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Why You’re the Only Single Friend Left
The best thing about this question is that I never ask it when I’m around my friends. I have no need. I’m fully in the moment and enjoying it with them.
It’s not as if I don’t have my own war stories of the past or even the present. For someone who hasn’t been in a relationship for almost four years now and who hasn’t been in a good one for twice that long, I keep up.
But I suppose the weirdest trip is when the friends depart and then later in the week I’m the one getting the message or the phone call about what’s going down in my friends’ love lives.
It’s too easy to diagnose others. All you have to do is watch with love. Then you learn that there are certain tropes that haunt relationships. Fear of missing out, the grass being greener on the other side, the ethics of manipulation, fear of the future, the lust of novelty and the possibility of blind spots are pretty common.
When you’re in the wind tunnel of falling in love (read: infatuation) or cementing yourself in actual love, it’s easy to lose perspective sometimes. We all need a stabilizing voice and it doesn’t have to be an expensive one.
It’s why talk therapy is effective. People just need to externalize their thoughts, bounce it to someone else who bounces it back and then the matter is settled.