Originally published November 2022.
Tension is coming. Long rows of place settings dotted by trivets labeled with post it notes. A slight dip in height where we had to dust off a folding table from the garage. People will gather, familiar dishes will be shared, new dishes will be criticized. And eventually we’ll get around to the part of the conversation that separates the white from the yolk, that reminds the room of how different, and immovable we all are when it comes to topics like politics, religion, or our ideas of who is worthy of human rights and respect. Tension does not feel good, particularly among those who are supposed to effortlessly, naturally love each other. But rather than resolving it with emotional maturity, we deflect it and offer relief to everyone in the room through the one thing that can almost universally soothe: humor. When you’ve got one in the family who’s single past the age the collective feels it’s appropriate to be unwed, there’s no easier tension breaker than that.
“So, Emily, still single? Whatsa matter with you, can’t keep one around?”
“Emily, tell us about your dating life! What’s that app you use, Bubble?”
“I could never be single these days, I don’t know how you do it, Em!”
“Emily, go on any good dates lately? Tell us a good story!”
“Give me your phone Emily, I want to play with Bubble!”
Everyone agrees again! Being single is incorrect, it’s a problem in need of solving, and anyone who remains single when the family thinks they shouldn’t be is obviously incapable of “finding someone” or they’re actively making the problem worse with their own flaws. Single is a great unifier—everyone dislikes it, so everyone can agree it’s embarrassing and funny. Except you.
Small talk as a vehicle is dying. I doubt when Gen Z sits at the head of a table beaming at its grandkids flaccid questions like “How’s work?” will cut much mustard. But for now those of us raised by Boomers, a collective not known for empathy, inclusivity, or any grasp whatsoever of modern manners, are still fielding verbal kicks to the gut any time we actually participate in family. And it’s never the one speaking who’s to blame for causing harm, it’s the easy target’s fault for having feelings in the first place. Re-route the blame to the family scapegoat, it feels so much better than admitting you did something wrong.
I have a theory that holiday and celebratory gatherings are shifting, particularly for those of us who don’t have idyllic or even average family situations. I think we’re starting to understand that it’s possible to love people without liking them, and it’s the like part that makes you want to get on an airplane. When you don’t, when people bound by blood, adoption, and marriage don’t actually like each other or have much at all in common, forcing togetherness seems like a relic of pre-pandemic times. I think many of us learned how good it feels to shed obligation and the reopening of wounds that often come with doing what your family wants. We’re learning we don’t have to let our families hurt us anymore, we can have dinner with friends instead.
There’s an ease to gatherings of unrelated people within the same age and political brackets. The awkwardness level drops to pretty much nothing, and the list of safe topics grows much longer indeed. I’ve been celebrating major holidays with a group of chosen friend-family members for the last few years, and not one of them, ever, has even inquired about my singlehood—not once. When we need to laugh, we refer to one of countless memes shared throughout the year, inside jokes acquired over time, or that Peach Candle Christmas sketch from SNL, but that one might be just us.
Families don’t seem to get it, that it’s actually really rude to use someone’s singlehood or private dating life as common bonding for everyone at the table other than the single person who’s in the hot seat for something they wish didn’t exist. It takes a real asshole to look at someone who’s been trying, maybe for years, to find simple partnership and love—something billions of people on the planet have by the way, y’all are not special—and see nothing but flaws you assume are causing their solitude. Lol, my family member isn’t desirable enough or good enough company to make someone want to be with her, what a joke! Meanwhile if that entirely ignorant relative received an unwanted dick pic even once they’d call the FBI.
There’s a reason families still see the sad-sack, pathetic narratives of single people, particularly single women. It’s what they’ve been taught. Every societal celebration is devoted entirely to romantic partnership. Every piece of fiction or music is centered around love plot lines, with the single girl as crying, ice-cream devouring cat lady foil. We don’t make movies or television about what it’s really like to swipe your adulthood away, getting rejected and ghosted while your hopes rise and crash constantly for years at a time because nobody wants to see how that kind of sausage is actually made. We don’t show the acute fear and urgency involved in wanting a family, you know…that thing people insist is the most important thing in the world, and being unable to find one, despite clawing through any local humans you can find with every spare minute of your day. Nobody’s figured out how to make that funny yet, so nobody knows the actual truth of what it’s like to be single. If they did, they wouldn’t call you out at a dinner table, they’d pay for your fucking therapy.
I prefer friend-centric gatherings for holidays because there’s nothing weird about me there. There’s no glaring gap, no presumed flaw, no one feels pity or worry when they look at me. Nobody jams in little suggestions or tips for fixing my singlehood issue like they’re a map to buried treasure, like they’ve suddenly found a completely unheard of solution and are therefore geniuses. No one throws me scraps by suggesting I meet a random acquaintance fifteen years my senior twice divorced who thinks I’m just “too cute.” Friends that I’ve chosen, as opposed to family who never seems to choose me just as I am, never look at me and see something wrong. When I’m around them, I feel no tension at all.
Even in family situations you want to be in, you should never have to deal with being the human ice breaker, the one everyone can poke at because isn’t it all so funny—and don’t get offended, because can’t you take a joke? You’re not really one of us if you can’t take a joke. If you can’t take a joke, you make things awkward for everyone else. You don’t want to make things awkward for everyone else, do you Emily? Play along Emily, entertain us—or you’re the reason there’s tension. Why would you do that to your family?
So we shrug and smile, laugh things off, maybe even joke around about the dating space ourselves. Because that’s easier. Diffusing the tension and moving the conversation along to the next topic as fast as possible, even at our own expense, is easier than telling the truth about being single and dating and getting back nothing but insinuations that this shit is happening to us because we’re doing it wrong. As if people who met their spouses in college were doing it “right.” And then the family gathering ends and you have more moments to recover from than moments that restored you. All while this was your vacation, too.
Single people are not a joke. I know it might be more fun and effervescent and entertaining to gab and gossip and play with the single person’s life like it’s a fucking video game or a super juicy episode of The Bachelor. But that game is someone’s life. That game is what someone wants and cannot find, no matter what they try or for how long. There’s no sympathy for it, and certainly no empathy for it, because we’ve never been taught to give that to singles. Don’t believe me? Think of how we treat people trying to have a baby who can’t. Do we blame them, or do we hold them? Why is that so different than someone who wants a partner? They’re both seeking the same thing. They’re seeking family.
I have a lot of hope for holiday gatherings of the future, but for now I have far more respect for the tables we set tonight. In my dreams, the single people at the table are revered for all the ways they’ve handled life alone. All the bills and rent they’ve never split, all the tough days where they’ve come home to no one’s comfort. I envision us treated as the wise ones, the example-setters, the ones who receive extra love in place of the romantic love we never got. The gatherings never stop, they relentlessly show up year after year, becoming an exhausting “thing” to deal with where we no longer envision holiday magic, we just hope for the miracle of ease. And because they won’t stop, and certain loved ones won’t stop, I won’t stop either, and until we treat single people with the exact same care and respect we give to marrieds, the world will have to deal with me—and my dreams—too.