What Happened That Fateful Day?

Today marks twelve years since my fiancee left before the wedding. Of course, it is one of these days when I feel some nostalgia.

That fateful day, we argued, and he moved out. 

I initially thought he was kidding. But that was it.

A month later, I learned from social media that he had a new girlfriend.

Needless to say, that was a lot of pain. 

Pain: an honest gift that nobody wants.

They say that a guy’s rejection is God’s protection. True that. 

I was a frustrated academic back then. If he had stayed, I would have probably been miserable by now: suffocated in a dysfunctional academic system and reinforcing each other’s frustration together with my partner.

We would have pulled each other down without even knowing. We would sit in a bubble, thinking that we were helping each other instead of just leaving the bubble.

OK, but what happened since then, and why am I still a free bird? What went wrong? Or rather, did anything really go wrong?

What Did the Healing Process Actually Look Like?

The first year was a healing process. My general practitioner refused to give me any prescription drugs, saying that “it’s just bereavement.”

As many people do in such situations, I looked for new hobbies and ways to occupy my thoughts. In the end, I faced another challenge: I started a new job and hiked Kilimanjaro that summer of 2013 (which was supposed to be my honeymoon but well…).

Then, I went to South America for summer school in neuroscience and stayed over for a month. I hiked in the Andes by myself for the whole month of February 2014. I guess I just tried to hide from the world.

Eventually, I pursued my PhD, and that’s how I spent the next few years of my life. Over time, it became painfully clear that grad school was not the time or place to find a partner.

The institute was small, and the walls had ears, so no one was risking dating coworkers. The workplace was more of a place to share your never-ending work-related frustration than a place to meet new people. People used Tinder to date instead, which was giving me a reflux

After PhD, it was even worse. Once you leave your institute, people forget your existence and move on.

The sad part was that I used to live literally behind the university’s corner. Still, I had no contact with my former peers.

Then, a 2-year lockdown, which felt like living in a monastery.

And then a never-ending journey starting from moving to Amsterdam in March 2023 that lasts for 3 years now. 

That’s the whole healing story.

What Did I Actually Do?

It’s not that I was sitting still. 

I’ve been working on my weaknesses and mistakes. After my fiancee left, I made a list of all I could improve—a full eight pages of bullet points. Ever since, I’ve been crossing items off the list one by one.

During my PhD, I also bought a house and froze my egg cells. Then, I felt a little safer—but still, I was nowhere closer to a real home.

During the lockdown, I started working on my personal standards, which grew to a short novel format. In the winter of 2022/2023, I printed this 20-page-long text and put it on the walls of some hackerspaces around the Bay Area.

Since half of the Silicon Valley laughed at mefor doing that… I added additional 10 pages of text.

I also traveled a lot for all this time, both in grad school and as a solopreneur. I went out my comfort zone and attended hundreds of events I didn’t even want to attend in the first place, just because I knew that statistically, it increases my odds of finding a soulmate in the long term.

And I really don’t think of myself as a passive person; I can take action whenever I see the point. I even took a flight to Argentina during my PhD just to meet with a researcher I’d met at a summer school. Despite I’d talked to him for just one evening, I enjoyed our conversation so much that I wanted to spend some more time with him. 

You get the idea: I wasn’t sitting with my arms crossed for this whole time.

Anyways, action, taking care of my personal network, and taking gambles didn’t get me anywhere. Or at least, it hasn’t gotten me anywhere yet. 

Did I Checkmate Myself?

So, did I checkmate myself somehow? What did I do wrong?

It’s not that I don’t see the positives of this whole time spent on my own. I don’t really need to prove anything to myself anymore. I can live on my own and be highly functional without leaning on anyone’s shoulder.

I also think that, due to the necessity to push myself out the comfort zone day in day out. My nervous system got stronger, and my personality has morphed into much less neurotic and much more peaceful than before.

I believe that you never know what God has in store for you. Perhaps I dodged a bullet, and I don’t even know it. 

Who knows, maybe I have a genetic burden, and I would have ended up with severely sick kids. Or perhaps my destiny is to become a Buddhist monk?

On the other hand, I cannot get over the feeling that twelve years of solitude is way over the norm for healing. And I must be in one of the two tails of the Gaussian curve — but which one?

On Professional versus Private Life.

Sometimes, I wish I was born a man. Ambitious men typically gain in women’s eyes but what about ambitious women? According to Bursztyn, Fujiwara and Pallais (2017), single women even downplay their ambition when single men are watching.

I feel that professional and personal development don’t go hand in hand for us. Yes, strong women with plans and agendas get a lot of attention… but for all the wrong reasons, namely from cheaters and weak guys looking for a nurse.

In general, I was luckier in my professional life than in my private life to date. 

What Went Right in My Professional Life?

In professional life, the wind was blowing on my shoulders for all this time.

The Interfaculty Studies in Mathematics and Natural Sciences offered me all I wanted from my undergraduate studies.

My PhD contract allowed me to buy a house as a PhD student at the very right moment.

Then, cryptocurrencies blew up at the right moment. This made it possible to take time off, do some soul-searching, and then start a company.

When I started the company, I had no cash but I found overly competent, productive, and affordable contractors overseas.

During the pandemic, the job market became chaotic — which is excellent for an anti-fragile business like mine. The more chaos in the market, the better for me.

Also, during the pandemic, my PhD suddenly became hot due to Andrew Huberman and other popcorn neuroscientists who made careers in the media.

Despite never planning to go for a PhD for splendor, my PhD title suddenly gained in value.

And then I landed in a meritocracy called the United States.

Now, LLMs and AI agents make bootstrapping and solopreneurship easier than ever. 

Overall, I was lucky. Even my adventure in the crypto world eventually became beneficial to me, as it familiarized me with fast-moving markets where new bombs land every day.

And you feel it’s hard to track what’s happening. This experience greatly prepared me for the messy times of the AI revolution.

But Private Life Was a Different Story.

On the other hand, in private life, the wind always blew in my face.

As a young adult, I moved to Warsaw for my studies. It was hard times. Most of my peers from studies were genius physicists and mathematicians with serious issues in their social lives. 

Plus, twenty years ago, Poland was still a society full of complexes. And women with an ultra-high education and ambition did not seem to appeal to the opposite gender. 

I’m sure there were still some highly functional and dateable men in that crowd. However, I was green and inexperienced.

And I simply didn’t know what to pay attention to and how to express what I needed. That’s probably why I didn’t make any good decisions throughout my studies.

Crossing the Atlantic.

After moving to the Netherlands, I realized that the Dutch are used to the 9-to-5 model in professional life and tend to disregard hard-working people, including hard-working women. (According to Eurostat, employees in the Netherlands work the shortest average working week in the EU.) If you work really hard and try to build something with passion, you are labeled “a workaholic,” which is worse than “an alcoholic.” Unfortunately, I fall into this category and so I was avoided as if I was a carrier of a mortal disease.

When I finally arrived in the US, I discovered that Americans enjoy highly educated and hard-working women… As long as they have a green card. Every time I meet someone with whom I have great chemistry, the question is shot: “So, when are you leaving again?” And then the whole interest pops like a bubble.

I am talking about general observations here. But throughout the years, I also met many outliers with whom I had great chemistry… Nevertheless, for some bizarre reasons, something was always standing in the way.

The wrong time, the wrong place, or just silence on the line for no apparent reason. With all these bizarre coincidences in place, it felt like fate. Or a supernatural force, was preventing me from something to happen, I’m not kidding.

The Long Long Childhood.

I feel can never win this game. Just as if the game was consciously set to level hard for some reason. On the other hand though, Despite being on my own in an unorthodox way of living, I feel blessed in some weird way. 

Namely, for some strange reason, I was gifted with an unbelievably long childhood: the period when I have time for self-discovery, taking risks, traveling… While many of my friends are now stuck to cradles, I have an insane amount of free time and all the reasons to push myself as far as I can. Plus, all the best things in life are still ahead.

The Mark Rutte’s Case.

I sometimes think of Mark Rutte, the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands who now serves as the 14th secretary general of NATO. In the Netherlands, Mark is a political superstar — with a total of almost 14 years, he was the longest-serving prime minister in Dutch history. And probably also the most popular overall.

According to NATO, Rutte took office as the Alliance’s 14th Secretary General on 1 October 2024, after serving as the Netherlands’ longest-serving prime minister.

So, what about Mark? Well, he is and has always been openly single.

Witty, highly sociable, and always in a good mood, he appears to be a perfectly functional individual who easily bonds with people. And yet, for some (publicly) unknown reason he didn’t commit to anyone and anything other than world peace.

The older I become, the better I understand how this might come about. Namely, if you have passion, you have everything.

And, the peace of mind coming from the fact that you rely on yourself and no one depends on you, is an invisible source of power that can effectively compensate for the lack of close family. And perhaps, provide even more life force. According to Long and Averill (2003), solitude can bring freedom, creativity and intimacy rather than loneliness.

That’s why I’m starting to treat the possibility of going solo as a viable path for life, neither better or worse than matching with someone else.

So, sometimes I think to myself: wouldn’t it actually be easier if I decide to give up on that part of life and just enjoy all I already have? I’m out!

Is There a Fix?

One fix to the situation that still comes to mind is: just move to the US; what’s your problem? Well… American culture of success has its own issues, too.

Especially Californians always want to network upward and can kick you out of their lives like trash if you don’t fit in anymore. This freaks me out like hell.

Nevertheless, moving across the ocean might be the best bet at the moment. After all, if the only moments in your life when you remind yourself of being a woman is when you bleed once in a while, something is clearly not right.

While recalling the full story of these twelve years of solitude, I genuinely don’t know what I could have done differently. I was honest with myself and others, I worked on myself, and I did my best. 

Twelve years of solitude, and yet, here I stand—not broken, but unapologetically free. Maybe the punchline is this: life didn’t give me the fairytale, so I wrote my own story.

And I’m just packing for my trip to the Himalayas. Bringing my resume just incase they have a vacancy in one of the local temples.