The vital role between being single and coupled-up

2 weeks ago 3

When Carrie Bradshaw danced through her gazillion-dollar townhouse in the final moments of And Just Like That affirming that her alone-ness did not equate to loneliness, I fear she was missing an option that lies somewhere outside the spectrum of “single” and “coupled up”. It’s a place I know well, and wish the fictional patron saint of single city girls could experience for herself. It’s a vital role, one that affirms existing friendships and builds new ones, and doubles your opportunity for gossip in group chats.

I’m talking about being the third wheel.

It’s a title that’s had a bad wrap since the beginning of time, with its inference of unsteadiness and unwelcome-ness. The third wheel is supposedly an imposition or someone who can’t read the room. They’re encroaching on a happy couple’s alone time or cursed to wallow in a hazy state of former friendship forever.

Unless my closest friends are really excellent actors, those misconceptions couldn’t be further from the truth.

Eight years ago, when my friend Emily started seeing Mike, she and I went from close to inseparable – and he became an inextricable part of our relationship. We co-ordinate weekend visits to the local farmers’ market as readily as we hatch plans for movies, clubs and music festivals. There’s a group chat with the three of us, and separate ones where Mike and I make plans and jokes. When I got some shocking and upsetting news recently, he talked it over with me over drinks and checked in on me the next day. When she and I make plans, he is rarely excluded.

So often, conversations about friends entering into new, serious relationships focus on a lack or absence. As the single friend, you’ve been replaced, or felt like a symbol of a temporary holding pattern. But when all parties value friendship as highly as they do romantic and paternal relationships, all that emerges is opportunity.

Seeing the way my friends’ partners have built their own specific, individual relationships with me has also helped me to draft new standards for anyone I might meet. Now, I’m looking for someone who can hold their own in a room full of my friends and family, who isn’t superglued to my side, who can have their own dynamic and jokes and bond with people who matter to me. If someone comes into my life and ticks all my boxes – but they’re only interested in spending time with couples or treat my friends as residents of a different emotional territory, ones who are out of bounds for them? It could never work.

It’s a gift to not just know about your friends’ lives but to be a part of them, even as they grow and change. I felt that way at 18, before the invention of Uber, when my uni bestie’s boyfriend would make room for me on the couch in his sharehouse after we’d all spent a night out dancing long after the last trains left the station. I feel it at 35 when a friend’s new boyfriend is thrown in the deep end at a dinner party full of people he doesn’t know, and ends up deep in conversation after a shared bottle of wine.

I’ve met up with couple friends on Valentine’s Day and on overseas holidays. We’ve stayed up at night in holiday houses giggling and talking. When my friend Sinéad was booked to speak at a writer’s festival in regional Victoria, she didn’t just see it as an opportunity for a getaway with her partner, Andy; the three of us conspired to book an Airbnb that ticked all our boxes (a fireplace for me, local nibbles for her, a hot tub for him to poach in all weekend long). I never once feel like an addendum or a glitch in the plan, the recipient of an obligatory invite or a buffer giving bored couples someone new to bounce off once they’d expired all their conversation topics together.

Being a third wheel is not a reinforcement of my singleness, but a reminder that all relationships – romantic and platonic – are cemented by friendship. That connection between the people in the relationship is just as vital as the one I have with each of them.

In the third season of the Sex and the City spin-off, we saw Carrie go shopping with Harry, her girlfriend Charlotte’s husband. We saw her meet Joy, Miranda’s new romantic interest. And she introduced Seema to her gardener, Adam, setting the two up for a new love story. What she never did, though, was pull up a seat at a table set for three and build a new dynamic with her girls and their partners, together. She’s missed out.

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