20 Things You'll Miss About Being Single

We seem to spend our lives looking for our perfect partner, dating endlessly until we find the one, promptly falling in love, and moving in together. All of a sudden, in this romantic whirlwind, marriage is on the horizon, and the single life you once lived has become a distant memory. While you will be overjoyed (or at least you should be — if you're not, cancel the wedding now!) to have finally found the love of your life and to be settling down, there are many aspects of the single life you'll soon begin to miss. Sadly, there's no way to get them back —you really do have to surrender to living with another human and sharing everything you own.

Sometimes, you just want a bowl of cereal for dinner. When you live alone, that's OK. When you have to have dinner with your spouse, cereal is no longer really an option.

You used to decide what to have for dinner based on your own whims, cravings, and desires. Now, planning what to eat for dinner becomes a long, complex discussion with various proposals, arguments for and against certain dishes, and a whole load of cravings, emotions, and tastes to take into account.

Cooking for one means you can eat directly out of whatever you cooked it in. Sadly, eating your spaghetti out the saucepan isn't feasible when it has to be divided between two.

When you live alone you don't have to answer to anyone about your lifestyle, health habits, or eating preferences. When you're living with somebody else, eating nothing but take-out for a week is frowned upon and considered unacceptable.

It used to be so easy to spend the night out with your closest friends, but know this takes a lot of planning, approval from your partner, and promising to be home by a certain time at night, so that they don't have to wait up for you, and you don't disturb them when you get in.

All those clothes you used to dress up in to go out every Saturday night are now hidden and covered in a film of dust at the back of your wardrobe. Not being single means putting on your favorite, fancy outfit is now an incredibly rare occurrence.

Do you remember the days when the only gifts you had to worry about were the ones for your parents at Christmas? Now that you're in a relationship, there's so many more, from Valentine's Day, the holidays, birthdays, anniversaries... The list goes on.

Shaving your legs, taking care of your appearance, and maintaining a so-called acceptable level of physical self-care was always totally optional. But now you have someone else around to impress and consider, and ignoring what you can hide under sweaters throughout the winter is no longer an option.

Sometimes you just need to spend an evening alone with your favorite movie, a bottle of wine, plenty of snacks, and your most comfortable pajamas. That sounds like it should be something you can achieve, even if you're not single, but in reality, finding that night when it's just you in the apartment is harder than you would think.

One of the best things about being single is being as selfish and self-oriented as you want. When you're no longer single, suddenly everything is a compromise, and you'll soon find that all that you previously took for granted is no longer entirely yours.

Dealing with the in-laws is a challenge that nobody will ever get totally used to, even if they love them dearly. Being single and just having to think about your own family is now a long-lost, distant memory.

You remember those nights when you just really didn't want to wash the dishes, and decided they really could wait till morning as they weren't going to bother anyone just sitting there overnight anyway? Yes? Well, now that the single life has gone away, so has the ability to make a mess and leave it visible for more than five minutes.

When you were single, you could order dessert at a restaurant and eat the whole thing yourself. The same applies for serving yourself a bowlful of dessert when you were eating at home. For some reason, when you're in a relationship, every time you eat dessert from here on out, you'll be sharing it with your partner.

Whether you're at home or eating out, as soon as you're in a relationship you can forget ever being able to eat your entire pizza without giving away a couple of slices to your other half, no matter how much you don't want to.

Turning your lights out and falling fast asleep used to happen whenever you decided you wanted to. Once you're in a relationship, going to sleep now has to happen at a pre-agreed time, and has to be a jointly made decision.

You'll never again have the opportunity to fall asleep like a starfish, with your limbs reaching all four corners of the bed, because, quite simply, someone else is going to be there.

Whether you're a boy or a girl, one of the worst things about moving in with someone of the opposite sex is the battle of the toilet seat. We can guarantee that you'll never find it where you want it to be, no matter how many times you complain about it.

The days of setting your own alarm at the exact time you wanted to wake up, and not having to either have two alarms going in the morning (and obviously, you'll be woken up by both), or not having to compromise (yes, another compromise) on a time that vaguely works for both of you, are long gone.

You are going to spend the rest of your life complaining that you no longer have enough closet space and angrily moving your other half's clothes back to where they belong, which is not in your clearly marked half (or maybe subtly more than half) where they always seem to end up.

You may have your favorite TV shows that you watch religiously every week, however, you may no longer have the ability to decide what you're watching every evening. A fight over who has control over the TV remote will be at least a weekly occurrence now that you're in a relationship — a stress on you and your partner that we bet you didn't see coming.