Wedding Season Is Hard When You're Single and No One Talks About Why

"Teri baari kab hai?" someone's aunt asks at the sangeet, laughing, holding a plate of gulab jamun like a peace offering. We smile. We always smile. We have been smiling at this question since our mid-twenties and the smile has become automatic, a reflex that requires no joy, just muscle memory. The aunt means well. The question does not.

Wedding season in India is a mirror. It reflects back at us every version of a life we are not living. The couple on stage, the coordinated outfits, the choreographed dances, the mothers crying, the fathers standing stiff and proud, the friends throwing petals. We sit in the crowd and clap and the clapping is genuine, mostly, but underneath it there is a loneliness that has dressed up for the occasion, put on its best kurta, its best face, and is quietly falling apart between the pheras and the dinner buffet.

We are happy for them. Let that be clear. We are happy for every friend who finds someone, every cousin who posts the ring photo with the caption we have come to expect. We double-tap. We comment fire emojis. We mean it. And also, in the same breath, in the same chest, there is a weight that we do not name because naming it would sound petty. It would sound like jealousy. And maybe some of it is. But most of it is something else. Most of it is the specific exhaustion of watching the world pair off while you stand at the singles table with a smile and a mocktail, performing a contentment that takes more effort than anyone around you will ever know.

"Shaadi toh honi chahiye, beta. Settle ho jao." Ma says this on the phone the morning after the wedding, as if marriage is a chair and being single is standing and the standing has gone on long enough. We don't argue. Arguing takes energy and the energy was spent last night, at the reception, dancing to "Gallan Goodiyaan" and pretending the song's joy was our joy, when really our joy had left the building around the time the bride's best friend gave a speech about finding your person and the room sighed collectively and we sighed too but ours was a different kind of sigh, the kind that escapes when something inside you deflates slightly.

The metaphor of a wedding season is a parade. Beautiful, loud, colourful. And you are on the sidewalk watching it pass. One wedding after another. November, December, January, February. The invitations pile up like evidence. Everyone is moving. Everyone is progressing along a timeline that we somehow missed the bus for, and the bus is not coming back, and nobody is sure there is another one.

We come home from the third wedding in six weeks and sit on the bed still wearing the outfit, still smelling of incense and food and someone else's happiness, and the room is quiet. The phone buzzes with group photos. We look good in them. We look like we had a great time. We did, partially. And partially we spent the evening doing math we didn't want to do, counting the friends who are married, counting the ones who are engaged, counting the ones who are "talking to someone," and arriving at a number that is just us, alone, in a bed that fits one person, scrolling through photos of an event designed to celebrate the thing we do not have. Someone on Haven once said "it's not about wanting a wedding, it's about wanting to matter to someone the way the person on stage matters," and we read that at 1am after a reception and it hit so precisely we had to put the phone down for a minute.

February will end. The season will pass. The shaadi ka season will fold itself up like a shamiana and we will go back to our regular loneliness, the kind that doesn't wear lehengas and sherwanis, the kind that just sits with us on ordinary Tuesdays. And we'll be fine. We'll be fine the way we are always fine, which is to say: functioning, presentable, smiling when asked, and carrying something we can't quite name through a world that keeps asking when it's our turn.