Single woman at 30: I want a different life, but can we still be friends?
Every week, PhilSTAR L!fe explores issues and topics from the perspectives of different age groups, encouraging healthy but meaningful conversations on why they matter. This is Generations.
It really is true—you turn 30, and all of a sudden everything you see online is engagement photos, wedding SDEs, and sex reveal parties. As I scroll through another post of “boy/girl mom” or “we did a thing,” I forcibly give myself a pep talk: This dreadful feeling that I am getting left behind, that I don't belong, is just screen-time-induced anxiety. I remind myself to breathe, anchor myself, and turn my phone off. Live my real life.
But when I do reach out to my girl friends, I find myself competing with "brunch with the mommas." For the record, I love these mommas. I grew up with these mommas, banged—literally and figuratively—through our emo phases together, and survived our just-girly-things Tumblr girl eras. I know these mommas face a very different kind of Everest, a different kind of pressure from everyone around them. So why, then, do I feel like I am unqualified in this new friendship space? Why do I feel like I’m encroaching on a space where only fiancée-wife-mom friends can sit, even when we share the burden of living up to what women are expected to be?
I have consciously lived a life nurturing intergenerational friendships. Case in point, I'm set to go on a 10-day girls' trip with a 70-year-old girl friend (I'm 31). I made sure to window-shop through the different lives women could live outside the linear adult checklist of school-relationship-marriage-motherhood. I learned that women could live multiple lifetimes in 10 years; it is not simply limited to a single milestone. To witness it is a privilege of knowing that any kind of life is possible. And yet, despite happily choosing a life outside the widely accepted and rarely contested adult checklist, why do I feel like a fish out of water?
As more friends get married and build families, I struggle to find my place in their lives when they remain front and center in mine. While the easy solution to this is giving in, what do you do when giving in to this adult checklist is dishonest to what you truly want? While one voice in my head is struggling to find a resolution to all of this, the other is reassured by knowing that caring this much is proof of how enduring female friendships can truly be.
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Where do I belong? Under which glass case of life achievements do I hang my adult milestones that aren’t part of the usual checklist we know? I have rationalized this "othering" feeling I'm ever so familiar with. It's hard to celebrate an uncommonly experienced milestone. A first anniversary? More than a million couples know this feeling. Being the opening speaker in front of a UN meeting on the global arms trade? What does that even mean?
I find solace in the fact that this feeling—isolation that aches for occasional validation, so basically being a normal human person with needs—is not something revolutionary. Thankfully, I know other women who are in the same sticky place. I'm also thankful to the women before me who made sure that I can overthink the weight of the choices I continue to make for myself, rather than overthinking a life decided for me.
Every Christmas, I have my Little Women tradition, rewatching Greta Gerwig's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic. I play the game of assessing which March sister I relate to the most each year. Obviously, I see myself in Jo. I, too, want a yearning Timotheé Chalamet asking for my hand in marriage.
In my 20s, I hyperfixated on the dread of Jo’s realization that “childhood is over,” witnessing all my friends move on to a different chapter from me. Her other monologue about being “so lonely!” felt like a line taken straight from my brain before I could even think it. But this year, it is in Meg that I confide—Meg, who got married off first, who passed the adult checklist in flying colors. Ironic, I know.
I hear Meg’s response to Jo more clearly now that I am older: “Just because my dreams are different doesn’t mean they are unimportant.” I hold on to her reminder as I live through the motions of the changes of womanhood, no matter what that looks like, and what choice feels true to me.
I'm cognizant that my woes are not isolated. A single 30-something woman isn’t the only person feeling the pressure of living up to the choices they are making. I would bet my childhood friendships that for my momma friends, there is some kind of version of this fish-out-of-water feeling, perhaps when all the child-free friends get together. Similarly, my happily child-free friends in marriages also face a different mountain, one that needs constant justification of a choice that was theirs to make. Life really can be one big cafeteria with cliques you have to decide to sit with. There is no winning in a society that’s normalized this for longer than it has challenged it—one that is used to dictate how our lives should be lived.
I thought that crossing over my 20s to my 30s would exempt me from the growing pains of becoming. I have always assumed that after a certain number of years invested in friendships, it would be unchanging. But surprise, it’s an unending dance of forward and backward; it's an unending process of living life.
I'm reminded of a Generations episode titled "Why Is It So Hard to Make Friends?", where Boomer host Luchi Cruz-Valdes pointed out that lasting friendships are often built over years of knowing and being with one another. "Friendship, to me, is really time-tested," she said. She also acknowledged that friendships exist on different levels and that everyone goes through different phases in life. Millennial host Raco Ruiz and Gen Z host Abi Marquez added that outgrowing friendships is part of growing up, too.
In my case, two things hold: One, my life’s version of an adult checklist doesn’t fit into most of the lists my friends are choosing. Two, just because my list is different does not mean it's unimportant. So being able to freely choose an honest—albeit sometimes lonely—life is a celebration in itself.
At 30, friendships reach the shared milestone of adulthood, with adult privileges like girls' trips and brunches on our own dime. But at the same age, we are also relearning how to support each other’s choices and paths, even when it's something we can't completely understand anymore.
Whatever checklist we choose to subscribe to, no matter how cookie-cutter or radical it is, will never be an easy one. I hope, though, that when our hairs turn gray, we go back to this moment and reassure our younger selves that it was, in fact, a rewarding one.
So, what’s on your checklist? And can we be friends?
Generations appears weekly at PhilSTAR L!fe.
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