“Arm in arm, but never in step”
Babies. Houses. As we reach milestones at different stages, it’s easy to feel out of sync with your friends. But, as Dolly Alderton says, you’re not behind, you’re on your own path
Don’t let friends’ milestones dictate your path, says Dolly Alderton
WHEN I WAS 25, THERE WAS A NIGHT I FEARED
WOULD DEFINE THE REST OF MY LIFE. My best friend, just engaged, invited me round to her family’s house to celebrate. Afterwards, she and her shiny new fiancé kindly offered me a lift home. I sat in the back of their Audi while they talked about wedding plans, then they dropped me off and drove back to the one-bed flat in Hampstead with outdoor space that they’d just bought together. I was hungover, single, lived in a mouse-infested shared house in Camden with 17 teaspoons and one knife. I had £19 in my bank account and I was £2,000 overdrawn. I didn’t have a car. I couldn’t drive. I didn’t own an umbrella.
As I lay in bed that night – the moonlight flooding in as there were no curtains on my windows – I thought: this is what I am going to be to my best friend and her husband for the rest of our lives. A hanger-on. A passenger in the backseat of their swanky car. I’m going to be one of those loser friends who you often see on the outskirts of an affluent, happy family. The one whose life never quite comes together.
When we are young, there is joy and camaraderie in the fact we pass the same milestones as our best friends at a similar time. There are first kisses (12-14), first Saturday jobs (16-18) and, for some of us, first graduations (20-22). But once we’re let loose on the real world, all formal scheduling is screwed and binned. Salaries and employment vary, sex lives differ wildly; some of us will rent forever, others will be homeowners before we’re 30. We become parents at different ages, we lose parents at different ages.
I knew this, yet it still bothered me. Most of my closest friends settled down with their first boyfriends out of university, many of them owned flats by their midtwenties. Of course, my distress was partly a matter of ego (“Why have they got everything sorted before me?”) but mainly it was a fear of being left behind. I didn’t like that we were all out of sync; I hated that my best friend’s children could end up being 10 years older than any I might have, that I’d probably just about manage to afford a studio flat while they would be buying houses with actual stairs. I was worried they’d want to find people who were moving at their speed; not lagging behind at the back.
But to limit yourself to the idea that milestones are tied up in children and houses is to adhere to a warped societal attitude that places a premium on a domestic trajectory in a woman’s life. I’ve realised I was never going to be the girl who spent her twenties in a long-term relationship or had children very young. That’s not my journey. It is not better or worse or more advanced or less developed than anyone else’s; it’s just different. I’m finally happy with the pace I’m keeping in my own life, and I’m even happier that my friends move in different ways, too. It makes everything more interesting. Auden hit the nail on the head in his poem In Praise Of Limestone with the line: “Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step”.
My best friend’s relationship broke up two months before their wedding. When it happened, I didn’t feel sad that she had fallen behind in the marathon of life, or relief that I might now be a few metres ahead. It reminded me that there is no final pinnacle of happiness or wisdom or success; the journey is the destination – and something that happens every day of our lives. For some, those milestones might include one Saturday afternoon in August when wedding vows are made or the wee small hours of a Thursday morning when a baby is born. For others, it might be the sea they swim in at sunset on their lone travels. It might be the day of a final drink, the day of a first therapy session or simply the day someone finally looks up at the sky on their walk to work. Experience is a radically different thing for each and every one of us. What matters is not whether our paths are paved identically to the ones we love; but only that we walk alongside each other.
“There is no final PINNACLE of happiness or SUCCESS; the journey is the destination”