I Don't Want To Plan My Own Birthday
Sick and tired of it.
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#117, July 1st, 2025
Hey Shani,
How do you deal with feeling tired of always having to plan your own birthday festivities?
Hey You,
Well this is certainly well-timed, my birthday was yesterday. I’ll start by saying that your feelings of tiredness around planning your own celebrations instead of having a romantic partner who we assume would plan them for us—those feelings are valid. I absolutely remember being let down by life itself year after year, when my birthday plans, or plans for anything I wanted to celebrate, were entirely my responsibility. No one likes asking people to come to their own birthday party, we’ve been programmed to view that as sad, and to see ourselves as somehow lower in social status than someone who has a buffer person doing the inviting for them. I will also say that I no longer feel this way. These days I’m just happy to celebrate another healthy birthday, and my singlehood is no longer something that impacts my birthday (or my birthday plans!) negatively.
Everyone would love someone else to make an effort on their birthday, and because we live in a society that largely centers the individual over the collective, and we still see couples as an individual unit, we don’t feel comfortable asking for birthday plans help—it’s seen as an imposition on our friends. With romantic partners however, we just assume that they’d feel intrinsically compelled to make our birthdays amazing. Anyone in a couple can tell you that this is not always the case, particularly not in longer-term relationships. It benefits singles to shed any programming we have around the “correct” way for birthday plans to come together, and this shedding will also serve us well in relationships too, because assuming something is going to happen on its own is a great way to set yourself up for disappointment. The way I see it? It’s my birthday, I get to do whatever I want. And nobody knows what I want better than me.