Tell me about your kids, mortgage and woes

I’M in my thirties, single and broke whereas most of my friends are only one of those three things. So, here’s the thing: my friends with houses and money think I want them to tell me about their mortgages, or their plans to extend the kitchen. My friends with kids think I’m interested in seeing 45 pictures of their toddlers wearing an entire plate of spaghetti on their faces while holidaying with their other mummy and daddy pals.

And my non-single friends think I have, both the time and inclination, to hear every detail of their onagain off-again relationships. One of my friends has been in one of the latter for some months now. In the beginning, she would cancel our plans to see him instead, talk on the phone to him while sitting opposite me in the pub and discuss their plans to move in together and have babies. Then, they started fighting. When she wants to see her friends, they fight. When there’s a ‘y’ in the day of the week, they fight.

Somehow I’ve taken on a full-time, unpaid role as her relationship counsellor/drinking buddy. This used to involve nodding and smiling while she told me what a genius he was, or about his swanky holiday home abroad, but now I get long calls about his behaviour and bad temper. This guy sounds like he could start an argument in an empty room, so I’ve been encouraging her to dump him. It all comes to a boil when he arrives to meet her at the theatre, but storms out before they’ve even taken their seats.

She calls, upset. Tell him to sling his hook, I say. But, by the time I’ve reached the bus stop they’ve made up again, so I call another friend to hear about how they got on with the kids in Italy on the way home.