Playing The Odds

Lately I’ve felt like my life is one giant game of roulette where everything is separated between the evens and odds.  

The evens are engaged, married, paired up, or pretty much just destined to travel through life in packs.  In the past few months, I’ve had three good friends get engaged, a few get married and a hell of a lot of relationship status changes on my facebook home page.  We celebrate the evens.

However, on the flip side, there are the odds.  The odds are single, odd man out, odd numbered wheel in a group or basically standing alone alongside the evens.  These are the people that begin to feel like they are staring at Noah’s ark and two by two everyone is getting on the boat while leaving them behind to drown in the flood, alone.  We don’t celebrate the odds, we feel sorry for the odds.

Due to my current status, I’m an odd and I have to say that I do have my times when I feel very much like other old ones out but lately I’ve sort of stopped seeing it that way.  By no means am I giving up my desire for that nice happily ever after or finding someone to go through life with but it’s not as important to me now as it has been in the past.  I started this blog to focus on change and I would say back in November, I was borderline obsessed with finding my next great love.  I thought that was the big change that was going to make everything else in my life make sense and fall into place.  Throughout that time I’ve gone through my ups and downs where I’m good with being single and then I’m completely over being alone but the other day I realized that I’m finally indifferent to it. 

I was out getting drinks with a friend who started telling me about a barbecue he had been to where he was the lone single person at a party full of couples.  As I listened to his story, I definitely commiserated with him but it also made me think of the day I had just had.  I had spent the day at a picnic and from going to the event with my friend and her husband to spending the day swimming in a sea of couples, I had had just about the same kind of experience as my friend telling the story.  However, it wasn’t until that moment that I realized it.  Typically when outnumbered by pairs, I would notice it right away, dwell on it, obsess about it and I would start to feel a little out of place but for some reason on this particular day, I didn’t feel that way at all.  By not feeling out of place, I was able to enjoy myself.  By not thinking of someone as so and so's girlfriend or that girl's husband, I was able to just spend time with my friends regardless of their statuses.    I had a wonderful day and not one single woe is me I’m alone feeling. 

For every happy story I hear about engagements and romantic gestures, I hear another about being the lone single person in a room full of couples once again.  Instead of stressing about finding someone to pair up with and take on the world two by two, I’ve decided to try being one of a kind.  I’m going to play the odds.  Think about it this way.  In the game of roulette, the chances of coming up lucky are the same for the odds and the evens.  Life is unpredictable so all you can do is spin the wheel and hope your number comes up.

"All the evidence shows that God was actually quite a gambler, and the universe is a great casino, where dice are thrown, and the roulette wheels spin on every occasion" - Stephen Hawking