On Leaving

This weekend, I went to my fifth wedding of the summer, and my fourth in six weeks.

I just graduated from college, so the sheer volume of my friends and classmates having weddings that I have both heard about and attended does not surprise me that much. It seems to be the thing to do--especially where I went to school--you meet someone in college, date for a couple of years, then when you graduate, you get married. It is a pattern I have seen many times. What I was not prepared for was how many of my close, lifelong friends are getting married: almost all of them. All of the male friends and most of the female friends that I was closest to throughout my adolescents are getting or have gotten married this summer, a couple of them to each other. I cannot help but feel somewhat left behind.

That is not to say that I have suddenly found myself in a rush to get married. I have been in a steady relationship for the last several months, and it is going very well, but neither of us is in a place where we feel ready for marriage, and the wedding season has not changed that. Rather, I have the strange sensation of watching these friends of mine setting up homes, entering a new stage of life with a spouse, while I am going to graduate school. It is a silly thought, but I have been subconsciously trained for years to think of marriage as that next step, and with all of them taking it while I remain a student, I gain this illegitimate feeling of inadequacy and stagnancy, even though I am the one who is moving a thousand miles away while they mostly settle in this area.

But then, that is a part of it too. Most of these couples are friends with each other. All through college they were going on double dates or group dates or just generally hanging out together for the simple reason that it is just what couples generally do. Now, they are all standing in each other's weddings. At the beginning of the summer, fiancées were escorting each other down the isle together, and now spouses are escorting each other down the isle. It has been a matter of changing locations and outfits while the bridal parties change only slightly. There are many reasons that could be given for why I have not been as close to my adolescent friends since high school, even though most of us went to the same college, and there is certainly no one place where the fault lies, but what I have realized is how much it affected me that I was single for most of college. These friends were pairing off, while I was making friends with other single people. In fact, very few of the close friends that I made in college are tying the knot now that we have graduated.

This has just furthered my feelings of not only being left behind, but also of losing my friends. It is an anxiety that I have always had and that has caused me a lot of pain over the years, sometimes paralysing me to the point that because I am afraid of losing my friends, my lack of action brings this to effect. With graduation, I had to say goodbye to a lot of friends, people I will never be close to in the same way again. Now with my oldest friends, from whom I have already drifted somewhat, all moving on to married life, and me moving on to grad school in New Jersey, we will be in different worlds, and I already feel guilt for the consequences of that fact.

Change is inevitable.

Change is constant.

Change is not easy.