How we cope with singleness
By Kurt Alec Mira
Valentine’s Day is nearly approaching, and that means couples will spring everywhere in public — in the flesh or on the web. And guaranteed, some will find it difficult to walk alone on Lover’s Lane. Especially the chronically single.
Chronically single is defined as staying single despite the number of dates you’ve gone to or the number of persons you’ve talked to; the inability to get past the talking stage. Like grief, the chronically single uses humor to cope with ambiguous loss. But it didn’t instantly start there.
The young Filipino has always been witty in playing with language. Perhaps, that’s because we’re romantic — and dramatic, that sometimes our emotions would come out as awfully funny.
Filipinos are hopeless romantic
If the Portuguese have saudade, we have hugot. Some say that the Filipino hugot culture can be traced back to teenage emo culture. As teenagers, it means having strong urges of emotions — some even hardly controllable. It manifested in the way they talked and the music they listened to. But as time passes, more people have started speaking the language of puns and banats. And that’s when hugot was born.
Thanks to film and music, the era of the modern Filipino hugot culture began as early as the 1990s. From movies like Labs Kita…Okay Ka Lang? (1998) and I’m Drunk, I Love You (2017), to all-time favorite karaoke hits like Migraine by Moonstar88 and the 2022 hugot song of the year, Jopay by Mayonnaise, both millennials and Gen Z find enjoyment in hugot.
When social media got bigger, Facebook and Twitter have been the avenues of different memes catering to our disappointments from experiencing unrequited love. If you were using social media as early as 2010, you undoubtedly experienced the jejemon phase, which Facebook would keep on reminding you through Memories.
Group messages or posts straight from Boy Banat and Marcelo Santos III meant to subpost someone, “kaw LnG Xap4t Nuh,” and unapologetically listening to Repablikan or Hambog ng Sagpro Krew were some of the reflections of this unforgettable phenomenon. Chances are, this phenomenon still resonates with many of us, and the reason why many men today turn into “sad bois.” The versatility of our language and the limitation of phone keyboards in the early 2000s gave us this quirky communication style. And so, we’ve invented further expressions and phrases that will be picked up by the common Filipino netizen.
“Sana all,” a term used to express the feeling of wanting what someone has, is another way of showing envy without malice. In the context of singleness, people would often comment or reply with this phrase whenever they see pictures or videos of couples dating or just simply doing tasks together.
And there came “sana natulog na lang ako.” It doesn’t explicitly show envy. Instead, it denies the existence of something — a more pessimistic view of relationships. Whenever there are couples who are religiously comfortable with each other, seeing one will make you react in two ways: find them similar to cringe-worthy Wattpad stories, or make a quip and humor the scenario.
Finding reliability amidst the ambiguous loss
In today’s generation, we can find an infinite amount of coping with the ambiguous loss that we feel being single our whole lives. To counter the sadness and longingness, we tend to make ourselves laugh. And we, through thick and thin, have always turned to memes.
Finding relatedness and community in witty memes, graduating journalism student Ian considered memes as shields to real emotions. Whenever he shares a meme and people interact with it, he feels that he shares his emotions with others.
“Feel ko kasi hindi ako nag-iisa,” he added.
To some, being single can sometimes be boring. Corrine, a graduating economics student, used humor to cope with singleness by engaging in them to make up for the mundane parts of not experiencing relationship problems.
“I think sometimes being single gets a little boring, only because you don’t have relationship problems,” she said.
Alexander IV, a sophomore marketing student, used humor as his coping mechanism. But despite making fun of his love life, he just wants to post random things that he finds funny.
“Pero siyempre at one point gusto ko rin ng makakausap and all,” he added.
In a more cynical manner, others would also hate people in a relationship. It’s like cancel culture, but against couples. Whether posted jokingly or soberly, there’s an underlying reason behind this case. To some, it can be experiential and a result of dating fatigue. And to others, it’s simply envy in a wacky way.
Without minding our cynicism about being single, perhaps in a way, we want to experience accepting long messages or getting launched on Instagram stories. But jokes aside, it’s not a rumor to say that humor has become Gen Z’s way of dealing with jealousy and bitterness in any situation — political or otherwise.
Although they’re funny and relatable, behind every meme, there’s an underlying frustration to turn things around. It’s failure after failure without a clear chance of bouncing back. But unfortunately, we could only do so much.
A long, less lonely road
I’m not ought to say that there’s nothing wrong with being single because I, myself, am single as well. Just like the other kids wearing college uniforms, we want to be strong while allowing ourselves to be vulnerable through humor.
And while we navigate the road of singleness without knowing where to go or what comes after, we must accept the ambiguity of being single. The underlying sadness in every meme or pun we share is, in fact, a shared struggle of adulthood.
Realizing that other singles experience the same ambiguous loss can redefine the whole meaning of being chronically single. Believe me, this is a situation that many singles find themselves in. We may have spent countless days and nights hurting, and even made mistakes that have resulted in our singleness, but despite all of these, we’ll always love humor.
