Jumping for Love
On celebrating friendships in your 30s
To celebrate Valentine’s Day, Devin and I went with friends to the trampoline park. I’ve never understood why anyone would want to go out to eat at a fancy restaurant – or any restaurant – on February 14th, when there are crowds, something Midwesterners (myself included) are generally allergic to. Why eat fancy food surrounded by strangers when you can risk serious injury with friends?
I’d be lying, though, if I said we’d cleverly planned to celebrate the holiday that way. A short while before, when a group of us were unironically eating dinner at the Olive Garden, we came up with the brilliant idea to go jumping during the last hour the place would be open (fewer crowds). We wanted to go on a random night – like a Tuesday – so we made plans to go on the 14th, completely forgetting it was going to be Valentine’s Day.
When we realized our oversight, we decided to roll with it. Because the Midwestern Gods smiled upon us, Tuesday also happened to be half-price night. And as my friend Jerry said, “$10 is a small price to pay to soar through the air like a GOD.”
There are one-hundred articles about how to maintain friendships in your 30s and beyond, but I think the secret is having zero pressure about what you do when you hang out. The stupider the activity, the better. One evening we decided to go to Michaels and buy supplies to make shadow box art. We’d observed that 90% of the (real and possibly expensive) art at my mom’s house consisted of shadow boxes with decorative items glued inside, and we wanted to see if she’d notice if we replaced a few with our homemade versions. (She did.) I realize this is not a ringing endorsement for the cool stuff you can do when you’re sans children in your 30s, but it’s what we do.
The even more low-maintenance activity we often do with friends is to co-watch possibly the worst reality show on television, The Challenge (on MTV), and text about it in real-time. The show, which features physical competitions and a lot of trashy drama, gave us the false impression we might be good at the Ninja Warrior Course at the trampoline park. “Give us the Warrior Passes!” we said with far too much confidence. Almost immediately, Jerry was in the horizontal position, which provided great entertainment for the kids who’d not yet cleared out of the trampoline park. I very quickly realized my arms are for decoration only when I immediately slid off the first dangling rope I encountered.
In a recent New York Times article, author Catherine Pearson wrote about the importance of celebrating platonic love. I can think of no better way than to get blisters and sore muscles together on Valentine’s Day. I’m not sure what the employees at Culver’s thought we’d been up to when we arrived at an odd hour on February 14th, sweaty and in desperate need of some ice cream, but the answer was celebrating friend love.
For those of us who are not Challenge competitors and don’t live in a house with 30 of our closest friends, we have to keep inventing our own excuses to get together, even if they involve paying $10 to fall flat on our faces.
