Dwain Northey (Gen X)

I’m not trying to throw myself a pity party. I’m not looking for sympathy, and I’m certainly not interested in pretending that every disappointment in my life is somebody else’s fault. I’ve lived long enough to understand that some of the circumstances we find ourselves in are the result of our own decisions, while others are simply the unpredictable turns life takes. Usually, it’s a combination of the two.

But every once in a while, something completely ordinary comes along and makes you look at your life a little differently.

Recently, I had someone in the car who was in town for a college reunion. Nothing particularly remarkable about that. People go to reunions all the time. They reconnect with old friends, reminisce about the stupid things they did when they were younger, compare the directions their lives took, and probably promise to stay in touch for another ten years before disappearing into their respective routines.

For some reason, though, the idea of that reunion stuck with me.

I realized I have never had that experience. I don’t have a group of old college friends to meet up with, and I don’t have a collection of high school buddies whose lives I can check in on every few years. There isn’t a group of people from my younger days who can sit around a table and tell stories about the person I used to be.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this wasn’t simply about reunions. It was about the absence of connections that make reunions possible in the first place.

I don’t have a long list of people from my past whom I still keep in touch with. In fact, I can’t think of anyone from the time I got married in 1996 who remains a part of my life today, outside of the family connections that still exist. Thirty years is a long time. You would think there would be a few names left on the list.

Apparently, my list was misplaced somewhere along the way.

When I got married, it was a small civil ceremony before a justice of the peace. There was no elaborate wedding, no procession of friends standing beside me, and no best man. At the time, that was simply how things worked out. I didn’t make a big deal of it. But looking back, I realize that I didn’t even have someone in my life whom I could ask to stand in that role.

I don’t mean that a wedding party is some official measurement of a person’s worth. Plenty of people have wonderful marriages without elaborate ceremonies, and plenty of people have enormous wedding parties filled with friends who will be strangers ten years later. A tuxedo and a matching tie don’t guarantee a meaningful relationship.

Still, when I look back, I notice a pattern.

I’ve been invited to very few weddings in my life, essentially those connected to my ex-wife and my son. I’ve never been asked to be a groomsman, a best man, or part of a wedding party. I’ve never had that particular experience of someone saying, in effect, You’re important enough to me that I want you standing beside me on this day.

Maybe that sounds trivial to someone else. Maybe it is. But sometimes the little things reveal something about the bigger picture.

I’ve been divorced since 2013, and for the most part, I’ve remained single ever since. Over time, my world has become smaller. Not necessarily because I consciously decided to shut everybody out, but because isolation can happen so gradually that you don’t recognize it until you look around and realize how much space there is.

You get comfortable doing things alone. You develop routines. You stop expecting invitations because there aren’t many invitations coming. You stop making plans because there isn’t anybody to make them with. Eventually, being alone becomes the default setting, and the idea of changing it starts to feel more complicated than simply continuing as you are.

Then your son grows up, gets married, and moves out.

For years, he was the center of my little universe. After the divorce, he was my circle, my constant, the person who gave a lot of my days a purpose beyond work and the ordinary business of getting through life. Now he’s building his own life, as he should. I’m proud of him, and I want him to have every opportunity to experience the things I hope he will experience.

But being proud of your child and adjusting to the empty space he leaves behind are two entirely different things.

His life is expanding. Mine has become quieter.

And somewhere in that quiet, I’ve started noticing things I might otherwise have ignored.

We often talk about living life as though it’s a collection of things to look forward to. Vacations. Holidays. Family gatherings. Reunions. Weddings. Concerts. Road trips. Even something as simple as meeting an old friend for lunch because you haven’t seen each other in a while.

Those things become markers on the calendar. They give you something to anticipate. They create the little pockets of excitement that interrupt the routine of everyday existence.

You finish one vacation and start thinking about the next. You see an old friend and begin planning when you’ll meet again. You receive an invitation and have something to look forward to weeks or months down the road.

I honestly can’t remember ever having much of that.

I can’t remember regularly looking at a calendar and thinking, I can’t wait for that weekend. I can’t recall having a vacation on the horizon that filled me with anticipation, or a reunion coming up that made me wonder how everybody had turned out. My life has generally been about the next day, the next responsibility, the next thing that needs to be done.

Work. Home. Repeat.

There have been experiences along the way, of course. I’m not suggesting that my entire life has been an uninterrupted gray hallway. I’ve traveled, lived in different places, served in the military, and experienced things that many people never will. There are memories worth keeping.

But experiences aren’t necessarily the same thing as connections. And having lived in a lot of places doesn’t mean you have a lot of people who remember living there with you.

You can accumulate miles without accumulating relationships.

That may be the part that bothers me most. It’s not that I haven’t done anything with my life. It’s that so much of it seems to have happened without leaving behind the kind of relationships that give those experiences a continuing life of their own.

There is nobody from a particular chapter waiting to reminisce with me about it. There isn’t a circle of old friends who can remind me of something I’d forgotten about myself. There are no annual traditions or standing invitations connecting the person I was twenty or thirty years ago to the person sitting here today.

Just memories, mostly kept to myself.

And that’s where the title comes in.

The bed we make is the one we sleep in.

It’s an old expression about consequences, usually delivered with the implication that we shouldn’t complain about the circumstances we’ve created for ourselves. And I understand the sentiment. We make choices. We develop habits. We prioritize certain things over others. Sometimes we neglect relationships because we’re busy surviving, working, raising children, or dealing with whatever life has thrown at us. Sometimes we simply don’t recognize what we’re missing until the opportunity to build it has passed.

I can’t honestly say that every bit of my isolation is something somebody else did to me. I have to accept that my own decisions, my own habits, and perhaps my own reluctance to reach out have played a part.

Relationships require maintenance. Friendship isn’t a subscription service that renews itself automatically every year. People drift apart when nobody makes the effort to stay connected. And the longer you go without those connections, the more difficult it can become to establish new ones.

At some point, you can find yourself living in the house you’ve built, wondering why there aren’t any other footprints in the hallway.

The uncomfortable part is that I don’t know exactly when it happened. There wasn’t a particular Tuesday when I decided that friendship was overrated and social gatherings were a waste of perfectly good time. There was no formal announcement that I was retiring from human connection.

Life just kept moving.

One relationship ended. People moved away. Jobs changed. Circumstances shifted. My marriage ended. Years passed. My son grew up. And the circle of people around me never really replenished itself.

Perhaps I assumed there would always be time to build those connections later. Perhaps I thought relationships would develop naturally, as they seemed to for other people. Or perhaps I became so accustomed to being self-sufficient that I didn’t notice the difference between being comfortable alone and becoming isolated.

Those two things can look remarkably similar from the outside.

Now, nearly sixty years into this experiment called life, I find myself wondering whether the habits I’ve developed are simply too deeply ingrained to change. I know how to live alone. I know how to fill my time. I know how to get through a day without needing anyone else to participate in it.

What I don’t know is how much of that is a genuine preference and how much is a circumstance I’ve learned to accept because it was easier than trying to change it.

And I’m not sure there’s a clean answer.

I don’t suddenly want to become the guy who joins every club in town, attends every social event, and introduces himself to strangers with the enthusiasm of a cruise director. That isn’t who I am, and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise. I value my independence. I like my quiet. I’m not convinced that being surrounded by people is necessarily the same thing as being connected to them.

But there’s a difference between enjoying your own company and realizing that, if you wanted to share an afternoon with somebody, you wouldn’t know whom to call.

There’s a difference between choosing solitude and discovering that solitude has quietly become your only option.

I think that’s what the college reunion brought to the surface. It wasn’t envy of somebody else’s weekend. It was the realization that other people have chapters of their lives they can return to, people they can reconnect with, and memories they can collectively revisit. They have evidence of relationships that survived the passage of time, even if those relationships have changed.

I don’t have much of that evidence.

And I find that sad.

Not devastating. Not something that requires a dramatic soundtrack and a rain-soaked walk down an empty street. Just sad in the way certain realizations are sad when you’re old enough to understand them and honest enough not to look away.

I don’t know that I can change the past. I can’t manufacture a group of lifelong friends at fifty-nine. I can’t go back and cultivate relationships I never established, or suddenly become part of a wedding party that never existed. The calendar doesn’t offer do-overs, and nostalgia doesn’t issue refunds.

But perhaps I’m making the mistake of looking at the remaining years as though they’re simply the final pages of a book whose ending has already been written.

Nearly sixty isn’t twenty-five. I understand that. The opportunities are different, the responsibilities are different, and people at this age have already established their own routines and relationships. Building something meaningful may require more deliberate effort than it would have when I was younger.

Still, different isn’t necessarily impossible.

Maybe the goal isn’t to recreate the social life I never had. Maybe it isn’t to build some enormous network of friends or collect invitations to weddings. Maybe it starts with one person, one recurring activity, one relationship that grows beyond a casual conversation. Maybe it starts by putting something on the calendar that exists for no other reason than that I want to do it.

Something to anticipate.

That last part feels particularly important to me. Not simply finding people to fill the empty spaces, but finding reasons to look forward to what comes next. Something beyond the next workday. Something that isn’t just another obligation to get through.

For most of my life, I’ve concentrated on what needed to be done. Perhaps I haven’t spent enough time considering what I actually wanted to happen.

There’s a difference.

I don’t know whether I can build the kind of life that includes reunions, regular gatherings, old friends, and all those little traditions other people seem to accumulate along the way. I don’t know whether I’ll ever have someone who considers me a close enough friend to ask me to stand beside them at their wedding.

And I don’t want to turn those things into a checklist of deficiencies, as though a life can be graded by the number of invitations it receives.

But I also don’t want to dismiss the longing behind them simply because admitting it feels uncomfortable.

There’s a tendency, particularly as we get older, to convince ourselves that we’re beyond wanting certain things. We tell ourselves that we’re independent, that we don’t need anybody, that we’re perfectly happy doing our own thing. Sometimes that’s absolutely true.

Other times, it may simply be the story we tell ourselves because wanting something we don’t have makes us feel vulnerable.

I’m still trying to determine which parts of my solitude belong to the first category and which belong to the second.

Perhaps that is the work left to do.

The bed we make is the one we sleep in. I accept that. But I don’t think the saying means we’re obligated to lie there forever, staring at the ceiling, simply because we made it ourselves.

We can rearrange the furniture. We can open a window. We can leave the room and try something different.

We can’t change where we’ve been, and we can’t demand that the people who once occupied our lives return to fill the empty spaces. But perhaps we can stop treating the life we’ve accumulated as the only life we’re permitted to have.

I may never have a high school reunion to attend. I may never have a room full of old friends laughing about things that happened forty years ago. I may never look at my calendar and see a wedding where I’m standing beside a friend who’s known me for decades.

Those possibilities may be gone, or they may simply look different from here.

What I don’t want is to reach another ten years down the road and realize that I spent the intervening time assuming nothing could change because so much already had.

I’m not throwing a pity party. I’m taking inventory.

And sometimes an honest inventory reveals that you’ve spent so much time making sure you could get through life on your own that you’ve forgotten to ask whether you actually want to.

That’s an uncomfortable question at nearly sixty. It doesn’t come with easy answers, and it certainly doesn’t come with a guarantee that anything will change.

But maybe recognizing the problem is the first indication that the story isn’t finished.

I’ve spent a lot of years learning how to live with the bed I’ve made.

Maybe it’s time to consider making a few changes to the room.