I’m a late-twenties married woman who’s been feeling old and lonely lately. Why? Because I’m starting to lose my single friends to insanity and my coupled friends to conformity.

Let’s start with my single friends. While the crazy comes in all kinds of forms, one thing is consistent - single women in their late-twenties and early thirties are scary. One of the classic archetypes is the whiskey-drinking, sharp-tongued party girl who is “focused on her career” and “doesn’t want a boyfriend.” And to prove it, she fucks married men, and really anyone else for that matter. While some see this as empowered sexuality and all that crap, what they tend to not see is the late night tears and drama when that brave persona disappears as she faces going home alone. The other version of the single woman is the one with such naked desperation for a boyfriend that she thinks she’s in love with every man she meets. Had a chat with a guy at the coffee shop? She’s at home knitting him socks, going on and on about how he’s different. I understand that relationships make people crazy, but it does put a strain on friendship when every conversation is focused on her boyfriend-du-jour, and that your input is not welcome because you’re “married” and “wouldn’t understand.”

Not that my friends with spouses are baskets of fun, either. I get together with my “married” friends about 3 times a year, because that seems to be the amount of time we can rip ourselves away from our husbands. The conversations are fun, full of shared stories of the trials of living with men. You know how annoying it is when he leaves whiskers on the bathroom sink? Your husband grabs your friends’ boobs too? (OK, admittedly, I haven’t found anyone who shares this with me yet). Every get together ends with, “Oh my god, this was so fun. We have to have a girl’s night!” Great, right? Yeah, except that in order to make girl’s night happen, planners are retrieved, dates scrutinized, husband’s needs weighed, until girl’s night is 3 weeks away, from 6-8, because they already have plans to see some new movie on release night. Any girl’s night that requires an Outlook invite and a month’s planning really seems to defeat the purpose.

What happened to the glorious days in college when we just conformed to each other’s insanity, and went through the same craziness together? When I could look into a girlfriend’s eyes and say that maybe he is the one, or that you’ll meet someone else, and actually have some degree of hope? Or when boyfriends were a Monday - Thursday thing, and the weekends were about drinking with the girls and going out. I guess I long for the days when we were kind of on the same playing field, before our paths diverged on the boyfriend no-boyfriend path. I don’t even want to know what happens when babies are introduced. I can’t afford to lose anymore friends.