Are Stable Relationships the New Status Symbol?

It’s Sunday night in a cosy Greenwich apartment and the football game we’re supposed to be watching goes unnoticed. Instead across the room I hear talks of wedding planning and engagement parties. Amongst weaving conversations of relationships, and our friends’ relationships and their friends’ relationships, I realise I am the only single one. It was a feeling I was familiar with and had never really minded before, after all I am only 22 and fresh out of university, but the stark contrast was already clear. Those with a partner were seriously planning their future – marriages and mortgages in tow, and those of us without, felt the pressure to keep up.

My own love life, uni days filled with short term flings and excited texts, couldn’t compare to this new adult world I’d been thrown into. Of course, I noticed the subtle change – more and more of my friends were getting into relationships, and more of their friends were too. Suddenly I took a second look at the world and now people came in pairs, they lived together, took holidays together, and almost blended into each other; this new world was suited to couples. Restaurant experiences for two, romantic getaways, even matching bathrobes. Most intriguing of all was the wedding planning, where I still planned my wedding with the same casual optimism and grandeur of a 10 year old, people around me were considering venues and budgets and a million other details I never would have thought of.

I wondered when everyone in my life had flipped a switch and decided to get into long term relationships (relationships in uni had the same lifespan as a fruit fly!); suddenly instead of crazy drunk stories and one night stands we talked about anniversaries and the dreaded ‘meeting the parents’, suddenly those milestones became markers of success, and serious relationships became aspirational. So how did this happen? In my generation of tinder and situationships leaving broken hearts in their wake, is being in a serious, stable relationship the newest and shiniest status symbol? A 2021 UK census found that 37.9% of adults (18.4 million) had never been married or in a civil partnership, stacked with average divorce rate being 42% found in the same census, you start to wonder if serious relationships become more and more hard to come by, and to keep.

You don’t have to look far to see the subtle changes everywhere – your perpetually single friend now in a serious relationship, the girl who had sworn off men now calls one promising (gasp!) not to mention the countless movies, films and tv shows where the heroine – a romantic or not – ends up the person of their dreams. Consider Miss Congeniality or 10 Things I Hate About You, both Grace and Sam start off happily single until someone comes along and changes their mind. Or worse, possibly the biggest mistake in Sex and The City history was having happily single Samantha end up with Smith, until she famously calls it off with a line I’m sure many people (including myself) have quoted over the years: “I love you, but I love me more”. I can’t help but feel that these movies we grew up with while sweet and romantic, are served with a tone of condescension when you announce you’re happily single.  

Combined with the onslaught of reality shows aimed at finding ‘the one’, it becomes hard to ignore our society’s fascination with coupling up. Love island at the height of their success had 3.3 million viewers, while newer shows which debuted in 2020 like Love is Blind and Too Hot To Handle quickly rose in popularity. While each show initially only seem to be about watching attractive people fall in love, Love Island has had its contestants sharing beds since 2015 while Love is Blind and aims to have its contestants fall in love before even seeing each other, with weddings taking place only a few weeks later. Too Hot to Handle similarly towed an interesting line in the reality tv show world, encouraging their contestants to slow down their physical relationships in favour of emotional intimacy. In just 5 years the media we consume has shifted drastically, and the message is clear; short term flings are out, long term relationships are in.

In a society that treats couples as the default and singles as anomalies, is it any wonder that we look at stable healthy relationships in awe, especially in this day and age when its so hard to achieve? In Chiara Wilkinson’s ‘in defence of party women’ she charts a subtle change in people’s attitudes towards clubbing, my own worldview seems to have shrunk even smaller as I notice people grasping for straws with their dates, wondering when their time will come, or if they’re going to be the last single friend. More worryingly still was that with all the time invested into romantic relationships, are the friendships in our lives taking a back seat to our partners? And in our desperation to hang on to the idea of love, are some of us staying in relationships that would better be left behind?

Even at my age I find my single friends torn, surrounded by couples and perpetually being the third wheel, they yearn for their love lives to pick up. As my single friend told me over iced chai one evening “you can control your job, where you live, but you can’t control your love life”. And the lack of control is perhaps what makes it so frustrating, not the idea that we’re single, but the idea that everyone else isn’t; like with our careers and houses, when it comes to our romantic relationships, we scramble to keep up with those around us.

Strawberry Makeup and the Gen Z Identity Crisis

Beauty TikTok hit me hard. I’ve been a dedicated scroller and avid watcher of the tiktok beauty world ever since the app came out (how else am I supposed to know my colour season?). But ever since Hailey Beiber’s famous ‘strawberry girl’ makeup selfie lit the beauty world on fire, my for your page has been abuzz with different beauty aesthetics. Do I fit the clean girl aesthetic or the vanilla girl aesthetic? and what’s the difference? I ask my friends trying not to sound too old, who casually look up from their phones, shrug and say ‘neither’. An interaction I’m slightly ashamed to say had me questioning my identity also got me thinking, where have these aesthetics come from, and why are we so invested in them?

Gone are the days of clean girl aesthetic, 2024 is the year of micro trends. Blueberry nails, vanilla girl makeup, mob wife aesthetic, the options are endless, and you are left to choose like you’re Cady Heron picking a table for lunch. Choose one, and you fear you won’t be welcome in the other, choose the wrong one, and you’ve spent hundreds of pounds on the Pilates princess starter pack. Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing wrong with a trend, putting a bow in your hair can put a spring in your step, and wearing a milkmaid dress to a picnic is a great way to dress it up, regardless of the coquette or cottage core aesthetics; sometimes an accessory is just that.   But now more than ever there seems to be an outpouring of trends, with mob wife aesthetic gaining 2.2 billion views on tiktok, slightly overshadowed by latte girl makeup at 210 million views. Where 2016 brings us a strange sense of nostalgia with its heavier makeup topped with the kylie lip kits and the not so far gone past of 2020 was the era of glossier and slick back buns, what, if any trends will be strong enough to define 2024?

And more importantly in a world where we can identify with an aesthetic based on the colour of our blush, is there even a need for self-reflection? Where previous trends seemed to add onto our lives and be used as a way to express our personalities, the aesthetics of today have expanded to be lifestyles in their own right. Consider the Pilates princess aesthetic which along with its pink lululemon outfits encourages Pilates on a regular basis; instead of simply an accessory, the Pilates princess aesthetic advocates for a certain lifestyle. The trad wife aesthetic which has recently gained momentum (and controversy) on tiktok is specifically aimed towards women and advocates for traditional gender roles and marriages, again, instead of an aesthetic adding to our lives, these aesthetics begin to bend our lives around them in order to create a lifestyle.

These aesthetics begin to sway the ways we dress, the things we do and value; but can anyone afford that? The simple coquette aesthetic can be topped with just a bow, but more modern aesthetics require an arsenal of outfits, equipment and accessories to be able to live that aspirational lifestyle. The Pilates princess has its Lululemon, the old money aesthetic has it’s Loro Piano and Ralph Lauren, even the coastal granddaughter aesthetic has a whole wardrobe reminiscent of Brandy Melville. More than that, the time required to adhere to these aesthetics is  privilege in itself; Nara Smith famously makes food from scratch on tiktok, a labour that’s romanticised to some because she has the time to do so.

More worryingly still is what happens when you adhere to an aesthetic without realising its implications, as tiktok pointed out, mob wife makeup was designed to be so heavily applied to hide the violence those women may have faced. The office siren aesthetic faces a similar vein of controversy, as people argue that while the aesthetic – with its short skirts and messily tied up hair is fun – it’s not actually appropriate for the workplace.

And while It’s important to recognize that nobody is enforcing these aesthetics on you, when the media we consume bombards you with different aesthetics, is it any wonder we try to fit ourselves into a box? The sudden rise of popularity amongst these different trends also suggests a lack of stable identity within ourselves, if we can be so easily swayed from aesthetic to another. Another explanation for the rise of these aesthetics is the aspirational lifestyle we associate with them; we want to be like Hailey Bieber so we buy the products for a strawberry makeup routine, we want to exercise regularly so we buy outfits from lululemon.

And while our priorities and personalities shift and evolve its important that your aesthetic aligns with who you actually are as a person and add to your personality; instead of letting these aesthetics blend into your identity, its important to adopt the qualities we identity with already and aspire to in the future. So whether it’s a swash of bright pink on your cheeks, or a lululemon wardrobe that you gravitate towards, let yourself playfully slip into these new trends to figure out what suits you best.