Being a 33 year old single woman is no joking matter. In my 20s being single wasn’t something I spent all that much time thinking about. Plenty of my friends were still single. Dating was a regular topic for discussion, and we all enjoyed passing time swapping sweet stories (and laughing over our horror stories). But I never felt weird about being single. I took pride in being picky, and didn’t worry about not finding someone to spend my life with.
Now, those same friends who I laughed with (and on a lesser occasion cried with) are married, many with children, and they are more interested in discussing lactation and baby poop than dating. To be fair, this is their life now, but more and more often I wonder where our friendship fits.
So as I sat at the dinner table in my friend’s house on New Years Eve, feeling like the awkward fifth wheel as the two married couples dominated at Card Against Humanity, I began to think about my place in these wonderful people’s lives. When I brought up my disastrous dating life, and my most recent goodbye (because after a guy reveals serious mental illness diagnoses I always say goodbye), the conversation quickly changed to some new development one of the babies had made (for the record there were 3 babies collectively). I love these women; we just don’t have that much in common any more.
So what’s a single girl in her 30s to do? Well first, I will hang on to my baby crazy friends. I love them (and their babies) to death, and with any hope, someday I will get to ramble on about my baby…and I will be sure to tell them all the gross blown out diaper stories, and describe nasty rashes, and share all the disturbing facts about breast feeding I can come up with (because sometimes payback is fun). These women have been there for me for many years, some since childhood, so I can look past their disinterest in my life for this exciting time in theirs.
I need to accept that many of my friends have taken the next few steps in life without me, and that’s okay. After all, there is no man that I am wishing I never said goodbye to. I haven’t met someone worth spending a lifetime with. Maybe I never will. So I’m going to work on making sure I like myself, because that’s the bitch I’m stuck with. My pastimes may look different from my married friends’ (because I hope to God they are not getting bored and scrolling judgmentally through Tinder on week nights), but there will always be a place in my life for them. They may have limited interest in my dating stories, but there’s always the internet to share those. I may be taking the road less traveled, so to speak, but it’s the right one for me at the moment. So yes, I may be 33 and single, but I’m also a homeowner and have a job I love. It’s not always easy going it alone, but who said it was supposed to be?
Finding Direction 