The Weight of Waiting

I’ve spent most of my life waiting impatiently to advance to the next phase. I used to look at people a step or two ahead and wonder how they got there so fast — especially when they didn’t seem to be trying all that hard. It began to feel like if life was a game, I wasn’t even losing—I was playing with the wrong controller, on the wrong level, wondering how everyone else found the cheat codes. 

These are the people who win raffles they didn’t enter and land their dream jobs by blinking twice and whispering manifestations into rose quartz. And don’t even get me started on toddlers with iPads — running the household WiFi like tiny CEOs, mastering swipe gestures before they can form sentences, and FaceTiming grandma from three states away while I’m still googling “how to fix printer.” One of them made 11 million dollars reviewing toys on Youtube. I once cried because my microwave reset itself. 

Even as a kid, I felt out of sync—like someone had messed up my file and assigned me the wrong age. I’ve spent birthdays quietly mourning the year I wasn’t yet, and somehow being embarrassed by the age I actually was. Always too young for what I wanted, and too impatient to enjoy where I was.  

In grade school, I romanticized middle school: lockers, passing periods, and rectangle pizza. Then middle school actually happened and it was nothing but hormonal chaos wrapped in Abercrombie zip-up hoodies and awkwardly timed growth spurts. It was cryptic messages over AIM statuses and cafeteria drama. It was body odor and betrayal (far from what the Disney Channel had promised me.) Instead, it was a mess of trying to fit in, figuring out where you belonged, and surviving each day with your dignity intact — which, let’s be honest, wasn’t guaranteed.

High schoolers obviously seemed like mystical beings. They effortlessly floated through the halls with their learners permits, iced coffees, and the kind of freedom I could only dream of. They had cars, they had secrets, and they had those offbeat, borderline inappropriate relationships with substitute teachers that seemed like an entirely different realm of maturity. I couldn’t wait to join their ranks, to escape the purgatory of puberty and finally live in the land of boys, proms, and parking lots. 

As you might have already guessed, once I got to highschool, my expectations once again fell short. Especially considering my decision to attend an all-girls Catholic school, where the only thing less likely than passing love notes through lockers was the idea of peace. Everyone’s menstrual cycles somehow synced up, which only led to an elevated level of tension in the hallways, particularly when someone dared to steal the other's boyfriend. The result? Bitch slaps, trays being thrown across tables in the cafeteria, and the occasional late-night confessions to God.

I thought for sure college would be the holy grail of personal transformations. Except as I looked around at the sea of red plastic cups and frat boys in flip-flops, their outfits clearly chosen with the same level of care as a toddler’s first attempt at dressing themselves, I realized this was not the adult life I had dreamed of. The chaotic blend of Hawaiian shirts, cologne that could only be described as "douchebag in a bottle," and an overwhelming amount of chest hair left me questioning my life choices. I craved structure, ambition, and a conference room with bad lighting. I wanted to skip ahead to the part where I had a job title, a retirement plan, and could say things like “Let’s table that for now” in meetings without a trace of irony. Instead of deciphering the nuances of a corporate world, I was knee-deep in beer pong tournaments and trying to remember if I’d already told this person my name—three times.

Finally, the grown-up chapters I’d long fantasized about arrived. The career. The salary. The “I think I’m actually doing this” moment. I even joined the military — a plot twist, not many saw coming. I was no longer the awkward teenager; I was a functioning adult. I had a signature, I paid taxes, and I could keep a house plant alive for more than two weeks without it becoming a tragic reminder of my failures.

Instead of celebrating, I found myself quietly disillusioned. As it turns out,  adulthood wasn’t the polished, curated montage I’d once daydreamed about during third-period math, it was actually a lot of work. I was constantly pretending to understand health insurance policies and nodding at networking events like I wasn’t silently screaming inside: Do any of you know what you're doing, or are we all just cosplaying as competent adults? All while questioning my entire career trajectory.

Every instagram scroll felt like another passive aggressive slap from the universe — another wedding in a vineyard, another couple buying a home with “natural light” and “exposed beams,” “just outside of the city,” another pregnancy announcement featuring matching pajamas and a letterboard that reads “Coming this Fall” — as if the fetus has a release date and a PR team. Watching the beautiful lives of friends and strangers unfold right in the palm of my hands, while I reheat leftover pasta for the third night in a row, and try to remember the last time I washed my sheets. 

It felt like everyone else was handed a laminated checklist at some secret adulthood orientation — “Step One: Fall in love with someone emotionally available. Step Two: Get married before 32. Step Three: Buy a home with a kitchen island and good lighting for Instagram meal prep.” Meanwhile, you’re over here squinting at your crumpled to-do list that just says “figure it out??” in smudged ink, sipping iced coffee for emotional support and wondering if the universe skipped your name during roll call. 

So then comes the next holy grail: the marriage/motherhood milestone. The stage we’re all subtly—or sometimes very loudly—told is the final badge of womanhood. You’ve worked hard, you’ve achieved things, and now, your prize: a ring, a registry, and a child who may or may not resent you in fifteen years depending on how you handle screen time. Congrats! You've officially earned your place in the “I’m a Grown-Up Now” club. Just sign here, buy a crib that costs more than your first car, and hope to God the kid doesn’t develop a complex from all the social media comparisons by the age of seven. 

Unlike the other life stages, this one doesn’t exactly arrive on schedule.  You can’t just work hard or network your way into lifelong partnerships. There are no KPIs for love or quarterly reviews to determine if you’re meeting your relationship milestones. It’s less merit-based and more like a bizarre game of timing, chance encounters, and whether or not your soulmate decided to download Hinge that week. It’s the one chapter that doesn’t reward effort the same way the others do and sometimes, no matter how ready you are, it’s just not your turn. 

I wait at restaurants where I arrive ten minutes early because I was raised on punctuality and passive-aggressive mothers. I sit, smiling politely at hostesses who keep asking, “Are you sure they’re coming?” as if they’ve seen this story unfold a dozen times before and they know I won’t like the ending. I scroll through my phone, pretending not to notice that the busboy has now passed my table three separate times just to refill a glass of water I’m too anxious to drink.

When he finally arrives—usually with a flimsy excuse and the faint scent of weed or Axe body spray, I act like everything’s fine. I smile, because that’s what women do. We smile so we don’t get accused of being dramatic, emotional, or God forbid, “on our period” by a man who probably can’t locate a clitoris with a Google Maps pin and a user manual.

I wait for the conversation to start, only to immediately regret it. He talks about crypto. Or Joe Rogan. Or how his ex was “actually the crazy one,”  as if he’s not currently auditioning for the role of "this is why you’re still single." At some point, I mentally dissociate — not because I’m rude, but because my brain has its own self-preservation instincts and I’ve already rehearsed the ending to this date twenty-five different ways in my head. 

I wait for the check like it’s the last chopper out of Nam.  What will it be this time? Will he try to kiss me in a way that makes me feel like I’ve just been molested by a wet sponge? Or will he disappear only to reemerge with the classic “Sorry, I’ve just been really busy,” as if I asked him to solve global warming and not follow up on a mildly tolerable evening. And then the cycle resets. 

You have two choices — throw in the towel and accept defeat, or you can wait, again. Wait for the next one who seems even remotely worthy of your time — a heartbeat above mediocre, a little emotionally literate, maybe even someone who actually takes the time to ask you follow-up questions.  But ironically even if you're lucky enough to find that unicorn, you might still end up waiting. Because sometimes even the best of them come wrapped in potential, not readiness. And nothing screams "we’re getting there" like an emotionally unavailable man with a lot of feelings he’s “working through” — which is really just code for “I’m not ready to meet your needs.” 

No one warns you how brutal it is to wait for someone — especially someone who’s unsure if they want what you want, or worse, knows they don’t and just hasn’t said it out loud yet. There’s no manual. No downloadable guide titled “How to Emotionally Hover While He Figures Out If You’re Wife Material or a Free Trial With Limited Features.” Just you, dissecting whether “I just need time to figure things out” is a sincere confession or a politely wrapped declaration that he’s holding out hope for someone hotter, younger, and slightly more emotionally vacant.

And thus begins the slow descent into the Purgatory of Potential — a place so soul-draining where you sit, suspended between hope and humiliation. It serves as a psychological holding cell, wallpapered in what-ifs and self-doubt — a slow erosion of your own certainty. You edit yourself retroactively, trying to preemptively rewrite a story they’ve already stopped reading. You give space. You offer support. You suppress your needs and call it understanding. You convince yourself you’re “playing the long game,” as if love were something to strategize rather than something to surrender to. As if dimming your light, suppressing your needs, and becoming just a little less yourself might finally earn you the “reward” of being seen, loved, and finally chosen. 

Waiting for a person to be ready is like watching them search for their keys, in slow motion, while the house is actively on fire — and you’re standing there, keys in hand, screaming, “I have them! They’re right here!” But he’s too busy retracing his steps through the maze of his own unresolved issues, utterly ignoring the smoke, the flames, and the fact that your arm is going numb from holding the solution in plain sight.

Women have been conditioned—trained, really—to wait. Wait for commitment. Wait for clarity. Wait for the guy who isn’t sure he’s ready, but might be…someday. Wait to be chosen, as if life is one endless DMV line and we’re all just standing there with half-filled coffee cups and nervous smiles, praying our number eventually gets called.

We were fed a fantasy diet of romantic resilience from the beginning — storylines where love meant endurance — that real love was about weathering the storm, sticking it out, proving we were cool enough, chill enough, low-maintenance enough to be worthy of “forever.” What that narrative forgot to mention was just how exhausting it is. How demoralizing it is to survive on emotional breadcrumbs and still call it dinner. How disorienting it is to mistake silence for depth, and confusion for some secret love language.  In reality, we’re just investing in a startup that may never actually launch, and every month we don’t walk away, all we’re doing is pouring more emotional capital into a pitch deck with no business plan, no product, and no real feature.  

The world was built on men's timing — their pace, their readiness, their rules. It’s woven so deeply into the fabric of our culture that most of us don’t even notice it anymore. It's just how things are: the man decides when it’s time to propose. The man buys the ring. The man plans the big surprise. The man makes the move that changes everything. As women, we don’t even question it because we were raised on that blueprint too. We don’t just know it; we grow up looking forward to it, fantasizing about the moment we turn around and find the man we love kneeling on one knee, holding our future in a small velvet box.

But what often gets overlooked is just how badly women want to check off that final box.  And in wanting it so badly — not just the love, but the arrival it represents — we start to shrink. We sand down our edges. We quiet our needs. We become more agreeable, more patient, more palatable, hoping that if we are just easy enough to love, we’ll finally be chosen. We lose inches of ourselves not all at once, but slowly, in the little ways we stop asking for what we want. 

Meanwhile, men hesitate. They stall and delay because their biggest fear isn't that they’ll choose the wrong restaurant or the wrong engagement ring — it’s that they’ll choose the wrong woman. Or rather, that the woman they love today will become someone entirely different once the ink on the marriage license dries. And you can’t totally blame them. Everyone’s seen it happen before: the carefree, easygoing girlfriend suddenly becomes a stressed, demanding wife. It’s common enough to make anyone cautious - and probably at least partially responsible for the 52% divorce rate (but more on that in another article.) 

It’s almost impossible to tell which came first — the woman who waited too long and became resentful, or the man who stalled too long and became distant. The chicken or the egg. The expectation or the fear. The fantasy or the fallout. What is clear is that nobody actually wins. Women lose pieces of themselves trying to be patient enough to stay and men lose trust in the idea that love can grow without becoming a burden. And both end up mourning something that was supposed to be a beginning but already feels like an ending before it even has the chance to start. 

So when does loyalty cross the line into delusion? And at what point does “holding space” for someone become “renting space in your own heart to someone who doesn’t even want it?” It’s a question I’ve wrestled with more times than I care to admit — and one I’m still untangling from the fairytale myths I was sold, learning that devotion shouldn’t feel like a trap and patience shouldn’t cost you your self-respect. 

It turns out, the line in the sand isn’t marked by an external event. It’s not always the dramatic cheating or the ghosting or the final straw text that never comes. The line is when you stop feeling good. When the waiting starts to wear on your sense of self more than it nurtures your hope. When you finally see that what you've been holding onto isn't the reality of what's in front of you, but the illusion and fragile hope of what could have been.

The real heartbreak isn’t in letting go of someone else, but in realizing how long you’ve abandoned yourself, kept on holding on, and telling yourself the dream was still possible. The hardest goodbye isn’t to that person who never really showed up for you, It’s the one you have to whisper to the version of yourself that waited — the one that sacrificed too much, expected too little, and believed in something that was never really meant for them.

We dream of a world where connection feels easy, where clarity replaces confusion, and showing up doesn’t come with terms and conditions. In this world, consistency feels like foreplay —  not just in plans, but in their words, actions, and commitment. You realize you’re not actually asking for too much; you’ve just spent so long settling for so little that you’ve come to see basic human decency as something extraordinary, romanticizing the bare minimum like it’s a grand gesture. But the truth is, it’s exactly what you’ve deserved all along.

Deep down, we know the difference between being wanted and being tolerated. Between being pursued and being bookmarked for later. You can feel when someone wants you in the way they show up and in the effort that doesn’t have to be begged for. And just as clearly, you can feel when someone doesn’t.

However painful waiting may be — whether it’s for the next life stage to finally click into place or for someone to choose you with certainty — it will introduce you to the most important relationship of your life: the one you have with yourself. It strips away the distractions, the illusions, the noise of other people’s timelines and expectations, and leaves you sitting with the one person you can’t outrun: you. 

You can’t fill someone else’s cup when yours is bone-dry, and you can’t pour from an empty well without cracking under the weight. You certainly can’t keep handing out maps to people who have no intention of meeting you where you are. If you keep waiting for someone else to show up for you, you’ll find yourself standing alone, holding a checklist of everything you thought you deserved — none of it worth anything because you didn’t give yourself the opportunity to show up for yourself first. 

With that being said, the longer you wait for something or someone to choose you, the longer you postpone choosing yourself. So maybe waiting was never actually a punishment. It was a quiet kind of preparation where nothing really changed on the outside, but everything rearranged itself on the inside. Maybe it was the universe pulling you gently back to yourself. Maybe the waiting wasn’t about the arrival of another person at all — it was about building a life so rich with meaning, friendship, laughter, and self-trust that when love finally does come knocking, it’s a welcome addition, not a rescue mission. 

Being fixated on the future — the next phase, the next person, the next opportunity — makes us forget to notice what’s happening right in front of us because the idea of "getting there" becomes so consuming that we overlook where we already are. We compare our current state to an idealized version of ourselves in an imagined future where everything is Perfect and because we’re too busy wishing for more, we don’t even realize that some of the best moments have already slipped through our fingers unnoticed. Fulfillment seems like it’s always just one step away when, in reality,  it’s right here - if only we’d slow down enough to see it. 

That relentless hunger for “what’s next”  diminishes even our greatest accomplishments, making them feel hollow. You finally land the promotion, move into the dream apartment, or find yourself in what seemed like a perfect relationship—and instead of relief, there’s only a flicker of satisfaction before your eyes dart to the next goal post. Each triumph becomes a stepping stone rather than a celebration, and the sense of achievement dissolves almost as quickly as it arrives. You realize too late that chasing the next big thing can turn every success into just another item to check off, leaving you perpetually unsatisfied and wondering why, even at the top of the mountain, you still feel like you’re standing at the bottom.

The moment you stop treating waiting like wasted time and start seeing it as part of your becoming is the moment your life begins to shift. Solitude becomes a classroom where you learn your worth, your passions, your boundaries - and the importance of upholding them, especially when you need them the most. You learn what moves you, what sustains you, and what kind of love you’ll no longer shrink yourself to receive.

And when it finally does come — the person, the moment, the thing that fits — it won’t feel like waiting anymore. It’ll feel like coming home.