Bhavin RughaniEverything is a phase, some phases are just longer than others. – Marcus Flutie (Charmed thirds)
Today is a great day, 11.11 is celebrated for many reasons one of them being Singles day/ Guanggun Jie (as per Chinese tradition). This date is chosen because the number 1 represents an individual who is alone. Today is specially kept for singles to socialize and celebrate. All the Singles celebrate the fact that they are single and take pride of this fact. The festival has become the biggest shopping day in China (trust me bigger than big billion days of Flipkart) Chinese shopping site Alibaba has recorded highest sales in just 2 hours.
While the exact history regarding it is still unknown, most popular is this story:
Nanjing University’s dorm culture. This is the most acceptable guessing for the origin of Single’s Day. In 1993 at a dorm called “Mingcaowuzhu (All single men)” at Nanjing University, the four students talked about how to find a girlfriend every night before sleeping for a long time. During their little talks, they came up with the idea of organizing some activities on the upcoming November 11. Since then, those activities organized on November 11 were widely spread to many universities in Nanjing even in many other cities. With these students graduating from universities, this university culture was brought to the whole society, and because of a lot of single people and social media’s strong power, this day has become more and more popular in the Chinese society. So on this single’s day we dig deeper into the fact, why people choose to be single, and here are the some of the answers we received:
1) I am not much attractive.
2) I have no time for love/ I am an introvert.
3) I never got that chance due to non co-ed school and college.
4) I tried once but didn’t succeed, so I don’t want to try anymore.
5) I don’t want to risk my feelings for someone who will not appreciate it.
6) I am happy alone and I don’t want to mingle.
There are some facts which we came into during the research and would like to present to you that will make you proud of being Single.
1) Being committed is not a garment or accessory to show off. it’s just a phase just like being single is.
2) There is a difference between being alone and being lonely. for example, you can be lonely even when you are committed.
3) Being single is better than being committed with the wrong person (and if you think that you don’t know whether person is compatible with you or not just give it a time before committing)
Ironically 5 years back i.e., on 11.11.11 China
recorded the highest number of weddings. The mentality behind that being four times one (you are the only one for me).
To be single or to be committed is one’s own choice and a decision about his/her own life. The only advice that can be given is enjoying the phase whichever it is.