The more birthdays you collect, the shallower your pool of single friends becomes, and eventually you find yourself with two choices: hang out with your coupled up friends or find new friends. One might argue another option is to couple up. But if you are the One making that argument, you’re obviously coupled up. Everyone else knows it’s not that simple.

This past weekend, I found myself in one of those awkward single person situations: hanging out with five couples. Not that I don’t enjoy couples, I do. Hey, I’ve even been half of one myself. I’m a regular third wheel with two of my favorite couples, a wheel in which I take pride in being. 99% of my friends are part of a twosome and 99.9% of the time they’re amazing company.

But when you’re a onesome hanging out with a bunch of twosomes, you become acutely aware of your 11^th man party status. Who’s your beer pong partner? How will flip cup work? Will someone play Beersbee with you? Members of twosomes politely offer to be your partner, but even that eventually feels like a gesture of pity. The twosomes constantly creating new roles or ways to fit the onesome into games.

And really, I feel fortunate to have such creative friends. But this weekend, things got weird.

At one point during my observations, four of the five couples were physically locked in a loving embrace, one was actually spinning his wife around in circles. My eyes (so very wide) spanned the room in disbelief, like I was in some cheesy rom-com. I glanced back and forth between my coupled, but physically uncoupled friends, asked if this was really happening. (Hard to say whether or not they would’ve participated in the hug & kiss-a-thon if the flip cup table hadn’t separated them, though I was still grateful.)

They confirmed.

During flip cup?? FLIP CUP??? A totally unsexy, unromantic game, in which it’s hard (for me) not to burp every couple of minutes due to the rapid consumption of tiny beers? And this wasn’t even your standard game of flip cup! As adults, we reengineered immature college games into more mature versions, requiring advanced skill and thought, you know, to reflect our growth as humans. This game of flip cup involved more than just flipping a simple plastic cup. You had to drink the beer, then flip the smaller cup into a LARGER cup. Genius. This requires concentration and dedication. Not canoodling with your boo in between rounds.

I do not seek to destroy love and I enjoy seeing people happy, but a whole weekend of this kind of happiness can do some weird things to your psyche. And I might have been okay. But then.

My sister-in-law’s sister (roughly five years younger than me, a wife with two children before 25) casually asked if I had any “man prospects” in my life.

Something inside me unleashed.

“No.”

“So you just aren’t interested in anyone, orrrr…”

Uh, I thought “no” was a pretty solid answer, one in which I was not interested in elaborating.

Seriously? Is it not okay that I am single? Can I not choose to be alone? Does that make me weird? A loser? Must I have a “man prospect” or can I just wake up every day, not in constant search for a life partner? NOT EVERYONE WANTS THE SAME THING!

I can’t remember what I actually said in response, but it was something along those lines. She was just asking a question, making small talk, but the weekend had obviously gotten to me.

The thing is, it’s not her. It’s not any them. My reaction to her simple question is where I struggle. It’s highly unlikely anyone was thinking, poor tosh, she’s all alone. She has no one to play with or make googly eyes at. They’re just happy to be amongst friends; not feeling sorry for me or wondering about or judging my situation at all.

But in my head? That’s exactly what they were doing. What’s wrong with her? Why is she always alone at these things? When asked about my “man prospects,” somewhere in the air between her mouth and my ears, those words transformed into “You’re alone. Are you okay? Doesn’t anyone like you? Aren’t you a bit old to be alone? Running out of time, aren’t we?”

I used to think I didn’t care what other people thought, but I find myself creating these elaborate stories about what people must think of me shortly after we interact. It’s a bit overwhelming. Sometimes it becomes difficult to separate what I create in my head with what actually happened. Turns out, I don’t care what people actually think of me, because I don’t even know that most of the time. Reality doesn’t concern me. I’m more concerned with the stories I tell myself about what people think of me.

It’s not that I want to be alone. I don’t. Of course I want to find someone to share all the wonders of life with. But I don’t want it to be with just anyone. It’s amazing to me that people find their person at all, when you think about how crazy it is that of all the people in the world, so many people end up with someone they went to high school or college with or someone they met at work. In this huge world, your soul mate just happened to live in the same town as you? Lucky. Mine didn’t.

But I’m also very okay with being single. As my good friend Henry David Thoreau says, “A bore is someone who takes away your solitude and doesn’t give you companionship in return.” That’s where I’m at.

More than one friend recently expressed how behind they feel in life. Behind who? What makes you get ahead? Having a spouse? The Children? If so, I guess I don’t feel behind. I can’t lose a race I’m not running. I’d rather be alone than be in a relationship with just anyone. Maybe my person is years down the line, or maybe not in this lifetime at all. Maybe that will eventually suck. Some things you just can’t make happen.