Haylee Carlyle

I'm Not Like A Regular Single Friend, I'm A Cool Single Friend A favorite 90s sitcom trope of mine is The Single Friend. The one monogamous couples incessantly try to set up and prod. The one always portrayed as a fifth wheel, miserable in the presence of romantic attention. Maybe I love it so much that I became it. Or rather it became me, The 2018 Single Friend. And like, definitely also The 2019 Single Friend. But here’s the thing: I love it. I have third and fifth and seventh wheeled since seventh grade, when my friend Whitney got into a serious relationship with a guy who had Volcom decals on the wall of his room that we listened to Dashboard Confessional in. Thinking about it now, I don’t know when the hell they hung out alone. I always made myself present in my best friend Taylor’s relationships. We visited her boyfriends in the Starbucks they worked in, forced them to play Jonas Brothers songs on the guitar in my bedroom. She and I and one of them slept wholesomely one night on a full bed at a party. It wasn’t even weird, I think. Taylor got married earlier this year to a man I am actually really sincerely glad to call a friend. Our other Best, Emily, married her high school person like 20 years ago. He is a total​ weirdo whom I love. When my best friend from college, Mika, got engaged, her husband told me beforehand so I could surprise her in the garden after he proposed. My sister Loren found her Mike when I was 14 and I spent every possible moment I could with them, which was a lot, when we were all in Dallas. I used to crash at their house in Oak Cliff if I had drunk too much and they would buy me a honey butter chicken biscuit in the morning. One of my closest friends in Boston, Dahlia, married a build-a-bear of a person this year and they are some of my favorite people to be with of all time. Last Saturday, Dahlia invited me and some of her friends over to decorate Christmas cookies and eat latkes because she is a Christmas-loving Jewish person and I love that about her. It wasn’t until halfway through the hang that I realized I was watching parody YouTube videos and drinking IPAs with three couples. I was the seventh - that extra, maybe useless, maybe helpful little tire treading for dear life. But do you know why I love that shit? Because everyone loves each other! Everything is chill as hell! I am not an alien from an unlovable planet, I’m not a pawn in someone’s scheme to get their roommate laid. In fact, the men my friends have married are most of the only men I find tolerable anymore. On Sunday, Taylor and Emily facetimed me. They were with their husbands at yet another one of our couple friend’s house, one half of which is Courtney, a dream personified. Taylor went around the house having everyone look at me and made her husband write a song for me right there on the spot, the entirety of which was a single chord with the lyrics “Come home.” The weekend before, I went on a date with a man to a swanky basement bar downtown. Waiting in line alone, (he was late) I realized it was only couples. They would all huddle together every time the door opened and let the cold in while my “Wua??” text went unanswered. By the time I got in, the door guy assured me my date could skip the line once he got there. Don’t worry. He did. After he ordered a weird custom drink and I ordered an old fashioned, it happened: the realization that this was a Date Bar. You could barely see, the drinks were good if not pretentious as hell, and every. Single. Person. Was part of a couple. I had never seen anything like it. It felt weird, like I was mistakenly granted membership. This was… not like hanging out with my couple friends. In fact, I hated it. I could feel the unchill in the air, the lack of collaboration between singles and non-singles bouncing off the exposed brick. I vowed to remember the contrast, and to only come back if it was with a group and definitely not this guy who was extremely late. I am The Single Friend. That’s because I’ve bore witness to some seriously life-changing love. Life changing for me, I mean. When you see something like that and when you see it reiterated in utterly unique relationships, it fucks you all up. These people take care of me in every way, but my most favorite is the way they’ve managed to make me realize my worth and hold that steady. They ask just enough about my love life and they’ve never judged me for doing something weird with it. When a man flakes or creeps or hurls my heart into another dimension, they don’t say, “You ​can ​have it all, look at us.” But I do. I look at them.