. Then that helps you make better decisions about should I stay with this person, should I, should I continue dating.
Them, or should we part ways?
Because when you're acting out of fear, you're not acting from a place always that is from a place of reality, not always.
I think that you're acting out of need instead of want.
Yes, exactly, Yeah.
I think this idea is so interesting that you can be in a relationship and still not be attending to some of your core needs. For anyone who is in a relationship, how can they embrace some of the principles of the party of one in their life?
Absolutely?
Yeah, So I would say making sure that you it's not even just alone time. I do advocate for that. I think making sure you have hobbies that you like that are just for you. You don't have to do every single free activity with your partner, and kind of romantic those things that feel good that are just for you.
I love those walks because.
It's very a time where I can be really internal, connect with nature.
I get to walk as faster as slow as I want.
Right, So I would say, find the activities that feel really special to you and make you feel like yourself and hold on to those.
Also, just like.
Learning to tolerate your own emotions, thinking about how you can self soothe, and then also come to a partner and be like, hey, I went through this hard time, thinking through this through like here's how what I need your support. And then I would say the thing that will be additive, and it's definitely been additive in my relationship is to practice what I preach is bring in my single friends into my life where I'm making sure I'm making time for just them, that my partner isn't
always tagging along. Having different types of events. Also, we love hosting, so I hosted a book swap the other week where that was the whole point where just everyone brought books and we just had we made dinner and different groups got to meet each other. And so we really like being a center of commune for a lot of people in our life. And then yeah, like making sure we watch your friend's dog when they go to town. So we're making sure that there's a lot of community care in our.
Life as well.
So my final question is what advice do you have for someone listening who's still holding out for a partner.
Yeah, totally that was me.
You know, I would say pursue that part of your life in what is known as harmonious passion. I was stuck in what's called obsessive passion, where you are living or dying by the outcome of something and it's almost a compulsion to participate in it, so to swipe all the time, to go on as many days as you can to think about what's the new way I should
write my profile. And harmonious passion is really thinking about not letting the outcome control your own happiness, to kind of be less attached to the results of it.
But if you were attached.
To the outcome of every single date, it is miserable because I've loved it. So if you can approach your
life with a harmonious passion. So it's a lot of things in my book, which is making sure you have a full life and you have hobbies you like, that you're excited about the space you live in, that you do things that you don't wait for them for a partner, and then that makes going on dates or maybe just waiting for someone not waiting, but like you know, maybe meeting someone out in the wild, feel less like everything
depends on this one person. Because I think for me, what was super helpful was thinking, Okay, my life could go two main directions, right, I could be mostly single for the rest of my life, or I could meet a partner. I just don't know when, and I have to make sure both outcomes are great.
I think that is beautiful and spot on. Thank you so much for joining us, Megan.
Oh, thanks for having me appreciate it.
Megan Kane is the author of Party of One, Be your Own Best Life Partner. She's the supervising editor and founder of NPR's life Kit.
That's It. For Today's Show Tomorrow, relationship guru Jillian Tareki is here to talk all about her best selling book, It Begins with You, Nine hard truths about love that will change your life. Join the conversation using hashtag the bright Side and connect with us on social media at Hello Sunshine on Instagram and at the bright Side Pod on TikTok oh, and feel free to tag us at Simone Boyce and at Danielle Robe.
Listen and follow The bright Side on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
See you tomorrow, folks, Keep looking on the bright side.