Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's AskSeph episode,

I am answering the question of how do I cope with feeling like I'm falling behind relative to

all of my friends who are getting married and having kids when I've just come out of a

relationship in my mid-30s? So, gosh, this is such a common experience. Maybe the

specifics are different from person to person, but that overall sense of feeling like you're

not where you're meant to be, according to some preordained societal timeline of what it means

to live a successful life and be ticking all of the

boxes. And it's so easy, particularly when we already struggle with low self-worth or feeling like

we're bad at relationships, feeling like a failure, feeling like there's something wrong with us.

It's so easy to take the fact that life hasn't followed the path that we thought

it may be would, that we haven't ticked all those milestones by the point that we assumed we

would, that we are the problem, and that can obviously be really painful. And then, of course,

the social layer of that, if your whole friendship group is

at a stage of life where they're in the thick of parenting or buying houses and doing all of the

things and you're just not there, then even if they're still great friends and you still spend

time together, that feeling of separateness or of being behind or not really

getting it, that you've maybe grown in different directions, that can be really painful as well.

And you can feel like a bit of an outsider, which obviously the feelings of loneliness and

isolation that you might already be feeling having just come out of a relationship

at that point in your life, that can feel really stark as well.

So just validating that it makes sense that that would be really tricky

and that there are a few layers to navigate in that.

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