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.