5 STEPS TO BE OKAY WITH BEING THE ONE NOT GETTING ENGAGED

I've never been the girl that dreams of her wedding. That's just not my style. If it's yours, by all means, embrace it. I'm just not wired that way.

However, when you're creeping up on thirty and are as single as is humanly possible, the whole social norms of relationships vs. age seems to play a big part in your life, whether you want it to or not. When your Facebook photos are of you and your other single friends drunk off your ass and your closest married friend posts photos of the same night where they drank red wine and played Bananagrams with her whipped husband and all of their pansy ass mutual friends, it's hard to not feel like you don't have your life together.

So here are some tips on how to feel more "together" and how to realize that it's not bad to be the single one:

1- However together other people may seem, everyone has bullshit in their lives. These days, if you can't instagram it, it's not worth having in most peoples' eyes. This is why so many people instagram their food and their nails and their blowouts and their expensive shit; they want to seem like they have their lives together. But behind those filtered photos is a laundry list of shit that's wrong with their lives. So even though they can take thirty selfies until they find the one that catches their newly dyed hair in the right light, know that a Nashville filter cannot hide their subsurface problems.

2- Don't be ashamed of having fun. I went through a lengthy phase where I felt like a douchebag everytime a photo of me in a less than sober state appeared on Facebook. Scrolling down the page would be that photo of me, followed by a friend's new baby and another friend's perfectly manicured hand with a giant shiny rock on it. But just because we all live our lives differently doesn't make one of us better than the others. Single people don't have the responsibility (or the weigh-down, if you will) that people with children (or sometimes husbands -- hahahahahahahahahahaha. ahem.) do. Which leads me to my next point.

3- Don't let any married person or person with a child tell you that you will embrace their lifestyle one day. Maybe marriage is not for you. Maybe having children is not on your to-do list. THAT'S OKAY. You're allowed to not want a child and you're allowed to not want to fuck only one person for the rest of your life. Don't let friends who want that make you feel bad for not wanting it. Ultimately, you know what's best for you and what makes you happy, so do you. Which leads us to..

4- Remember that even though you don't have a wife/husband or a child to clean up after, you still have plenty of life's responsibilities to handle. Don't let your friends make you feel inferior because you couldn't possibly understand what it's like to have to take care of a child 24/7. Life is hard for everyone in different ways. I'm sure taking care of another human person or adjusting to life with a significant others is a difficult thing to do, but so is being unemployed and trying to figure out how to pay your bills. We all have our crosses to bear. Make sure your friends aren't trying to pass theirs off on you just because you took different paths in life.

5- Be happy for your friends. I know this one seems like a "WTF?! How is that supposed to help me?!" kind of a thing, but if you're truly happy for your friends, they're less likely to rub their blissful milestones in your face. Remember, your friends are your friends for a reason. And even if they're annoyingly happy, at least they're happy. And they'd be equally happy for you if this was the path you were taking.

Remember that marriage isn't, like, the one big key to happiness in life. Sure, it's great to have someone love you and to love someone, but it's not the end all be all. If you're happy with yourself, your life and the people you permit to be in it, your life will be equally, if not more, fulfilling as your married friends'.