There will be a point in your 20s – probably around the time you’re deciding whether it’s acceptable to steal loo roll from work before pay day – when something strange happens. Your first friend gets engaged. I’m not talking about relatives or colleagues, but someone the same age as you, from the same background, who has cruelly and without warning become an adult.
In this case, my mate Lauren was first, announcing out of the blue (and via Facebook, obvs) that she and her year-long boyfriend had just got that little bit more serious. They’d got engaged on a family holiday, of all places, so I’m pretty well placed to coach you on the ins and outs of coping, reacting and generally dealing with this inevitable, occasionally depressing, milestone.
Try to sound pleased
Personally my reaction was mainly: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!. For one thing, embarrassingly, I hadn’t even met the guy (if I’m entirely honest, I wasn’t 100% on his name), which was mostly down to how our lives had changed thanks to Lauren’s job. Being hideously important, she worked the weekends and evenings that I spent at the pub, weeping over G&Ts (or occasionally just Ts when money was tight) about the newspaper job I hated. I knew from the moment we left home to take our respective science and arts degrees (guess who graduated with which) our lives were going to be massively different, but I hadn’t expected it to hit at the age of 25.
Anyway, I sucked up all of my internal quivering and congratulated her (because I’m not a total cow), acknowledged that she probably hadn’t done it to spite me, and I’d advise you do the same. Make yourself sound pleased. Even if you hate the guy and she’s caught you off guard. She’ll have had days of people shrieking at her, and it’ll be starkly obvious if you’re not speaking in an appropriately high pitch. Even a ‘that’s fantastic news!’ will do, allowing you to go eat a three-cheese pizza and consider the more profound things which may/may not need saying, such as, ‘How have you managed to get your shit together’.
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Don’t compare yourself to them
I wondered if she looked down on me, with my shabby rental flat and salary that left £20,000 a distant dream. I was one of the lucky ones, as I’ve got a lovely boyf (while he professes to like it, there still ain’t no ring on it and, to be frank, I don’t see that changing for a loooong time), but I did have to console a few tearful buds, who saw her wedding as proof that everyone besides them was settled for life. It’s a weird feeling, that you’re being romantically left behind, and ultimately one that you can’t talk yourself out of – you just have to go Pollyanna and be grateful for your independence. Mojitos help.
Try to get to know her fiancé/e
Because s/he’s not going anywhere, and once they’re married it’s all too easy for them to become one of those couples who only hang out with other couples. Nip that in the bud. I made sure to borrow Lauren and her hubby’s Game Of Thrones box set so they had to see me post-nuptials.
Don’t worry about a gift
Engagement gifts are in a category along with Arg from TOWIE and Mooncups, i.e. nice in theory but actually completely pointless. A card will do, and you could always try and boost your chances at getting seated next to an eligible bachelor by creating a tear-jerking home-made collage involving pics of you and her. Provided your single and want to get seated next to an eligible bachelor, of course.
Have a decent hen do
And by decent, I mean neither expensive nor tacky; just use it as an excuse to cement your friendship for the next stage in life (as Oprah-y as that sounds). Once my friends and I had grudgingly come around to the idea of losing Lauren to conversations about mortgages and unclogging the guttering, our hen-do plans went totally tits-up. The chief bridesmaid was someone from her rather exclusive uni (* cough * insanely rich * cough *) and suggested a ‘little weekend in Paris’, and none of us could afford to go.
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I actually felt quite heartbroken, convinced that Lauren must have changed and become, in the words of Jessie-J, all about the money. My other friend Sophie was more enraged, ranting stuff like, ‘How dare this uni muppet make us feel bad for earning peanuts’ and ‘I’ve heard she lives in a castle with her parents’, plus the rather less convincing,‘Paris is so overrated anyway’. Rather sweetly, and as an act of solidarity, even our other high-earning friend pulled out of the posh do, and we threw our own cheap-but-chic bash instead.
OK, so it was pretty much just cheap, but we didn’t make her wear deelyboppers, and there was a lo-ot of wine, which helped any initial prickliness. It turned out lovely in the end, with Lauren reassuring us that she liked our hen do just as much than the pricey rival one, if not more (take that, castle dwellers) and committed to at least one social occasion post-wedding. We made her write it into her diary, while I went a bit Gollum over her ring.
Most importantly, we got to see Lauren as we remembered – pissed and ridiculous. And that, in itself, was weirdly reassuring.
And finally, steel yourself
You have bigger things to worry about anyway. Like preparing for your friends having babies. Breathes into paper bag.
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Follow Lizzy Dening on Twitter: @LizzyDening
Picture: Li Hui
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.