Hello, Carolyn: I have two close friends getting married — I’ll be in one of the weddings. From the past few years, I have learned that I get very depressed and down on myself during wedding season. I suck at dating and have had zero luck getting return interest from anyone I’ve had feelings for, so I am perpetually single while my friends are hurtling en masse down the aisle. (Although the rush is slowing down a bit.) At one wedding, I wound up crying until I threw up in the bathroom as this loop of “I am alone, I am unlovable, other people get to fall in love but I don’t” played in my head. And that was after only one tiny glass of champagne.
I REALLY want to rally for my friends but am full of dread about what the next few months will do to me emotionally. How do I prepare? How do I care for myself before and during these weddings?
— Down
Down: The connection between “I am alone” and “I am unlovable” is begging, begging, to be broken.
That would solve your problem with weddings, for one. Much more important, though, it would also settle you into a much happier place in your life in general. Because this has little to do with weddings themselves — they’re just a trigger — and it’s not even about your success or lack thereof at romantic relationships (friends clearly love you).
How alone you are and how lovable you are can be completely different things. How each person approaches love is unique, and can’t be compared one-for-one.
Imagine for a moment you were on a first date with someone that went exactly as the first date went between one of these couples about to get married. It’s possible you would have thought, “Eh, meh,” and passed on Date 2, where they said, “Wow!” over the same conversation. Or they thought, “Eh, meh,” and … stuck with it anyway, and got the result they did. Give a good think to how much can be taste or tolerance or patience vs. “lovability.”
I’m not recommending you tough it out with people you don’t enjoy — I’m just giving an example of how we all get to crossroads in life every day, little ones, ones we barely notice, and bearing left vs. right can take us to completely different places in ways we can’t always fully understand after the fact.
Your comfort level with new people alone, or your impatience with minor incompatibilities that your more-easily-coupled friends just brush off, etc., could very well change everything about the dating process for you.
Just as people who get married and stay married for 70 years until death parts them aren’t automatically “lovable,” either. No one knows but the two of them whether love had anything to do with it.
So, again, don’t “settle,” whatever that even means, but do reframe where you are as a place that your decisions at your crossroads brought you. Positive choices, by you, reflecting your needs, more than any given rejections by others.
Consider talking to a good therapist about this, too, as self-care for all seasons. It’s bugging you, so it matters, and you matter. Doesn’t have to be any more serious or persuasive than that.
Write to Carolyn Hax at tellme@washpost.com. Get her column delivered to your inbox each morning at wapo.st/haxpost.
