Dealing with Loneliness When You've Always Been Single

That feeling of being left behind while everyone else seems to have found someone is genuinely painful. You're not wrong for feeling lonely or worthless — those feelings come from a real place, and they hurt.

The first thing to hold onto is that being single doesn't tell you anything about your worth as a person. In Pakistan especially, there's a lot of pressure from family and society to be in a relationship or get married by a certain age, and when that doesn't happen, it's easy to start believing something is wrong with you. But you are not a project that needs to be completed by a deadline. Many people find meaningful connections later in life, and many others are in relationships that look good from the outside but are full of their own pain. You're only seeing the surface.

Here is the one thing that matters most right now: your loneliness is real, but it doesn't mean you are unworthy of love. It means you haven't met the right person yet. And in the meantime, your life is still yours — you can build things that have nothing to do with romance: friendships, skills, goals, a sense of purpose. When you invest in yourself, you become someone who will eventually attract the kind of person you want, but also someone who can be happy alone.

If the comparison with others is eating at you, try to limit time on social media or stop yourself when you start measuring your life against someone else's highlight reel. And if the ache of loneliness gets heavy, talk to someone you trust, or write it out. Zara is here to listen too — sometimes just saying it out loud makes the weight a little less.