I was listening to an episode of The Moth podcast called Radio Hour: Brand New YOU and at around the 07:38 mark is an amusing story of a girl named Kristin Lawlor who, when she was 28, discovered to her dismay that she was “the only single girl in New York.” All her friends were in relationships and couldn’t hang out with her because they were too busy having dinner and couch movie nights with their boyfriends.
One night, someone at work organized a Friday cocktail night, and four drinks in, she declared to a male colleague: “I’m gonna have to learn to knit or read Proust!”
“Come over to my place Monday night,” he invited. “My wife will teach you know to knit and make you dinner.”
She ended up spending all her Monday nights learning how to knit and also talking about all sorts of things with her colleague’s wife.
Her knitting teacher eventually confessed that the whole thing had been a set-up. She had tasked her boyfriend to bring home a friend.
She had moved across the country for him to take a new job. She didn’t have a job and was still looking, and in the meantime she had no idea where to begin meeting people and she was kind of lonely. So he was a matchmaker and he did a really good job.
Kristin was like: “Wait. You’re in a relationship! How can you be lonely?”
Years ago, I would have asked the exact same thing. See, the thing that a lot of single people don’t realize is that even people in relationships need friends, too.
Just because one is in a happy relationship does not mean that’s enough. One person does not fulfil all of one’s relationship needs.
I knew this because of friends who were like that knitting lady.
I had a friend who moved across the world to UK to what seems like an enviable life full of Europe travels with her brand new husband. But she told us that she was sad because she didn’t have any real friends.
Another friend also moved across the world to Canada, where she made a home with a dog and a boyfriend. But she confessed that she struggled with loneliness because she didn’t have close friends.
Now of course I know how that feels. When I first moved to Hong Kong, I had no friends, too, and I couldn’t make new ones because of the pandemic and ate my loneliness away and gained a crapton of weight.
This reminds me of the first incident that made me realize that I was wrong about thinking that people in relationships would always rather spend time with their significant others than with their friends.
It was Valentine’s 2011. My single friends and I decided to go on a Singles Night Out so we wouldn’t feel lonely on single awareness day. So we dressed up and headed out to Chijmes.
Sometime during the night, we noticed something unusual. One of our friends had posted something on Facebook when he normally wasn’t a social media poster. He had written an angry status about how he and his girlfriend had not been invited.
The guy was actually one of our single friends’ roommate so we called her attention to it. “Is he okay? Is this meant for us? What did you tell him?”
She called him then and he broke down and confessed that he was mad at us for going out and not inviting him. That he missed us because we hadn’t hung out in a while and it hurt to see us all together without him.
She apologised and said she had assumed he would rather spend Valentine’s night with his girlfriend over us losers who were just trying not to feel sad about being alone on Valentine’s.
Realizations were had that night.
So if you’re single, don’t assume that your friends in relationships no longer need you. Keep inviting them to things in case they do.
And if you’re in a relationship, the effort is on you to let your single friends know this. And that is because single people will always assume that you would rather go out with your significant other over them and will make themselves scarce, usually because of how you treat them. You cannot take them for granted and just keep blowing them off to be with your boo because if you keep doing that, they will find someone else to replace you.
Always remember that friendships are a two-way street.
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