How Having a Boyfriend Was a Prerequisite to Playing Settlers of Catan

Six months into my first romantic relationship after years of being involuntarily single, I’m finally playing the board game Settlers of Catan with other couples. 

I see Catan as a cutesy relationship marker, much like donning matching sweaters at a Christmas tree decorating party. (Or so I imagine – as I’m writing this, my first un-single holiday season is still around the corner.)

But Catan also represents so much more.

Because I was single for about 10 years, and 10 more years before that one, short, long-distance relationship, I was pretty used to playing the role of the rogue single woman. I went through life stag, and at first, it felt fine; I was an enthusiastic third wheel, just glad to tag along. And I am, perhaps due to my circumstances, fiercely independent. 

But at some point, I turned my inward discomfort into outward rage, and I started to resent my friends in relationships for not being more sympathetic to my plight. 

“It’s good to be alone, you learn more about yourself that way,” they’d say.

If being alone meant getting to know yourself better, I felt like I should be the most self-enlightened woman on earth. 

I first learned about the game Settlers of Catan while coming downstairs, hungover, during a friends’ weekend getaway at a lakehouse in Pennsylvania (I was the only person there not in a couple), and saw my friends playing the board game around a kitchen table. What stuck out to me most was that this wasn’t their first rodeo; it was clear they had been getting together back in New York, playing this game without me.

Catan, as it’s called, was invented by a German man in the 90s, and involves equal amounts of luck and strategy, kind of like Monopoly. You aim to build settlements, trade with other players, and earn Victory Points. And, unlike Monopoly, it’s a game of symbolic conquering and pillaging of unclaimed land.

While innocuously watching my friends move their colored wooden pieces around on a hexagonal board, my mind went straight to exclusion and dread. Scenes of my mother’s death from brain cancer flashed before my eyes, which led to the dismantling of the only family I ever had. Next were images of the pandemic and being locked down alone with my cats, while friends bonded with their chosen families. Because I had not been invited to play this board game, I might not be able to have children and will most certainly die alone.

I let unhealthy thoughts like these ping pong inside my head often. My solitude became my identity, a lonely outer crust, which didn’t make me a very receptive audience to anyone trying to brighten my mood. I’m sure this mindset didn’t make me any more appealing to a potential partner I might have encountered, either.

“When you stop trying, that’s when it will happen,” said a friend who met her husband when she supposedly gave up.

“Be friends first, that’s how you set yourself up for a lasting relationship,” said the friend who didn’t get physical with her boyfriend for the first few weeks.

When it first became apparent that my years of being an uncoupled 20, and then 30, something were not going to end anytime soon, I started venting about it. Not just venting, but extolling to anyone who would listen the financial pitfalls, being the only single person on group vacations and having to take the bunk bed at the Airbnb, not having someone at home caring about me, not having the emotional support, the punching bag, the lack of ever hearing someone say “I love you” when I most needed it.

Friends heard me out, but their compassion was often tinged with defensiveness. Sometimes I was provoking them to try to shut me down, so I could continue the myth that no one understood me. 

I once or twice very childishly sent text messages to friends telling them that they would kill themselves if they had been single for so long, which of course didn’t elicit boundless sympathy. 

But part of me believed this. It sometimes felt like in today’s society, being a single woman was a fate worse than death. I wanted validation for my pity party, but instead, I got a mix of reactions from bewildered to insulted. On the other hand, if they had gone ahead and agreed that my life sucked, I probably would have been pretty upset.

And the contradictory words of advice and consolation continued:

“Be more picky of who you swipe right on,” they’d say. 

“Be less picky and approach dates with curiosity so you don’t write people off too quickly,” my therapist said.

I was bitter, but in hindsight, I was also allowed to flourish in my singledom and do things that would have been much trickier to pull off had I been in relationships. After a three-year job based all over Africa and the Middle East, I spent the remaining years of my late 20s and early 30s backpacking Southeast Asia alone. I lived in a van for five months during early COVID, crisscrossing the Rockies solo. I went to business school in South Africa, worked at nonprofits in Kenya, and did a short project in Jordan right before the pandemic. On a day-to-day basis, I went to plays, took off on long bike rides and went on camping trips whenever the mood struck. 

Friends and family would always tell me, you are so brave to embark on these adventures by yourself.

“Of course,” I’d reply with agitation, “if you were single for this long, you too would have to be brave and figure out your life alone.”

Immediately after leaving the planet of the undateables, my partner and I were invited to play Catan with a friend and her new boyfriend. 

As the four of us sat around another kitchen table eating Indian takeout, my friend Heather and her new boyfriend set up the pieces for the game to begin. This was our first presentation of the partners, and Heather and I shot each other glances each time one of them did or said something cute. She texted me the next day that my boyfriend had lovingly smiled when I threw my hands up in the air after I gained another Victory Point for accomplishing the longest road.

He gained approval over Catan, and now we were ready to embark on other relationship milestones that were once off-limits to me.

I have someone to accompany me when I visit my dad and his new wife. Someone is cooking for me, feeding my cats when I’m out of town, joining me on bike rides. Mostly, there is someone completely devoted to me, who finds me excruciatingly beautiful and reminds me of those things often.

But it’s the board game that looms particularly large amongst all my former losses. I feel like I’m now participating in not just the literal games adults play, but the figurative ones, too. I’m getting a taste of what I thought was most desirable and taking my seat at the table of grown-up romance. 

I am also reaching back out to friends and challenging them to play Catan with my couple, to make up for lost time. Or maybe to make some kind of amends. 

Now that I’m a recovered permanent single person, I’m more confused than ever about my identity. There was something about my anger that gave me a false sense of strength. Without that identity, I’m a little embarrassed by my past lashings out.

I would never judge another woman for being partnerless for as long as I was, but I fear I have a lot of internalized shame and subscribe to beliefs that I wasn’t worthy of love. Sometimes I catch myself lashing out at my boyfriend, and I fear this could be another mechanism to protect myself if he ever leaves me. See? I could say, it was never meant to work out for me.

A lot of my friendships are still strained from my bitter words and outbursts. It was a tough situation, and I didn’t put in the work to be able to handle it with the right tools. I hijacked conversations and tried to hold friends emotionally hostage with my pain. I was jealous of them for their long-standing place in the world of happy couples, but since no couple is ever happy all the time, I wasn’t receptive to seeing and holding space for their pain. This didn’t make me a perfect friend either.

There’s a lot of luck involved in games. I met my boyfriend at a party. I thought he was hot and moody. I don’t believe in soulmates; I believe we were both available and open at the time. We sat beside each other then, but could have been seated further away. Why did this one work out and others didn’t? Was it an alien’s move in a celestial board game? 

I am brave. I still travel alone, I prefer to travel alone, and still feel my independence fiercely. 

And now, regardless of what happens between my partner and me, I have mostly recovered from the pity-party single-person mindset. Do I value myself more now that I am in a relationship? No. But being in one has helped put a lot of the puzzle pieces into place. 

By the way, my boyfriend’s name is Serg and I love him very much.