Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more
Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more
Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more
’Tis the season for spending the weekend trekking out to whichever far-flung corner of the British countryside that your soon-to-be-married friends have selected as the backdrop for their picture-perfect wedding. For Googling what “cocktail attire” actually means. For secretly wondering why the bridesmaids are convinced that your friend needs a four-day hen party in Marbella, with a dress code stricter than the Met Gala and a price tag to match. And for calculating precisely how long you can get away with muting that particular event-related group chat before your silence starts to seem pointed and passive-aggressive.
Once you enter your thirties, summer starts to acquire a whole new meaning. What was once a time for long afternoons spent in pub gardens and last-minute group trips to bargain destinations becomes a period that needs to be planned out with military levels of precision. Suddenly, your free time is filled up with a string of weddings and other associated celebrations, requiring a seemingly endless stream of Travelodge reservations, taxi bookings and acceptable small talk topics. And if you have the odd weekend free? Don’t get too comfortable. There’s always the strong possibility of impromptu engagement drinks (after someone popped the question on their special summer holiday, when their partner “absolutely wasn’t expecting it”).
For this reason, I’ve come to think of summer as a season of milestones, the time when people tend to choose to tick off those big, grown-up achievements from life’s list (you can’t blame them, really – no one wants soggy hair in their wedding photos). It’s a stretch of the year when it can feel like everyone is striding forward into proper adulthood, trailing Le Creuset dishes, White Company sheets and whatever else they’ve stuck on their wedding list in their wake.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s a joyful time, full of reunions with pals you haven’t seen in too long (inevitably because you’ve each been busy attending other friends’ weddings) and heartfelt speeches that can make even the most cynical (me) start tearing up. But if you couldn’t feel further from checking off any of these milestones yourself, it can also be a difficult period to navigate. If you’re a serially single wedding attendee, this is not just an expensive time (all those hotel bookings very quickly start to add up when you’re not splitting the cost in half) but an emotionally draining one.
Watching two people you love declare their love is wonderful, but it can also prompt the sort of painful self-questioning that usually only happens during a 2am bout of insomnia. Will any of this ever happen to me? If it doesn’t, will I just spend my life in the background of other people’s celebrations, like a perpetual supporting actor? And is everyone judging me if my smile slips a little?
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Summer of love: Once you hit your thirties, summer becomes a time of back-to-back wedding attendance (Getty/iStock)
It’s not just single people who might struggle, either; if your relationship is floundering, applauding a series of apparently serenely happy couples can throw all your problems into stark relief. After a few months of functioning as a grinning spectator to other people’s romance, even the most warm-hearted among us end up feeling like our emotional reserves are entirely exhausted. And this post-summer depletion arguably only makes it harder to steel yourself against the less concentrated but still steady stream of milestones that are ticked off throughout the rest of the year: the baby showers, the christenings, the house purchase not-so-secretly smoothed over with help from the bank of Mum and Dad.
Whether consciously or not, many of us have absorbed “linear expectations for our life, around education, work, relationships and family”, explains Georgina Sturmer, a counsellor and member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). We’re brought up to believe that everything will happen in a certain order, at a certain time in our lives. And for a while, that holds true. “When we are growing up, the roadmap of our life typically matches that of our peers,” Sturmer says. “Life at school, home, work and beyond tends to follow the same path. Until it doesn’t.”
When we reach our late twenties and thirties, this “roadmap” becomes more complex, less linear. Some people seem to be ploughing forward at speed, others are taking looping diversions or might feel like they’re stuck in a traffic jam (if you’ll permit me to push this image to breaking point). What’s trickiest about this summer season is the way it makes the differences between, say, coupled-up friends and single ones unavoidably, glaringly obvious. This can mean that “celebrations for other people become a reminder of where we are at in our own lives”, Sturmer says – including “what we have, or haven’t, ‘achieved’”.
When we are growing up, the roadmap of our life typically matches that of our peers
Georgina Sturmer, counsellor
What can be especially disconcerting is the fact that, when it comes to our personal lives and the milestones associated with them, input doesn’t equal output. It’s not like studying for our GCSEs, when steady hard work and solid revision tended to equate to good grades. Relationships are much messier and more contingent. There is work involved, yes, but their success is at least partially down to an element of luck and good timing. And so, if you feel like you’re doing everything right and still not getting what you want, watching other people succeed, seemingly without all that effort, can be painful.
Social media doesn’t help, bombarding us with other people’s highlight reels. Even if you’ve never been particularly fussed about the idea of, say, the big, traditional wedding in some countryside hotel, feeling like the only person excluded from this particular rite of passage carries its own sadness. Also wildly unhelpful? The fact that many of the cultural expectations around these big milestones date back to a time when life looked very different. The idea that you’d have bought a house and settled down by 30? It’s a relic from a period long before the average property was priced at around eight times the average UK salary, yet for some reason we’re all still clinging on to it and using it to berate ourselves.
This mismatch between expectation and reality is taking a toll. In 2022, the charity Relate revealed that “milestone anxiety” was becoming an increasingly prominent topic in therapy sessions; the organisation also found that 77 per cent of millennials and 83 per cent of Gen Z survey respondents felt under pressure to reach life milestones. More recent research from insurance providers Confused.com found that 24 per cent of UK adults spend up to an hour a week worrying about hitting these milestones (which, if anything, feels like an understatement).
The jumble of emotions elicited by this season can be difficult to unravel, let alone to express out loud. Of course, you’re happy for your friends; you’re glad to have been invited to their celebrations, too. But it’s not a simple case of that happiness negating any of the insecurities and worries you might have about your own life choices.
You can be happy for your friends, while also feeling grief and longing for the things you’re yet to have
Nikkita Hope-Brown, therapist
Nikkita Hope-Brown is a therapist and BACP member, many of whose clients are single women, who end up “spending a lot of time, money and holiday [allowance] to attend and support friends at different stages to them”. It’s important to remind yourself that “Feeling sadness when you see your friends experiencing things that you too want to experience doesn’t make you bad or self-centred,” she says. “There’s no need to shame yourself when you’re already having a tough time. Humans are capable of feeling two things at once, meaning you can be happy for your friends, while also feeling grief and longing for the things you’re yet to have. That’s totally normal.” Essentially, then, you don’t need to beat yourself up for feeling bad when you’re already feeling bad.
So, how can we manage milestone season when we’re out of step with our friends’ life stages? According to BACP registered psychotherapist Susie Masterson, we need to acknowledge these tricky feelings rather than attempting to push them down (or to temporarily mask them by hitting up the free bar). We should try to recognise “the distress of not being where we want to be”, she says, while “also accepting that things will happen when we are ready”. Emotional readiness, she adds, “doesn’t have a timeline” and “it’s not always correlated with age. Therefore, to compare ourselves with our friends and colleagues because they happen to share a birthday with us is simply not relevant to our own journey.”
We should remember, too, Masterson says, that “We don’t have to say ‘Yes’ to every invitation that we receive.” Maybe you can manage the wedding, but you know that the week-long hen or stag extravaganza will leave you both out of pocket and emotionally exhausted. “If our relationships are truly meaningful, our friends and family will understand,” she adds. “Perhaps agree to find a different way to celebrate the occasion that is meaningful to both parties.”
It’s hard to get around the fact that our culture is set up to celebrate traditional successes, many of which are contingent on coupledom, while ignoring other achievements. If you opt out of the most traditional route, or if these things just don’t end up happening for you, then it’s easy to feel overlooked. A few years ago, I saw a dispiriting but grimly accurate social media post suggesting that if you don’t get married, have a baby or buy a house, then the one time people gather to celebrate you might be… your funeral, and it’s played on my mind ever since.
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Being seated at the ‘singles’ table time after time can be pretty dispiriting (Getty/iStock)
To avoid this grim state of affairs and to keep yourself buoyed up during a potentially tough season, it’s important to create your own alternative milestones and to find ways to celebrate them. The fact that those celebrations most likely won’t involve flower walls or games of “Mr and Mrs” doesn’t make them any less valid – but where do you begin? Bigging yourself up is difficult at the best of times, let alone when you’re feeling like The Last Single Person on Earth.
Katherine Cavallo, a psychotherapist and spokesperson for the UK Council of Psychotherapy, recommends taking some time to think carefully about “your values and what brings you joy. What feels meaningful and worthy of acknowledgement?” Your celebrations “don’t have to be ostentatious or extravagant”, she adds. They might relate to a hobby that you’ve picked up, a goal you’ve completed or a habit that you’ve stuck to diligently; they could honour a friendship that wouldn’t ordinarily get a shout out, or a big decision like leaving your job or switching up your career entirely. And, Cavallo adds, “If others don’t take your personalised celebrations seriously, you can celebrate them yourself, or gravitate towards those who do.”
It’s a practice I’m making an effort to try and adopt, even though moving against the prevailing current of your peers can, if I’m honest, sometimes feel a bit like running up a downward escalator. I’ve found low-key but still meaningful ways to mark the anniversaries of life events that have been important for me, like moving back to my home city and living alone.
Shifting the way that we think about milestones, though, is something of a long-term project. So what can we do when we’re facing those lightning flashes of insecurity that so often tend to strike just before you’re, say, preparing to turn up at another wedding on your own, or bracing yourself for a weekend of chatting about engagement rings and baby plans? Hope-Brown says we need to remind ourselves that our self-worth is separate from our status, whether that’s as a partner, a homeowner or a parent. “Many of my clients seem to equate being in a relationship or reaching milestones with another person as the ultimate evidence that they’re good enough and worthy of love,” she explains. “While it’s tempting to be seduced by the notion of being ‘picked’ and having that one person to depend on, you are a whole human being, worthy of love, respect, success and belonging all on your own.”
It’s a big statement, but one that we’d all do well to repeat back to ourselves, especially when you might feel like the sight of yet another seating plan with adorably named tables is going to throw you off-kilter. With that ringing in your ears, it’s much easier to focus your attention on the real business of wedding season: successfully persuading the pretentious DJ to play back-to-back Abba.
