Next year, I want to be as free as the women in Sex and the City

I am still young and there is still time.

Thank you for reading this post! Note: Nothing I write is currently behind a paywall as I’d like to reach as many people as possible. If you are enjoying As Seen On TV, consider upgrading to £4/month, or £46/year. To learn more, click here:

*If you’re already subscribed for free, click on “✓ Subscribed” and then change your subscription plan to a paid one when the “Manage your subscription” page pops up.

---

I’ve been rewatching Sex and The City (1998).

Clicking the play button night after night is the only thing I’ve been able to be decisive about in what feels like an eternity. For the past two months, my friend (and flatmate) Emily has been watching me repeatedly open and close cupboards in our shared kitchen — unsure about what to eat for lunch, how much pasta to portion out into boiling water, whether I want a cup of tea now or a little bit later.

“It’s amazing how you keep flicking between episodes of different TV shows”, she remarked one evening, “if I’m watching something, I’m stuck on it for weeks.” I told her it’s because I’m not sure what mood I’ve been in lately. I’d been feeling unsettled, floating a little bit too far away from solid ground.

I decided one Saturday night in November that this was what I would like to be stuck on until the end of the year. In an effort to ground myself when I have an evening alone, an episode or two of Sex and The City will be playing.¹

As I made to episode three, I realised that what I’d been needing is a little reassurance that everything was going to be okay. If I was going to get it from fictional characters and a fictional story, then so be it.

What did you imagine your twenties would look like? My second decade of life has simultaneously been going way better than I thought it would, but also terribly. The more traumatic stuff I will not share here, and there is a lot to love about my life.

Much like Carrie Bradshaw, my flat is, at present, rent-controlled. Very much unlike Carrie Bradshaw, I work a boring job that sponsored my visa, but gives me time during the week to engage in my hobbies. I spend my free time with the sweetest friends on planet Earth.

But I am always chronically single. I’ve exhausted myself trying to unpack whether it’s because I entered the scene too late, if something is critically wrong with my looks or personality, or if it’s just simply a case of temporary bad luck.

In her piece titled single girl syndrome,

Julianna

wrote that “it’s hard to face the societal and biological pressures of cohabitation, and it only gets harder with age. In your early twenties, everybody is markedly single, even the girls with boyfriends. There’s something playful in trying different things on and leaning into impermanence.”

There is a lot that resonated with me in her essay, but one thing she wrote stood out to me, that “everyone in their early twenties is markedly single.” That hasn’t been my experience. What if a lot of my friends in my early twenties had already found their life partners? What if, by my mid-twenties, a lot of them were all already markedly engaged, markedly married?

In season one, episode three, Carrie talks about the experience known to all chronically single people: the duty of giving married friends tidbits from their sexual and non-sexual escapades. The four women wonder over lunch if there is a Cold War between married people and single people. The talking heads declare “when women get married, they forget who they are. “I” becomes “We”… my best buddy and I did everything together. Then he married this girl that doesn’t like me. Now I only see him on Super Bowl Sunday.”

Later in the episode, Miranda ponders how much more seriously her colleagues would take her if she was in a couple, any couple. Carrie, Samantha and Charlotte show up at a housewarming party with only married people. As she makes her way through the corridor of couples, the only reason she isn’t being met with fear, pity or pointing is only because she showed up with Sean.

I giggled out loud. I relate to all of them so much, I thought. Then another, scarier thought formed — am I too young to relate to them?

When I watched this show in my late teens, it bred the expectation that my early thirties would be like this, too. My single gals and I — financially stable in a big city, still making mistakes and trying to figure out the dating scene together. I did not think I would even be talking to my friends about where they’d like to raise their children until we were at least thirty-five.

What I found myself feeling as I crossed the threshold from season one to season two, is that I envied all of these characters. They were all approaching their mid thirties and they’d only just started dealing with all of this stuff. They were still so free during the first season of the show, so unburdened by the pressures of settling down. Whereas I’d already been burdened with this pressure years ago.

Having recently sworn off dating apps, sometimes I’m scared I’ll never ever escape my single-hood. It feels like everyone is rapidly coupling up, permanently, one by one. There have been far too many house parties I’ve been to this year where everyone is either partnered, engaged, or married. Almost every man I speak to at a workshop, class or event is planning his upcoming wedding or has been dragged there by their girlfriend. I leave every new social gathering disappointed.

I’ve started declining invites to parties where I know there will only be couples in attendance, because I know that, afterwards, I’ll want to vomit the entire train journey home from the anxiety of feeling like I’m behind in life.

The past twelve months have been a weird one for my friendships. Maybe it’s petty, but I no longer want to spend my precious leisure time being a third-wheel to couples who’d rather just be on a date. I want all my friendships to last forever, I really do, and it’s been hard to contend with the fact that my partnered and married friends do not check up on me as much as they used to, they do not ask me many questions about my life anymore. I have been clasping desperately, so tightly, to any leftover love they are able to spare.

It has been years since I’ve gotten to speak to some of these friends alone without their partners present. When we do get to spend quality time together, their dialogue is serious, of mortgages and mother-in-laws and what happened on the multi-couples vacation three months ago. I listen and I feel older than I actually am and my stories feel silly in comparison.

Most of the time it feels like they all have entered an exclusive club of adulthood and I’m not yet eligible for a membership.

In an effort to also find the love of my life and feel caught up, I over-schedule myself. I volunteer and attend drawing workshops and boulder with strangers and go to jazz nights and travel to work conferences and RSVP yes to birthday parties of people I’ve never met — all while wishing I could pause time to just catch my breath.

I’ve been leaning more and more on my single friends and on my partnered friends who are Very Good about spending quality time with me away from their significant others. It needs to be stated clearly that I’m not judging anyone for their choices, nor am I blaming the actions of others for the complex feelings I have about my own situation. But as soon as I turned twenty-three, everyone seemed to be in a rush to settle down when I’d only just started enjoying not being settled.

I was unaware that I’d be shoved so quickly onto the express train heading straight to destination Adulthood. I do not recall buying a ticket or packing a bag.

This rush, this ride on the express train has only made me feel like I’m constantly running out of time. Like there’s an hourglass permanently lodged inside my brain. Every day I feel each individual piece of sand falling onto clear glass bulbs, reminding me that one day, soon, all my friends are going to leave me behind. Five months ago, I turned twenty-seven and this feeling has only gotten worse.

To combat the pressure of feeling like I should also be in a state of domestic bliss with my life partner, I’ve started taking notes of moments that have made me feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

This is what I have enjoyed most about living with Emily during this turbulent year: us both in our pyjamas with the candles lit and a glass of wine between our fingers, speculating about whether that night in the neighbourhood pub was a date or not, giggling about the cute guy at the climbing gym with the little dimples and broad shoulders, concluding that, yeah, it’s probably a little strange that a co-worker is still flirting for sport.

I spent a little bit of this summer drunk in Madrid with my friends, laughing a little too loudly inside the bar with no name wearing a low-cut top, head-on-the-table-hungover at brunch the next morning with the sexy waiter telling me you shouldn’t be ordering an iced latte, you’re already dehydrated enough.

My best friend travelled from Brussels to spend time with me for the long weekend. We talked for hours and ate good food and giggled incessantly. As we curled up side by side in my double bed I thought one day, this moment in time will be all I want to return to.

It has been within these moments that I’ve thought, this is what my twenties should be feeling like, this was exactly the experience I was promised: messy, silly, close enough to destination Adulthood but not completely there yet.

I liked watching Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda support each other through all of their silly mistakes and struggles. I loved watching them discover that they were all soulmates to each other, men would come and go.

Rewatching Sex and The City reminded me that my life isn’t ending just because I’m getting older. My timeline is my own, and it’s a futile endeavour trying to make it match up to everyone else’s. I am still young and I still have time.

Next year, I have four wishes for my future self: I want her to feel less burdened by the passage of time. I want her to stop trying so hard to play catch-up. I want her to feel a little more free, and a little bit closer to solid ground.

1. Emily has been watching it with me! In our household, Mr. Big shall now be forever known as Mr. Gaslight.