Saturday, 26 March 2011

• Single in a Sea of Couples

  
  Because I grew up in the woods, I have only one very good friend from childhood (outside my immediate family). For this story we'll call her Julie. I say we grew up together (even though we lived 6 hours apart and only saw each other once or twice a year) because we are lifelong pen pals (since the age of 8). Snail-mail style. Living under my bed to this day in my parents' house are shoe boxes full of Julie's handwritten letters and cards. 
  
  Julie and I promised when we were small that when we got married we would be each other's Maids of Honor. For the past few years Julie's been living down South, and I haven't been down for a visit (broke as I am from general vagabonding). But we've always lived apart, so when we see each other we just pick right up where we left off. 
  
  This weekend she was visiting New York with her Floridian boyfriend of sixteen months, who we will call Jeff. The three of us went to dinner in Manhattan, and we were joined by several of Jeff's relatives (and their husbands and wife) as well as one of Julie's friends from high school (and her fiance). 

  Hoooo! Single in a sea of couples... Table for nine? 

  At one point between the striped bass and the caramel cake I turned to Julie and said, "Julie, I have to ask you-"

  But she cut me off, emphatically. "I know what you're going to ask. Yes."

  "What was I going to ask?"

  "If Jeff is the One! Yes. We've talked about it. Not now, you know, but in the future. Maybe four years from now."

  Oh, man. That IS what I was going to ask. 

  She glowed the whole night. She talked about baby names. It was lovely to see her, looking even more radiant than I remembered. 

  And yet! When EXACTLY did my cohort reach of marrying age? Granted, the idea of a "marrying age" is a socially constructed one, and I GUESS we have been of baby-making age for about a decade, and we all know that Julie was mentally ready to be a mom when she was twelve years old....

  But still. I don't know. In ways I feel ready, after three years on the outside of coupledom, to delve in with someone special. But marriage? In ways I still feel young and reckless and a bit scared, and delightfully lost in the unpredictable pleasures of singledom, and unwilling to settle for anything less than extraordinary. 

  Have you ever been the only single at a couple's event? How did it feel?

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