Village People
The Viral Posts That Have Us All Talking About Being Villagers & Friendship Abandonment
There were two viral pieces in the last week or two I’m sure have already been all over your social feeds. They dovetail perfectly, so I’m featuring them together today.
First up is this viral article from The Cut about moms abandoning their friendships with their single friends. A single childfree woman wrote in asking for advice on how to handle their mom friends leaving them behind and not reciprocating friendship fairly once they start families. Writer Emily Gould gives a thoughtful response that I think appeases both sides. She supports the idea that everyone’s feelings are valid and that this is often a temporary shift in the dynamic that rights itself in time.
I agree that this can be a painful thing to navigate. Changes in friendship are never easy! I’m of the same mind that friendships can naturally ebb and flow, and we have to make space for our friends who are going through these major changes. Same as you would if your friend was going through cancer, a divorce or some other major life development that may require them to be receiving an extra helping of support.
Motherhood is an absolute wild time and we need to give our new mom friends space to really be in the thick of it and lovingly support them through it without too much expectation of reciprocity. And then there should be the expectation that once out of the trenches, a more harmonious balance should be struck. If this mom friend has instead just settled into a family life and seems oblivious to how she’s treating you, that may require an honest conversation, or the courage to walk away.
But even in knowing that to be true, it doesn’t make it easy when it happens. You can grief the loss of the friendship as it was while still holding space for it to come back to its normal state or even in a new and equally satisfying way. And while I think we’re mainly talking about long-term friends here, the kinds of friends we want to have for life, we also can remember that some friends are just meant to be with us for a season, and that’s OK. Some friends will come in and out of our lives over time, and that’s perfectly normal.
It’s also good advice to make connections with people living the lifestyle you’ve chosen, or currently find yourself in even if temporary. To Emily’s point, you don’t need ot hang around rooms where you’re the only single girl if you don’t want to. Or at least not exclusively hang there. You may remember Make New Friends But Keep The Old from last September where we talked about the complexities of friendship in general for women as we age, especially once marriage and kids enter the picture for a portion of us.
To be fair, I haven’t had the experience of being a single childfree friend feeling abandoned by her married new mom friends. I can imagine it feels pretty lonely. I have several friends who are single and childfree, and I have equally as many married friends with kids. I sit somewhere in the middle as a married childfree woman, so I suppose I’m only one step away from each group, as opposed to a single childfree woman who is two steps away from being married with kids.
I think that I’m used to having to make more effort in a lot of my friendships because I moved to New York City after college. Sure, I made new friends, but to maintain my closest relationships from Texas, I had to put in the extra legwork to make phone calls, come into town to visit, text, etc. I’ve always maintained that if you’re the one who moves away, if you want to keep those relationships, you need to put in a bit more work, at least at first. You’re out of sight out of mind for people. Their world is the same, you just stepped out of it. You need to reestablish the new relationship dynamic. Is this right? Is this how it should be? Maybe not. But it’s reality. If you want to keep those relationships strong, you’re going to need to take the lead. I suppose this never really bothered me, and the fruits of my labor have justified me doing it.
I think this mentality is why I haven’t flinched when all of my friends started having kids. I send the gifts, I text/call, I visit… and it’s worth it to me. Sometimes new moms are overwhelmed but it doesn’t mean they don’t want to hear about you. I’ve always been the type to just offer up my life updates without waiting to be asked. Your friends in the newborn trenches want to be reminded that they are a woman, a person, an adult, and more than just a milk machine. Sometimes taking the mental burden off of them to keep up with all the details and proactively ask questions is what they need in the short term when they are sleep deprived. I’m also a big fan of voice memos so they can listen and respond when it’s a good time for them instead of trying to catch them on the phone. Just keep them short! Moms don’t have time for your 18 minute daily podcast of what you’re doing that day.
As a single or childfree person, I also think it’s important to invite people to celebrate you and what’s going on in your life. Don’t just sit around waiting for people to rush in. Buy a new house? Host a housewarming. Graduate with an advanced degree? Throw a party or organize a fancy dinner out. Turning a milestone age? Tell your closest pals you want to celebrate by going on a trip with them. People are down to celebrate you, but you’ve got to invite them to do it. If you’re sitting there waiting for someone else to throw you a party, you might find yourself disappointed. Remember, a wedding is just a giant event/party that two people decide to have and invite everyone to. Nobody is going around throwing people weddings. Even bachelorette parties and bridal showers still require us to identify a Maid of Honor so she knows, “Hey, I’m expecting you to do this for me.” It’s no different. It’s just more normalized to us.
The viral video that pairs perfectly with that article is the one based off this quote you might be seeing everywhere right now…
“Everybody wants a village but nobody wants to be a villager.”
The attention to it comes from Rachel Lovely’s viral TikTok post, but I’m not clear where the actual quote she’s referencing originally came from. In her post, Rachel explains why her mom is an incredible villager and how her village works. To her point, you can’t sit in your house talking to no one and just expect people to come over and help you with everything. It’s a give and take, but without keeping score. The not keeping score thing is key, and is also always my advice to new couples sorting out the whole sharing expenses thing. I think it applies to long-term friendships as well, especially as those friends start entering relationships or marriages and having children.
Honestly, Rachel’s mom sounds a lot like my mom who is constantly bringing dinner to someone after surgery, picking up friends from the airport or just generally checking on everyone when they’re going through a hard time. My mom’s currently in Chile on a trip for work and told me the other night she was in the ER with someone from her group who fell ill. I’m not surprised at all that my mom was the one who sat with her. She’s a great villager.
My mom’s a bit of an extroverted social butterfly, so perhaps being a great villager comes more naturally to her than it does someone who is introverted, but I don’t think that means this is out of reach for introverts. It’s a conscious choice that must be made about what kind of society you want to live in and how you want to contribute to your community. Yes, it involves doing things you’re not always in the mood to do or that don’t always feel comfortable, but you do it because you want to create the type of group culture where people show up for you when you need it. It’s comfortable and easy to sit in our homes and watch TV on the couch, but you get out what you put in.
I honestly think this is the cultural shift we need to end the loneliness epidemic and to make parenthood more doable for women as well. I remember a moment vividly when my best friend was deep in the trenches with 3 kids under the age of 5. She’d hit a wall of exhaustion and she just said, “Where is my village?” referencing of course the phrase we all know “It takes a village”. Of course I was offering her support in the form of texts/calls and gifts here or there, but living thousands of miles away, I wasn’t able to pop over and help her in person on a regular basis. And with us all living in our separate homes with our separate cars all spread out minding our own damn business all the time, we’re isolated when we need help! Most of us aren’t living in the village mentality and it would make times like this a lot easier if we were.
And I don’t mean that we need villagers to center around just parents and their children. It’s just as important for childfree people to have a village. We constantly hear “Well who is going to take care of you when you’re old?” Yes, people we pay is one possible option, but we also need to have our community to take care of and to take care of us. When we hear about Blue Zones, areas with the highest density of healthy centenarians, one of the characteristics that defines these zones is strong social connection, including peers. This community looks out for and supports each other in these later years.
These communities, by the way, don’t necessarily need to be separate. Parents and childfree people can be part of the same community! Families should be looking out in just the same way for people in their community who are living alone. And it shouldn’t just be women driving this, which typically we all know it is. I think it could be part of the cure to this current political and societal climate we’re in where everything is so divided. We sit in our homes alone and get on the internet to regurgitate talking points we saw on our preferred news source. It’s isolating, impersonal, and a vacuum designed to keep us this way. It’s a system that serves a few at the top and really nobody else. Wouldn’t it be incredible to live in a community like Rachel describes? Could we change the dynamics at play if we started living like good villagers and let it spread?
If we want community, we need to be willing to participate in it even when it’s annoying or we’re not in the mood. Whether we have kids or we don’t, we need to show up for anyone and everyone in our community regardless of their parental status. We need to not keep score on how much helping we’re doing versus receiving. Of course if anyone is truly being abusive or neglectful we always have the right to choose not to continue that relationship if it isn’t healthy for us, but these should be the more rare examples, not the way we treat anyone who temporarily annoys us. We should see our relationships with our community as long term, understanding that they ebb and flow over time but it all evens out in the wash. And to bring it full circle, I think this villager mentality might be a helpful one as we navigate the changes motherhood brings to our friendships.
Valerie
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