Lindsey here! I’m so excited to introduce Alicia’s new column, 30-something! In this series, she’ll be exploring life, money, careers, and relationships in your 30s. Of course, you don’t have to be in your 30s to relate to the topics discussed here. To kick things off, she gets personal talking about one of my favorite topics: friends and money.
When I think of my friend K., one particular night from our early 20s always comes to mind. We were a little drunk, standing in the minuscule windowless kitchen of my Lower East Side apartment, scream-singing “Hello” by Adele and playing the music video over and over. It was a Friday, but we were having too much fun to bother heading out to the bar on our original itinerary for the evening. My roommate’s then-boyfriend walked in during one of our renditions and looked at us like we had lost our minds. Maybe we had. It’s one of my favorite memories.
That night took place 10 years ago—I looked up when Adele released the single, just to be sure—and a lot has changed in that time. Well, a lot has changed for K. She moved from New York to San Francisco the year after our singalong, eventually leaving journalism for a job at a tech firm that now has an eye-watering stock price. She’s since got married and had a baby. These days, she works from the beautiful home she owns in the suburbs, near her in-laws, who watch their grandchild when she and her husband plan a weekend away.
It’s hard not to compare the paths we took, especially since we both graduated from the same college and had similar starts (and aspirations) to pursue careers in financial journalism. A decade later, I live in a slightly bigger apartment (the kitchen has two windows), and I got married this summer. But a journalist’s salary and home ownership do not compute in today’s market. Fresh off a layoff, I feel like I’m falling even further behind not just K., but many of my friends, family members, and acquaintances who all seem to be steadily moving forward in their lives.
It’s not an uncommon feeling. There’s plenty of research about the human tendency to compare ourselves to our peers and neighbors, measuring our self-worth in relation to others—particularly those we’re closest with. Social media certainly doesn’t help. Though in my opinion K. could never post enough photos of her beautiful baby, I still feel a little twinge that I’m not yet posting photos of my own.
Over a decade into our professional careers, the differences in my and my friends’ finances, lifestyle choices, and career trajectories are the starkest they’ve ever been. It’s easy to overlook pay gaps in the early years of a career. College friends who got finance jobs may have lived in doorman buildings rather than dingy walk-ups, yet we still partied in the same dive bars. But when things like mortgages, equity compensation, and marriages get added to the mix, the divergence of our fortunes, literally and figuratively, can be hard to reconcile. It’s not so much that I want their lives, but that I wish my own measured up. I feel a tiny seed of embarrassment that I’m not doing as well financially or in my career.
I called K. earlier this week to talk through what I was thinking about and hear her perspective. Does she miss the city? Does she also play the comparison game? Our talk was a reminder of why we’ve been friends for so long, and it made me reflect further on our life choices.
Of course, she misses New York and journalism, she tells me. She keeps up with her friends’ “magical lives” in the city largely through Instagram and sometimes wishes she were raising her daughter here. And she was candid about how much pressure there is as a mom to do certain things in certain ways, feelings I’ve yet to experience. Recently, she reconnected with some childhood friends at one of their weddings, and K. says it was hard not to compare how she and her husband have decided to raise their daughter, relative to the other attendees.
K. is also her family’s primary provider, which adds layers to those feelings. She works full time and has no desire not to—even maternity leave got a little boring, she admits—but plenty of her local friends and neighbors have pursued the working-dad, stay-at-home-mom lifestyle. That doesn’t interest her, though other people are happy to tell her it should.
And while she finds fulfillment in her work, it brings its own pressures. Her family’s lifestyle would be very different if she had a less demanding job or quit to care for the baby full time. She isn’t in love with the work she does, but she plans to stick it out. Her job isn’t really about her anymore.
“I never envisioned myself being a breadwinner, but I kind of have found myself in that position,” she says. “In some ways it’s really empowering; in other ways it’s stressful. But at the end of the day, it’s like, whatever, I can suck it up. I’ve been here long enough to know that there are hard times and there are good times—no phase lasts forever. It’s just kind of like, all right, stick it through—there’s more riding on this than just me liking what I do.”
For her, moving cross-country from New York to San Francisco without a built-in community was a bigger strain on her friendships than becoming a mom. She struggled with imposter syndrome and feeling isolated. K. was still a journalist when she first moved to SF, but she tells me she questioned her own abilities every day. Taking a job at a tech company gave her more coworkers to befriend, more money to live comfortably, and an easier job that she didn’t doubt she excelled at.
The marriage and the baby and the house all followed, but she says I shouldn’t rush to meet her; the suburbs, she says, will be waiting. “Once you’re here, you’re here forever,” she jokes.
I hope it’s clear I’m only ever rooting for K., and all of my friends, to have the lives they want. There’s no hard feelings, or even jealousy. Perhaps the best way to describe it is a sense of wistfulness as we get older and our paths diverge further.
It’s inevitable that our 30-something lives would look different. We spend far fewer nights drinking wine and listening to Adele together, with adulthood unraveling before us and the world seemingly there for our taking. We’ve all made choices that have closed a few doors and opened others, and we’ve had to unlock them in our own way, and in our own time.
It’s impossible to know what the next decade will bring, where our careers and relationships will go from here. But wherever we go, I hope our paths never diverge so far apart that we lose touch with those ambitious 20-something girls and the dreams they were pursuing.
Do you have your own story of friendship changing over time. Share with us!
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Along the lines of Alicia’s essay, I loved this piece by Leslie Stephens on how to pursue your dreams without losing site of the happiness you feel in the present moment.
For the next 30-something, Alicia is working on a story about student loans, and we want to hear your experience! She’s specifically looking for 30-something millennials who are still paying off their loans and have feelings about them. Fill out this form!
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Friendship is my primary source of deep love, affection, attention, and joy. I married at 25, divorced at 43, and have had the same group of close friends for decades - we've raised our kids together, see one another weekly, and take care of one another.
A good friend of mine once shared with me that her mother shared with her, "we age with our girlfriends." Even my happily married friends are a little tired of their husbands after decades of marriage, and find their roles shifting as kids age and life changes. My oldest and dearest friend and I have been connected since we were 10. I have the general Group Chat, and two friends (the one since we were 10) and another college friend whom I'm in daily contact. We call the check-ins Proof of Life. Sometimes it's a "You OK?"
I've been fortunate to have been married, partnered after divorce, and I look to romantic relationships less in terms of providing me with comfort or joy. I get that internally and with my girlfriends.
You will find that you will root for your friends more, cry with them more, laugh with them more, and happily pick them up from their oral surgeries and knee replacements. You'll show up in new ways and ask for help. You'll call them to help you move a dresser and drop wildflowers on their doorstep when their kid is going through too much.
Like aging, it keeps getting better. I promise.
Will the Alicia column be a regular The Purse inclusion or should we subscribe to her newsletter? I'm a 30 something and loved this piece! It's hard not to play the comparison game, even if we want the best for our friends and ourselves, or wouldn't want someone else's responsibilities.