My birthday is coming up this week. And let me tell you I am a birthday girl. Summer birthdays weren’t always the best growing up — kids are often away at camp when you want to celebrate, and we moved around a lot so I was often somewhere new when my birthday rolled around (the original #nonewfriends). So now I go all out. I celebrate my birthday all week long. Ok fine, all month long. But this year with so much change in my life and so much heaviness looming from the past year, I’ll admit that I feel less blissfully excited about it than I usually do.
Does this mean I’m just getting older and more mature? Somehow I doubt it.
As much as I’d like to blame everything negative this year on the dark cloud of grief over my mother’s death, I think this one might be a little more complicated than that.
In recent years we’ve seen memes and articles lamenting how single women’s milestones aren’t celebrated the same way as when our friends get engaged. How getting your PhD should be just as lauded as finally walking down the aisle. This idea isn’t new. In fact, it was the subject of a particularly uncomfortable Sex & The City episode imo.
This episode made me so uncomfortable at times. Which I guess was the point. How could someone not be mortified if one of their friends’ shoes were stolen from their own home??
But the episode widens its scope to discuss more broadly the amount of money that we all spend on our married friends with kids in contrast with how little pomp and circumstance the single ladies generally receive.
And I couldn’t agree more. I’d be lying if I said that I was a little disappointed that when I launched my company — a whole freaking platform I’d built, launched alone in my apartment one night — and my friends didn’t respond with much more than a celebratory text or a clink of champagne glasses the next time we went out to dinner. Those gestures were appreciated, to be sure! But I’d just spent months toiling away by myself with my laptop to build something that I hoped would make a positive impact on women everywhere, and the people in my life reacted with less fanfare than when that guy who’d been breadcrumbing them finally texted them back.
Maybe it was my fault. I didn’t explicitly state that I wanted to be celebrated. I didn’t throw my own launch party the way I now throw my own birthday parties. I guess I thought it went without saying that this was a huge f*cking deal for me. And that maybe I would have appreciated a little commotion? Maybe it wasn’t actually as obvious as I thought it was.
So let’s circle back to the birthday for a second. I’ve gotten used to the fact that I need to plan my own birthday party. To be fair this was true even when I was in a relationship — I loved my ex dearly but he wasn’t excited to plan the party on his own. As not a big milestone guy himself, I’m sure he was frankly terrified he was going to make all the wrong decisions (note for the guys: there often isn’t actually a right answer, it’s just the effort itself that makes it sexy). But even as I plan my own party every year, my closest friends are also frankly exceptional at making sure they get individual time with me as well since they know how much my birthday means to me. So what’s the problem?
I’m now solidly in my mid-thirties. Maybe I’m entering a new splinter era? One beyond what we experience in our late 20s/early 30s where some friends are single and the others are starting to get married. The divide between single vs having multiple children and moving to the suburbs is even more vast. Maybe the gulf is just too big to traverse these days.
I’d argue it’s more than this. So let’s try to break it down.
Hypothesis #1: The splinter era theory
As we grow up and each of us enters different stages of our lives, it’s simply too difficult to all be on the same page anymore. It’s a simple, albeit sad, truth that I know if and when I do get married one day, it will likely be less exciting to the people in my life. It’ll be the zillionth wedding they’ve all attended by that point. Many of them will have kids at home that they’ll have to arrange childcare for (sorry, my wedding will likely be child free 🤷♀️). Some of them might have even gotten divorced by that time and decided they despise the very institution of marriage as a result. The reasons are endless, but the truth is simple: getting married later in life is less shiny and new. So fewer people will attend. And they won’t all feel obligated (or have the stamina, frankly) to dance the night away and make it to the after party.
Does that mean my eventual (hypothetical) wedding won’t be amazing one day? Of course not! But times change. And the people in your life end up on diverging paths. Maybe we should just accept that and stop trying to create the same sense of camaraderie we miss from when we were younger.
Hypothesis #2: Society f*cked us over
We have to at least partly blame society for programming us all to believe that the only milestones worth celebrating are those related to getting married. Part of what makes it so easy to celebrate someone’s marriage is because there’s a literal playbook of how to do it. Sure, we can all make our own decisions about whether or not we want a destination bachelorette party or who gets plus ones, but by and large there is an expected set of events that will occur when someone gets engaged. And the people in your life know about them already, therefore they’re inherently more likely to be present to attend them without having to be explicitly asked. Or begged.
Hypothesis #3: It’s the single ladies’ problem
That leads me to the next theory — maybe all single girls have to do to feel celebrated in a big way is to ask? Perhaps everyone would be thrilled to celebrate our wins — any wins — but we just have to be willing to make a bold declaration of what we want. People aren’t mind readers after all. So it’s on the single ladies to make it clear when they’re looking for a big splash.
I see plenty of validity to this theory. After all, I already said that I plan my own birthday party every year. But I think this theory alone is too derivative. As a part of the larger discussion around modern feminism, I think it’s important that we don’t ignore the impact of societal expectations. And don’t always put all of the responsibility on the “wronged” party to make things right.
And that brings us to…
Hypothesis #4: All of the above
As usual the answer doesn’t have a single, simple solution. One of the primary goals of me starting to write these articles was to establish that there is no single “correct” path for women to take in order to succeed in life. In fact, the only person who can define what success means for an individual is the individual themselves.
So we can’t ignore the impact of society’s programming (Hypothesis #2) on how we view celebrating non-wedding-related milestones. But we also can’t put the entire onus on single women themselves to make all of the changes (Hypothesis #3). As we all break off and take different paths into our respective futures (Hypothesis #1), we need to make more of an effort to take a beat, and take a breath, and put ourselves in our friends’ shoes.
I have a friend who’s been building a business around the concept that partnered friends need to be making more of an effort to help their single friends find love. Why has it suddenly become such a big thing to set up friends? Just connect them on a text thread, say you think they might vibe, and let them take it from there! TikTok is full of evidence showing how frustrated single people are with their married friends giving them completely irrelevant “advice” about how to find their partners. But there are just as many posts from new moms about how isolating it feels to see your childless friends making an effort to go out together but not realizing how much they might appreciate a visit to a tired mom at home one night too.
So maybe the answer is simply empathy. We all deserve to be celebrated. No matter what direction our lives are heading in. And it’s up to us as human beings who care for one another to figure out how best to do that for the people we love.
So I’m going to celebrate my birthday the way I want to this year. And if some people can’t make it, I’ll understand. Because friendships aren’t built in the big moments anyway, they’re built in all the small ways we show up for one another. And the fabric of those tiny moments weaves itself into a strong foundation that can withstand any missed event or small misunderstanding.
And hbd to all my other Leos out there — I know you’ll be doing it up big too 💃