Why did my friends drop me just because I got married?

Estie: You say things haven’t changed… but they have.

Tehilla: Does my sheitel mean we can’t meet for ice cream?

Tehilla

When they talked about shanah rishonah, they never told me about the quiet.

They talked about adjustments and compromise and the First Fight. They talked about cooking his favorite meals and getting along with his mother (or not getting along, as the case may be) and reminding him about your birthday. But no one ever told me about those long, boring, empty stretches of time — Shacharis and Minchah and Maariv, first seder and second seder and night seder, all that time listening to the clock tick slowly on in your gleaming kitchen and wondering how you never noticed how loudly your shoes slap on the floor .

The evenings were the hardest. I had a part-time secretarial job in a real estate office and I was getting my degree online. It’s not like I was bored. But I had no social life. I was the only secretary in the quiet office, and while I’d gotten my BA in a local frum program together with friends, my master’s program was totally online. If I didn’t count the cashier in the grocery or my visits to my parents, I had no social interaction to speak of. I used my free afternoons to cook supper and fold the little laundry we had, and when Meir left for night seder, I usually had coursework to do, but sometimes, when I looked at the computer screen, I thought I would scream.

“Why don’t you get together with friends?” Meir asked me one evening, on his way out the door. “Chill a little, relax, enjoy yourself... what about your whole chevrah? Or Estie?”

“I invited Estie over a few times. It didn’t work out for her.” I frowned, realizing something as I said it. “Wait, that’s funny, she really hasn’t come over in what, three months? I haven’t seen the group in ages.”

Now that I thought of it, it really had been a while. The last we’d all been together was probably my sheva brachos, the one that my aunt — Estie’s mother — had made. Estie’s my cousin and best friend, and, till I got married, was my neighbor down the block, which is about as close as you can get without being sisters. (Maybe closer, if you take sibling rivalry into account...) We were part of the same group of friends throughout high school and seminary, and stayed close afterward too. The last few years, there were five or six of us, same age, same stage. We did a ton of stuff together — bowling, shopping in the city, Motzaei Shabbos pizza parties, and of course, sharing a never-ending stream of dating sagas.

And then the dating saga ended — for me at least. I had a whirlwind engagement and before I knew it, the group of us were dancing up a storm at my wedding. Estie and the others turned up with full gear, shticks and pictures and customized T-shirts, balloons and confetti and all, and we danced the night away. I danced with all of them together and each one individually, and after tight hugs I made sure to let them know that “this” — my transition to the world of married women — wasn’t going to change anything between us.

Except that it did. I hadn’t expected that. After all, I was working the same job, living in the same town. Okay, so my schedule would be a little different — bein hasedorim would be sacred — but there was plenty of time outside of lunch and supper hour, wasn’t there? I hadn’t realized then just how overwhelming it would be to have to deal with keeping up an apartment and cooking lunch and supper, and for the first few weeks gourmet breakfasts too, until Meir had pity on me and told me he was fine to eat cereal. Then there was the master’s program I’d started pretty much as soon as sheva brachos was over. It was serious; so different from the chilled Sunday BA program where I’d laughed with friends as much as I’d taken notes. Life definitely got more intense after my wedding than I’d anticipated.

But now, a couple of months in, things had settled down a bit. I’d gotten better at cooking, and meal prep took a lot less time. And while I spent plenty of time on my degree, I’d settled down enough to realize that I really missed my friends. Things had been so quiet recently on the social front. Had the group disbanded or something?