From personal experience, I can admit that I’ve done my fair share of eye rolling and fake gagging at my friends who talk about their boyfriends more than Kanye West talks about himself. It’s easy to feel sad and maybe even a little resentful when those nights that once used to be filled with our girlfriends coming over become nights filled with listening to Michael Buble Pandora alone as we download yet another hopeless dating app filled with guys we don’t actually care to meet. In an effort to support how truly tough and independent we are, we break away from our friends who are now in relationships and deem them to be boring, old and wasting their time. Because all of social media says we only get to be young once, right? So we need to “live it up” and be single and free and form loose, meaningless relationships with countless partners, since we have the whole rest of our lives to be committed to someone. Stop giving grief to those friends who’ve found people to love.
Stop undermining date night
Even though no S.O. may currently be taking you out to an Italian restaurant with endless garlic knots, that doesn’t mean you need to belittle your friend who has reservations there Friday night. One day, when a significant other loves you enough to feed you pasta, you won’t want to receive dirty looks and passive-aggressive texts from your friends whining about how you should go to out to the bar with them instead. Let boyfriends and girlfriends eat in peace.
Stop telling them to break up
Unless they truly have a toxic relationship full of dysfunction, abuse and physical and mental distress, stay away from their personal business. Even though you have great opinions and theories on how people are supposed to act in a relationship, wait for you own relationship to express them. Your day will come eventually, but until then, let the couple fight over who gets to be the big spoon.
Stop holding their relationship against them
She is still your best friend and will have your back through anything. Love is not a finite and limited object that gets used up if spread out to too many people. If anything, always remember you will forever be one of your girlfriends’ first loves because the love of best friends is an unbreakable bond.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself
Eventually you will find yourself in a cuddly, gift-giving, forehead-kissing relationship and all the resentment you built up while feeling bad about yourself for being single will fade away. Just like your singleness is temporary, so are most of the relationships that yourself and your friends will get into during these young adult years.
The years that lie ahead will most likely be filled with enough bachelorette parties, wedding invites and baby showers that we will wish we could go back to the simpler days of not being able to find someone to bring on a date function. The truth is, most of us will not be single forever. The other truth is that most of us are also not dating the people we will end up with ultimately. Both of these truths are okay, and they are important to remember the next time we think about leaving out a friend just because it’s “her and Jake’s one week-aversary.” Romance comes in waves, relationships bloom and die out, but our friendships will brave the storms and the seasons.
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