Holding Pattern

One Saturday morning last September, I spent a few hours going door to door dropping off pamphlets for a municipal political candidate in my riding. This was not the only few hours I spent doing this kind of work, as I wound up being very involved with this campaign, but it was the first, so it was all new to me on that day. I was coming in pretty green, I had never met the candidate before that day, but I was happy to support her, and looked forward to doing my bit, mostly out of my revulsion for the sitting councillor against whom she was running. We were outfitted with buttons and T-shirts, armed with our stacks of material and sent out to hit the streets in pairs. I was teamed with LB, another woman I had never met who bore something of a resemblance to the candidate, and together we set off to our station which turned out to be a somewhat neglected part of the riding, including a large public housing project which we almost missed canvassing it was hidden so well.
Our conversation became very candid, very quickly, yet at the same time very casual. In short, we hit it off, but neither of us was shopping for a partner, so it was not hamstrung by that kind of tactical manoeuvring.
S. and I were going through the roughest bit we had been in, and in fact I had tried and failed to end it not long before. LB was single and seemingly happily so, and I somewhat teasingly suggested that she were somewhat deluded, what kind of a woman is happy alone, etc., all in good fun. I explained to her my situation with S. and that I was trying as hard as I could to make it work but that I felt like I (and my relationship) was in a holding pattern. Sometimes an airplane approaches its destination but it cannot land because something is not ready on the runway, and diverting to an alternative landing strip is inconvenient for the crew, the airline and the passengers, so the pilot elects to fly a holding pattern near the destination, hoping that the problematic weather or ground situation or whatever it is will clear before the airplane exhausts so much fuel that it can no longer afford the luxury of choosing a between a convenient landing site and an available one.
But as cynical as I was about my situation, as I explained it to this sudden, new friend on this unexpected and intimate level, I still felt like I was doing the right thing, and that LB's attitude was selfish: what kind of thirtysomthing woman could be happy alone, I mean come on? That is a thing about a holding pattern, it is an expression of hope that conditions will improve. But sometimes they do not, and you have to be ready to cut your losses and head to the alternative landing site, before you run out of fuel.