How Did I Become the Last Single Person in My Friend Group?

Image may contain Human Person Face Female Hair Jaw and Jes Macallan

I am officially the last single person in my friend group. How did this happen? It feels like just yesterday we were being rejected from Raya, and now suddenly everyone is scouting for wedding venues upstate—except me. I’m starting to realize how different—and freakish—being single feels in your 30s. And it doesn’t help that our 30s is also the decade where we spend so much of our time and money celebrating other people’s coupledom. Because, of course I want to spend Labor Day weekend manually inflating a 6-foot blow-up penis, drinking a month’s rent worth of rosé, and pretending to be happy for Karen.

When I was younger, I took it for granted that my friends would always be available for hungover brunches and emergency threesomes. But now, seeing my friends usually means being the one single person amid a mob of couples, who treat me either like hired entertainment (“tell us a funny Tinder story, clown!”) or like their problem child. For instance, for years now my friends and I have spent summer weekends at a shared beach house on Fire Island. There are three bedrooms and one pullout couch, and suddenly this year I keep being demoted to the couch, so that the couples can have “privacy.” Excuse me, but do single people not need privacy? I get that they want to have sex on their vacation, but where am I supposed to jerk off? This is my vacation too, people! There’s no other way to look at it: I am a hashtag victim of couple privilege.

As a millennial feminist, allow me to run with this victim thing. Last week I had a new air conditioner delivered, only to realize that it was too heavy for me to carry up four flights of stairs to my apartment. So, being single, I had to hire a random man from the Internet to carry it for me. Then I had to hire a different man to install it, only to have that man explain that I’d bought an AC with the wrong voltage for my building, which meant that I had to rehire the first man to carry the AC back downstairs again. When I told this story to my mom, she responded with a sigh, “See, this is why you need a boyfriend: Air conditioners, broken toilets, a raccoon in the basement—that all becomes their problem.”

But it’s not just that being single suddenly feels alienating in your 30s. It’s also that dating itself becomes more difficult. For one, the stakes are higher. You don’t want to waste your time on someone who doesn’t feel like they could be “the one.” But simultaneously, thinking “would he make a good dad?” after knowing someone for the duration of a martini makes you feel like an insane, rom-com cliché of a woman. Not ideal.

Essentially, we are far more discriminating in our 30s than we were in our 20s, which is both a blessing and a curse. We know more about what we want and what we won’t tolerate—but to a point where almost no one is good enough. I find myself having thoughts like, “I could never date him, he wears V-necks.” Or, “He was nice, but he sleeps in a mezzanine bed.” And this perpetual dissatisfaction is especially true in New York, where inflated egos are paired with incredibly high standards and the illusion of infinite choice. That cliché of thinking “someone better might be just around the corner” is real. But I keep turning corners, and I keep meeting finance guys with high cholesterol who just discovered Williamsburg. Sigh. Sometimes I think I should’ve picked someone when I was 25 and stupid, and then just made it work.

The catch is, as we become increasingly picky, the pool of soul mates keeps getting smaller. Here’s another 30s development: Now, when I meet a cute guy, he’s often already married. Just recently, I felt like I was truly connecting with my orthodontist—I mean, he’s literally been putting his fingers in my mouth for six months—only for him to drop last week that he has a wife. I feel mislead.

This past weekend, I was commiserating about 30s singledom with my friend “Steve,” a 35-year-old TV producer who lives in Chicago. “Okay, I’m going to be really misogynistic for a minute,” Steve told me from the phone, “but I think that women—even if they are modern and feminist and independent or whatever—still feel pressure to get married and grow up in that specific, Disney-lifestyle kind of way. So the women who are my age-ish, who are still single, are kind of the fucking leftovers. They’re the people who couldn’t get their shit together, and they’re kind of crazy—believe me, I know, because I’ve dated them all.”

While Steve acknowledges that this whole life thing is unquestionably harder for women, he says that guys also suffer through the 30s single shift. “In your 30s, everything becomes more segregated,” he mused. “Couples hang out with other couples. People with babies hang out with other people with babies. Eventually, you stop being invited to the dinner parties or on the vacations, because why would you want to be on holiday with a bunch of people who are shacking up together?” Steve sees this clan-like behavior creeping into the workplace as well. “At my age, people seem to trust you more if you’re in a relationship, because you seem more stable,” he said. “I’m a freelancer, so I’m constantly having to sell myself to new people, and now when I tell them I’m single, I just get this look that says: What happened?”

“The thing that scares me the most,” Steve went on, “is thinking about the future. I recently had a 60-year-old Uber driver who wasn’t married and had no kids, and he was like, ‘Yeah, l just Uber around, passing the time.’ Like, I don’t want to be that! I want to be surrounded by people who love me when I’m old, not making small talk with strangers, then going home to crack a can of tuna and get on Reddit. I’d rather be dead.” He paused for dramatic effect. “Maybe all the people who are biased against single people are right. Maybe there is something wrong with us.”

Like many women, I spent most of my 20s wondering if a conventional relationship and family is something that I even want. If you had asked me two years ago about having a family, I would have been like, “Eww, why would I have kids when I could devote my life to more important things, like blogging and attending mediocre sex parties?” But now I’m like: “I’m too lazy to go out. Maybe I should just start a family.” (I guess biology is real?) There comes a point at which eating steak alone at Le Bernadin and winking at strangers no longer feels exciting, and you’d rather actually connect with another human being on a level deeper than “I’m drunk and you’re in front of me.” And one thing that I definitely don’t want is to hit 35 and enter a uterus panic mode.

In 2010, Lori Gottlieb authored the polarizing bestseller Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. The book is an account of Gottlieb’s experience as a single woman approaching her 40s. Gottlieb argues that compromises are essential components of relationships—both when we’re in them and when we’re navigating the dating world. We’ll never get everything we want, she suggests, so if having a family is important to you, at a certain point you just have to pick someone and procreate. Basically, don’t be in denial about the fact that your marital value is higher in your 20s and early 30s, and the longer you hold out for “Mr. Right,” the smaller your chances are of actually finding him—or even someone “good enough.”

Of course, that sounds unromantic and literally terrifying, but part of me appreciates the harshness of it. Similarly, I’ve recently become obsessed with clinical psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson’s YouTube channel. One of his common sentiments (and I’m paraphrasing) is this: “Women: I know we live in a modern society where you are told to prioritize your career, and put off marriage and family until later. But the reality is, just because you’re a woke feminist with a trendy loft apartment who’s passionate about her career doesn’t mean that you’ve somehow transcended your biology. Most people—women especially—who don’t end up forming a family unit will live to regret it.” Not long ago I would have brushed this off as misogynistic, but I’m starting to wonder if that’s simply a cop-out because I’m afraid of dealing with this harsh reality.

I’m literally cringing while typing this, but I also think that a lot of people—particularly people in creative fields, whose professional lives have less predictable trajectories—see themselves as always on the brink of “making it.” Like, “Well, my career is just about to take off, after which I’ll be rich and famous, and then I’ll have access to better, hotter people.” I have been quietly thinking that to myself for 10 years now. And while I don’t think my career is going poorly, if you had asked me at 25 what I would be doing at 31, I would have said that I’d have already written a best-selling book and made a movie. And while those things are still on my to-do list, my older, more realistic self has to acknowledge that they might actually never happen. We all will likely end up being more mediocre than we thought. This magical pool of super-boyfriends might never manifest. And at this rate, if and when they do, most of them will already be married.

I suppose what I’m acknowledging here is that I’m encroaching on “leftovers” territory. However, I would argue that the leftovers are not always crazy, but often are the women who refuse to subscribe to the Disney, faux happy ending, and who therefore lead more interesting and strange lives. So maybe I will end up settling to some degree. But in the meantime, I’ll just keep eating steak alone and RSVP’ing to orgies. Oh, and I should probably freeze my eggs.