Ever since I can remember, I’ve known how I wanted to live my adult life. I’ve always been able to picture it very clearly: I live in an apartment building, on a middle floor, in a big city, with a cat and a child. An adopted child. I never really knew what I wanted to do or where I wanted to live, but I’ve always known that this would be my future.

I hardly ever told anyone this when I was younger, possibly because we never talked about this sort of stuff. Everyone around me was getting excited about a career they wanted to do, usually something big and shiny that would make them famous or rich, and I never understood that. I could never really picture myself in a career. Only I knew what I wanted my life to look like. I knew that I wanted to be happy.

The first time I saw one of my friends get into a relationship I was 15. At first it just looked like a close friendship, and in that way I could understand something like that. Every relationship I’d ever read about or seen in the media looked about the same as that—like a friend but better, someone you could talk to no matter what, someone that understood you. I figured once that was established that then… the other stuff could happen. That was when you’d want it to happen. It didn’t need to be there to begin with, or at least it never happened like that for me, so I thought that was how it worked. I didn’t know any different.

For the next two years of my life, I watched some of my friends get into and out of multiple relationships, have crushes and disappointments. I even had a few of my own (as I continue to learn how other people see relationships and dating, I’ve realized that those were not actually crushes. Whoops!) And I never saw any of this as different or abnormal—I had friends who had never dated, who’d never been kissed like me. I figured I’d grow into it one day, or at least that’s what the world tried to tell me would happen.

Two years after that first relationship, I started to realize that I was ‘behind’ everyone else. I heard people around me being totally normal about having casual sex or being handsy at school. I sat uncomfortably in a discussion about having kids, where I saw people younger than me already seeing a future for themselves that I could never understand. And I realized that all those times people had told me I would grow out of those childhood fantasies of not having a partner and not giving birth to children wasn’t something I was going to ‘grow out of’ anytime soon, if ever. I saw people around me getting engaged, for crying out loud, where I’d never been kissed. I started to realize that I didn’t really want to anytime soon. Then, I didn’t know. I was scared of myself and my own feelings, afraid I was broken and way to busy to do anything but shove it down and hope that it would go away some day.

Now I know better. Now I know that a relationship is not something I want to engage in any time soon. Now I know that I’m not behind, or broken, or in a phase. I know I’m not going to ‘grow out’ of this.

And sometimes I still don’t understand. I see people on Tinder and I don’t know what they see when they swipe right. They all look the same to me. I hear about some of my friends’ crappy past relationships and am confused as to why they would continue to try and date if it had only gone wrong in the past. Wouldn’t it be easier to just ‘give up’ now?

I don’t have a nice apartment like I planned. I don’t live in a big city. I don’t have a child and, most devastatingly of all, no cat. But I have time to figure all of this out. And I certainly haven’t lost my conviction in this dream. If anything, I’m going to keep chasing it, to let it compound and grow until I dream myself a whole life. A whole life that is whole without a relationship—one that I’m excited to live and will work hard to achieve. And that smaller me, the one that was told all those years ago that this wasn’t something I’d want forever is ready to get out there and do it, to stomp on all the people that told me I wouldn’t want this forever. And I guess they’re right, because one day I won’t want it anymore. I’ll have me all for myself.