One of the things that bothers me most about single life is how accommodating you are expected to be. People don't seem to think your time is worth as much as theirs; they think that they can throw you a pittance of their time when and if they feel like it, and you should be grateful.
And you are. You're so starved for quality contact that you start to give less respect to your own time as well. You value your enjoyable moments with good friends so much that you gather the tiniest scraps of them eagerly. You keep your schedule open like a doctor on call, ready to drop your own solitary activities the moment someone can spare you a moment.
And it's not just time. You get shuffled around on flights so that couples who didn't bother to check in until the last minute can sit together. You fit yourself awkwardly at the corner of the pub table because you aren't attached to someone specific. You're served much more solemnly by waiters who cheerfully make nearby groups' experiences more enjoyable. And frustratingly, people handle you with patronizing protectiveness in a tacit assumption that you can't take care of yourself.
You feel obliged to defer to everyone around you: couples, seniors, single mothers, children. Unless you're career-driven, you probably defer to anyone you interpret as being professionally above you.
But at some point (after years of this treatment and observation of human nature), you realize that treatment is largely a matter of image. You can command more respect than society deems appropriate for your class. The catch is that you have to give up a piece of your identity to do so, but identity is evolutionary and fluid—and the happy truth is that you can stick up for your lifestyle these days.
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