This piece details my reflections on my friends’ new year’s resolutions, and what made me feel that it wouldn’t be healthy for me to have the same resolution.

At 11:56 pm, as we were nestled in the crowd of people waiting to see the New Year’s fireworks, my friend, I’ll call her Taylor, asked us what our new year’s resolutions were. 

Almost all the other girls we were with expressed that they wanted to find “a man” in 2025. 

My heart sank a little – I knew just how tempting that wish was, but the more rational part of me knew that this wasn’t the new year’s resolution for me.

I’ve always been a romantic: ever since I was a kid, I loved romance stories; I used to have a google doc to plan out how my future partner and I were going to set up our home and raise our kids together; and just a few months earlier, I believed that I was going to eventually marry my then-boyfriend (I’m 18, mind you).

But then the reality of doing long distance for five years hit me, and I realised that I was looking for other qualities in a partner, so we broke up after a year of being together – we’d known each other for more than three years at that point.

Shortly after breaking up, I began looking, consciously and unconsciously, for someone else who could potentially be my future husband, and I found someone who I really wanted to like me back. He has a good relationship with his family, takes good care of himself, is insanely smart, and has lots of interesting hobbies. 

I told myself that I wasn’t looking to fill a void, that I wanted to date this guy with a healthy mindset, but looking back, it wasn’t healthy at all.

It wasn’t until I had a conversation with a couple in their early thirties did I realise that I was overly anxious about dating, and that I still had so many years to meet the “right person”. And not only do you have to meet the right person, but the timing is also really important – the girl expressed how she’s grateful that they met at the time that they did – her being in med school and him already a lawyer – as she thinks that it wouldn’t have worked out if they had met earlier.

So I guess all this is to put out, in this little corner of the internet that I call mine, that my goal for the new year is to give myself space from all this relationship frenzy, to work on doing the things that I love, have my source of happiness be from within, and certainly not dependent on one other person. I’ll hopefully stay on top of my academics, go to the gym more consistently, continue running with friends two times a week, cut back on my screen time, read more, and spend more time with family and friends. 

New year, new me.

(featured image is my own)