I think I'm falling behind my friends. What do I do?

With help from Persuasion

Anne Elliot, 27-year-old spinster

Hi Emma! I'm having a tough time hanging out with some of my old friends from university. They're a bit further along in life than I am, by the conventional metrics: houses and money; kids. I am in a happy relationship and have work that I enjoy, but it doesn't make me much money. It's not that I want the life my friends have, but when I spend time with them I find it sapping - I leave feeling anxious about having fallen far too far behind, and worried that I've been living with my head in the sand about the practicalities of life. What do I do to feel better about it? I could raise it, but my worry is that my friends think they are helping me when they ask about this kind of thing, and would be very hurt by the idea that they are no longer fun to be around.

You would think that, having spent a lot of time feeling the way you do, I’d have a fabulous response to this question ready in my back pocket. But unfortunately it’s one of those problems to which the truest answers - ‘everyone is on their own journey’; ‘meaning doesn’t come from achieving what looks good on paper’ - are horribly cliché, and entirely useless, unless you believe them deep in your soul.

Having to attend ‘sapping’ social events is something I remember from my early twenties (gosh, sounds so grown-up to say that). For me, it wasn’t close friends but peripheral acquaintances I dreaded spending time with. I remember coming home for Christmas, just like in a D-list Hallmark movie, and being asked by well-meaning family friends about my career. As a penniless playwright/actor/creative type, I was insecure about what I perceived as a lack of success, although you’d never have guessed it from the sunny performance I was able to conjure.

I don’t feel this way anymore, either because I have been calcified by the ravages of time or because my writing career feels more secure (although don’t worry, I’m still broke, childless and well behind in those conventional metrics!). What’s funny in retrospect is that nobody in my peripheral acquaintance knows enough about the world of theatre commissioning to understand the material difference between me-now and me-then anyway. To them, the stuff I was describing at 23 probably sounded just as interesting as the things I’ll talk about at ’Xmas 2025.*

In other words, my insecurity was not a product of the behaviour or judgements of anyone around me. It stemmed entirely from how I felt about myself. Your situation sounds similar: I doubt your friends are actually no longer fun to be around, so I agree that it would be hurtful to accuse them of this. Equally, however, I don’t think you have to torture yourself by hanging out with people that drain your energy, because knowing that it’s not their fault doesn’t change the way it feels.

I have just reread Persuasion, a novel very much about being behind by society’s metrics. Even if you haven’t ever opened it, you might know that its heroine Anne Elliot - who, at nineteen, was persuaded into turning down a marriage proposal from her true love Captain Wentworth - is now considered a spinster at the amusingly young age of twenty-seven. This is a very meme-able fact, so it looms large in the public consciousness. What is less well remembered is that Anne has a twenty-nine-year-old sister, Elizabeth, who, although she feels ‘her approach to the years of danger’ (lol) is also ‘fully satisfied of being still quite as handsome as ever’. This is a belief affirmed by the novel’s authorial voice: ‘It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking, if there has been neither ill health nor anxiety, it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost.’

During the course of the novel Anne experiences what can be most succinctly described as a glow-up (hate myself). Thrown back into the company of Captain Wentworth, at first Anne remains convinced of her relative decline: ‘the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look’. But after some time away from her difficult father and sister, as well as a trip to the seaside and a chance to show off her knowledge of literature to a nice sailor, Anne has the ‘bloom and freshness of youth restored’. The fact that she then finds two men vying for her hand in marriage makes it tempting to read Anne’s ‘faded and thin’ spinster status at the start of the novel as being as much a limiting self-belief as a label forced upon her by the eyes of society. And isn’t limited self-knowledge the subject of every Austen novel? Elizabeth Bennet thinks she’s a good judge of character; Emma Woodhouse thinks she’s a good matchmaker; Anne thinks she is past her prime - all women’s journey to maturity involves better understanding themselves.

Reading Persuasion this way made me want to reevaluate the novel’s title, too. Nowadays we largely use the word ‘persuasion’ to refer to the act of convincing someone else, i.e. as relating to the transitive verb, persuade. But in the early 19th century ‘persuasion’ was just as commonly used to refer to one’s internal beliefs, i.e. ‘she was of a persuasion that…’ The noun is often used this way in the novel: Elizabeth has an ‘internal persuasion’; Wentworth suffers from the ‘unfortunate persuasion’ that Anne is flirting with someone else. So perhaps the novel is not about the damage other people’s coercion does to us - or not only about that. Perhaps it’s about the damage our ‘internal persuasions’ do to ourselves.

So, in this analogy, you are Anne. The way you think about yourself is hurting and limiting you. We both know plenty of people would kill for a happy relationship and work they enjoy: some people go their whole lives without finding either. Of course, as in Persuasion, part of your insecurity is created by societal frameworks, but part of it is just in your head. So how do you truly internalise the knowledge that the enormous blessings you already possess are just as meaningful as money and a house? Annoyingly, I think the biggest answer is time. You will find your groove, and learn to settle into the decisions you’ve made career-wise, which sound like they were the right ones for you. And when some of those conventional metrics eventually happen in your own life (as I think they will, if you want them to) I doubt it’ll feel at all important that they happened a few years later than your peers.

There are ways to make this settling-in period easier, though. While I believe you should hold onto those university friendships, there’s no harm in taking some distance. (To be brutally honest, if they have kids, they might not even notice.) It’s bolstering to surround yourself with people who are on a similar path, just as when you’re single, it’s nice to have single friends to share the experience with. Feeling less alone in your choices might strengthen you when you go to hang out with the ‘smug marrieds’ (here, an important literary reference to Bridget Jones’ Diary).

And it could also be that you need to be more intentional in the way you hang out with your university acquaintances. ‘The medium is the message’, said media theorist Marshall McLuhan, to describe the way that our tools of communication (say, Twitter) shape the kind of discourse that takes place. In a similar way, if you are allowing your house-owning friends to dictate the rules of your social interaction, you may end up having an excess of conversations about kitchen renovation. So don’t go to the house-warming lunch at your friend’s new apartment, which is bound to make you feel terrible. (Just send some flowers, if you feel bad for skipping.) Instead, invite friends to do things one on one, like play squash or go to the theatre or anything else which will create the conditions for conversation that’s enjoyable to you, too. One on one hang-outs might also help you open up to your friends about your feelings, which I do think is important. You don’t have to tell them it’s not enjoyable to be in their company. But you can tell them it feels scary and hard to have chosen a different path. The reason I didn’t like hanging out with peripheral acquaintances when I was sad was because I felt the need to perform a confidence I didn’t feel. I would hope that with your close friends, at least in the right setting, you can be yourself.

That’s my advice: prioritise your well-being, as much as you can, by taking space and setting the terms of your social life. Feel no guilt about doing this; friendships should be elastic. At the same time, don’t turn your back on your long-standing mates. A few years down the line things may well feel different, and I think you’ll regret doing anything drastic. You might even end up wanting a friend with a kid to trade parenting stories with.

It’s so hard to make different decisions to the people around you. I admire you greatly for doing it, if you know in your heart that it’s right. So keep having experiences that help you see the world differently - take a trip to the seaside; find a sailor to talk books with. Eventually, just like Anne Elliot, you will wake up to find that it is not too late, and that inside you were blooming all along.

If you’re looking for more Jane Austen content, you could join

haley larsen, phd

for a Pride and Prejudice slow-read, check out some of the brilliant essays by

Plain Jane

or subscribe to

The Literary Assistant

for all things romance, Austen and historical fiction.

*By the way, if you think you live with your head in the sand - I wrote ‘’Xmas 2026’ in the first draft of this piece, and only just corrected it in time. I don’t even know what year it is. Jesus.