If You Don't Love You, You Won't Love Life

A 2022 General Society Survey (GSS) showed that married men are the most fulfilled demographic (fulfillment being equated to happiness with one’s life).

Just two years later, a University of Toronto study indicated that single women are the happiest group of people in society.

Although there are a plethora of jokes and snarky remarks to be made about these two statistics, the reality is that they show one common truth—that people are most fulfilled when their needs being met.

Single women presumably meet their own needs. Modern times allow women the freedom to do so, too. They enjoy financial independence, freedom from time and relationship constraints, and the guiltless pleasure of pursuing joys and passions and all that makes their hearts happy.

Married men enjoy many of those same freedoms. Additionally, they are often reliant on their wives to manage household and family responsibilities, despite the so-called progression of gender roles and expectations. As such, they certainly would be satisfied with the combination of freedom and accommodation.

Where does that leave everyone else, then?

Well, single men are looking for the single women they can marry, or having fun while mom ensures their basic needs are met.

Which brings us to married women—the most UNfulfilled demographic.

🫨 In fact, 69% of divorces are initiated by women.

At an average age of 45.

The biggest reason?

It’s not infidelity. It’s not even abuse or domestic violence.

It’s the lack of fulfillment.

Married women are statistically NOT happy.

They don’t want to be burdened with serving everyone else’s needs, maintaining everyone else’s peace, and ensuring everyone else’s happiness, while theirs are expected to be dismissed in deference to their spouses and children and anyone else they live in servitude to.

Then, society glorifies womens’ self-sacrifice, even though women are suffering in silence and dying slowly from the inside out.

Until now.

Women are finding their voices.

Women are giving themselves permission to live how they choose to.

Perimenopausal women, particularly, are using midlife as an opportunity to reinvent themselves instead of going into crisis.

Why? Because they are learning to love themselves out of situations where their love was taken for granted, situations that prohibited them from living their full, authentic lives.

What’s a girl to do, then, if found in a situation where you are unfulfilled?

💗 Ask yourself what you truly want. Deep down. If there were no limitations and nothing to stop you from pursuing that dream.

💗 Ask yourself what—or who— IS stopping you from pursuing that vision for yourself.

💗Consider whether that limitation is real or presumed. Oftentimes, you are the one in your own way due to your unwillingness to change or the fear and uncertainty of it. Just know that anyone who truly loves you will support your pursuit. So, whatever or whomever you might lose in the process is a necessary price for the life you say you want.

💗Decide whether you are willing to pursue your vision for yourself and your future. It’s really as simple as a choice.

When I had my dark-night-of-the-soul moment, everything changed. Within a year, I was divorced, engaged, moved, and shifting careers, all with a teenage son graduating high school and entering technical school across the country.

Was it a trying time? Yes, but it taught us resilience.

Did I ever question my decisions? Of course! But I trusted and respected myself more, to know that I was creating a life that my son and I would thrive in and love.

Do I regret it? No. I’d do it all again in a heartbeat, and sooner.

As I advised a friend recently, you can always go back to what was, but you never know what could be if you don’t pursue it.

✨So, give yourself permission to be fulfilled. Then, make your happy happen.✨

➡️For more on that dark-night-of-the-soul moment and my personal journey back to myself, download the first 2 chapters of my best-selling and award-winning debut memoir, GASPING FOR AIR: THE STRANGLEHOLD OF NARCISSISTIC ABUSE, from my website—danasdiaz.com.

📚 GASPING FOR AIR is available anywhere books are sold online, and on Kindle and Audible, too.