‘Help! I’m the Last Single Friend in My Group Chat.’

Dear Allison and Amy Rose,

I’m 40 years old. I live in a big city (Toronto). I am actively dating (but don’t have any good prospects). I have lots of hobbies — working out, hanging out with my dog, reading — and I have a compulsion to “finish” the internet every day. I travel a lot — I’ve been to 27 countries on my own and try to take a trip a month.

Even though I have a very full life, I’m the only single person in my friend group (and not interested in having kids), and I feel like I’m constantly being left out and left behind. It started around my 40th birthday. I planned a trip to Greece and invited 25 people. Everyone was super enthusiastic when I put out initial feelers, but only four ended up coming. It was incredibly hurtful. I’ve been a bridesmaid in 15 weddings and officiated four of them. I’ve been to so many bachelorette parties, and while I didn’t want to make the comparison, it felt like I had spent tens of thousands of dollars on their lives, and nobody wanted to make the effort for mine. I was afraid to talk about it because it seemed like every time I did, someone else bailed.

It always feels like everyone else has a priority that isn’t me. Nobody asks how my day is. Truly, I wonder what they think I do all day. They never ask! While I am super close with my brother and sister-in-law, I can’t remember the last time any of them asked a question about me. We are always talking about their kids. (They’re cute, so I don’t mind.) My friends don’t ask about my dating life anymore. It used to be a super-fun thing we all commiserated about, but now it’s kind of a thing I do in the background that they know nothing about. I’m quite close with all of their spouses. I know everything about their lives, but then it’s just like a black hole when it comes to me. I’m sure I’m just projecting, but I get the feeling they think I’m just not trying hard enough.

I’m beginning to feel an acute sense of loneliness. I now simply don’t want to expect anyone to want to go on trips with me, so I don’t even ask. I go alone. It feels like a huge emotional burden to always say, What about me? Do I need single friends? (Ugh.) How do I get the fullness of my life back?

—Left Out and Left Behind

Dear Left Out and Left Behind,

First things first. About that “ugh” at the idea of “needing single friends.” Ugh! That ugh disturbs me. That ugh feels like a judgy aunt at Easter brunch who is all “When the heck are you getting married, you’re no spring chicken.” That ugh is the loud chorus of centuries of stigmatization, of podcast bros calling single women sad cat ladies. What do you have against single people? You identify as a single person, too! Single people need other single, childless people, who usually have more time, more flexibility, more emotional capacity to be more active in your life. It’s basic friend math. Go make some single friends. Don’t be a self-loathing single person. I say this with love.

Especially when your experience of being single sounds pretty incredible. What you’ve pulled off is not easy: You’re building a life as a single person in a world that feels full of couples, and you don’t seem to be thinking of the life you’ve chosen as a placeholder for a real life that begins when you find a partner. I’d consider you part of a league of women doing single right, including Rhoda (who I always thought was better at being single than Mary Tyler Moore) and Tracee Ellis Ross, taking lavish solo trips for her Tubi show. So I challenge your thinking: You don’t need to get your full life back. The fullness you seek is already there. Hobbies? Girl, who has those?

Acknowledging how good you have it does not diminish how difficult it is to do life alone. There are more single people than ever — like 100 million more single people (according to a recent article in The Economist) — yet our society fundamentally favors couples, marriage, and monogamy. A lot of things are just easier when you’re coupled up and harder when you’re not. Paying for everything alone? A drag and a drain. The number of nights you have to eat leftover Indian food because you ordered food for two for one? Infinite. Decision-making alone? Exhausting and alienating. (Recently, I couldn’t decide if I should buy an upstate house, but after snapping at friends whose advice didn’t really factor in how hard it would be to be a homeowner alone, I was left with nobody to consult but an app-based psychic. I am too ashamed to disclose how much I spent to arrive at the conclusion that I should not buy the house until I could make better financial decisions.) Of all the very difficult parts of being single, sometimes the hardest part is sitting with the very specific loneliness you describe, or the “What about me?”s. When all you want is someone in your life to ask the most mundane question because it’s the purest form of being thought of. Not feeling thought of is a very real, painful, and uncomfortable part of single life that can undermine how good we feel about it in general.

Here’s something I like to remind myself in my loneliest moments when the phone is decidedly not blowing up with notifications, and I find myself placing bets on how long it would take each of my so-called friends to realize I was dead or kidnapped: Somewhere, someone with a live-in partner is sitting there wishing said partner remembered to ask them about their day once in a while.

I don’t say this to be smug. The truth about people, coupled or not, is that they are self-centered. They are stressed and depressed, or they have kids or pets or jobs, or are so happy they have tunnel vision. Or they are in a new relationship and want to travel with you, but they also want to take a trip with the person they can have sex with but only have so many vacation days so choose sex. They’re scrolling through Instagram’s chaotic stream of terrible news and lymphatic-drainage tutorials instead of texting you back. But it doesn’t mean they don’t care. It doesn’t mean they are sick of hearing about your dating life. Are you kidding? Those stories are gold to people in relationships. Sometimes, we just don’t have the capacity to remember each other. So we accept that, and we help each other out by training people in our lives how to treat us.

Try just swooping into your group chats or your friends’ messages with dumb news of your day. The kind of mundane stuff you wish people would ask you about: how annoying it was that you were stuck in traffic; what the weird guy you see every day at the deli was up to; whether you should have pizza or lentil soup for dinner. If you plant those little seeds of delight, ideally, it will become a habit: Your friends will do the same. You could also try directly telling your friends what kind of support you need— we leave each other in the dark too often. Do they know you feel left behind? Or that your feelings were hurt? There’s a chance your life seems so full they might not consider the ways you still need them. They might assume you have 100 other friends dying to come to Greece, or that you’re too busy having a torrid love affair in a foreign country to check in about your dating life. It’s uncomfortable, but you probably need to start What about me–ing more and trust that people you consider friends will show up for you as they can. And if they don’t, that sucks, but you can make new friends. Single ones.

Rooting for your next international vacation,APD

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