Housewarming Celebration > Weddings & Childbirths

I haven’t attended or been invited to a wedding in over fourteen years.  I sometimes joke these lack of invites indicate a better choice (for me, anyway) in friends, as I’m gravitating toward other single to at heart folks.  But I went to quite a few of them in my 20s, three of which I served as a groomsman.  And it cost me money and time.  Gifts, tux, travel in some cases.  In fact, a finding stated that in 2022, the average guest spent $430 to attend a wedding.  Sounds about right.
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And I’m not saying weddings AREN’T worth celebrating.  But why are they more important than, say, promotions?   Or getting a new job?  Or, in my case, getting tenure and buying a home?  When I got tenure, I planned on having a celebration once I bought a home.

And part of that celebration included a registry.  The way I see it, if a couple can ask for gifts for combining names and incomes (which yields them more money anyway), then I can ask for gifts for having worked my tail off to get tenure and buy this home.  I mean, Carrie Bradshaw even popularized that idea.

It meant a lot to me to be able to celebrate these two significant milestones with people I love and care about, but I had an ulterior motive: to try to give them the same amount of weight (to the best of my ability anyway; I wasn’t about to pay for invitation cards).  And here are some pictures:

It was quite a day.  Chester woke me up with his customary yell at 5:30 in the morning.   After I finished grading weekly journals from students (due the night before) and got my jog in, I did my best channeling of Guy Fieri as I: 1) combined vegetables, sausage, ground beef, tomatoes, beans, and a cacophony of spices into a chili; 2) cut up eggs and mashed up the yolks for deviled eggs; 3) combined sugar, flour, cocoa powder, butter, eggs, vanilla extract, and just a hint of salt to make brownies; 4) combined the Trader Joe’s brand of pumpkin bread mix with an egg, water, and canola oil to make…pumpkin bread.
At 12:15, Christina of Onely fame came by, as did Charlie.  Then Johnny Mac followed.  The next twelve hours are a bit of a blur, as people from my Childfree Singles of the DMV, DMV Childfrees, and Asexuals and Aromantics of the Mid-Atlantic groups came, as did friends from CoSP and my neighborhood.  Conversations (that I can remember) included:

• Microlabels around asexuality and aromanticism discourse
• Our experiences with cats (I seem to attract a lot of cat parents these days)
• Travel experiences, particularly to Japan
• The importance of advocating for the Childfree (Thanks, Mr. Vance)
• Me holding court on the bare basics of Singles Studies

​And Rolf brought a game called Truth be Told, where we asked questions to gauge how well we know each other.  I enjoyed the quirky responses, and I even won (I never win at board games).  And toward the end of the night, Kevin and I had a deep conversation about the nature of friendship as I washed dishes and straightened up.

I had planned on screening a pro-single movie.  I asked CoSP to pick from my list of films reviewed; the winners were Whip It, 28 Days, and Private Benjamin.  I didn’t want to disrupt the natural flow of conversation, and board games are more interactive.  But I did have Whip It spinning on the DVD player while I opened my gifts, and Private Benjamin filled the room during my first wave of writing thank-you notes (that’s one way in which I consider myself old school).

On the second wave of thank-you notes, I had the podcast, Spinsterhood Reimagined playing, guest-starring my good friend and colleague, Ketaki Chowkhani.  It was all I could do to keep away from compulsively checking the election hype. 

Sadly, I woke up at 6:30 the following morning to learn Trump had taken it.  While I was deeply saddened, I wasn’t surprised; this is the face of the United States and it always has been.  This may sound quixotic, but maybe if the Democrats paid more attention to single voters (a generally non-partisan population), particularly in the wake of J.D. Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment, things might have been different.  I doubt it, but it’s nice to believe.  And that’s why the advocacy we do is important.

I’m writing this paragraph on November 6, the day after the United States Presidential election.  The mood was dour on the Metro this morning, and I saw a few students in tears.  I gave my class the option to attend in-person; of the eight that showed, five stayed until the end.  And they were willing and ready to learn.  We had a nice impromptu review of how to use Purdue OWL and ChatGPT to assist with citing sources in APA (writer/scholar geek stuff).  And I felt a little less depressed after that; I was impressed at the resilience of those students.

I’ll continue to speak and write about singlehood for as long as I’m legally allowed to.  Because no matter who you support, you may be single by choice or by circumstance.  So someone needs to give a voice to them, no matter who is bothered by it.

Celebrating milestones other than marriage or childbirth, like a housewarming, is a good start.