I love a celebration. I love birthdays, weddings, promotions, engagements, going-away parties, and just about any other excuse to gather people in a room and make someone feel important. I love buying gifts. I love planning surprises. I love decorating. I love the anticipation of having something to look forward to and the satisfaction of seeing someone enjoy something I helped create.
I am not particularly concerned with whether other people find an occasion worth celebrating. I think being alive is worth celebrating. I think getting through another year is worth celebrating. I think finishing something difficult is worth celebrating. I think deciding to start over is worth celebrating.
But more than anything, I think the people we love deserve to be celebrated.
I’ve spent hundreds of dollars traveling across the country for weddings. I’ve planned entire birthday celebrations for friends, spent hours researching activities I had no personal interest in, and rearranged my schedule to be present for moments that mattered to someone else. I’ve gone shopping with friends to help them find outfits, compared prices, helped set up events, and volunteered to handle the boring logistical parts of things that weren’t even mine to organize.
And I actually enjoy most of this. I like spending an afternoon helping a friend find the perfect outfit. I like researching venues, putting together plans, and running errands with people I love. Half the time, the errand itself isn’t particularly exciting, but getting to spend time together makes it fun. I don’t need every activity to benefit me personally to enjoy being involved.
I don’t think any of this makes me particularly selfless. I love my friends. I like making them happy. It’s really that simple.
And while I don’t believe every relationship should be transactional, I do believe that loving people comes with obligations.
Somewhere along the way, I think we’ve become a little too comfortable treating every expression of consideration as an extraordinary act of generosity. We talk about showing up for people as though it’s something that deserves applause rather than a fairly ordinary part of having relationships.
Of course, nobody is entitled to unlimited access to our time, money, or energy. We have jobs, responsibilities, financial limitations, and lives of our own. But I think we’ve taken the very reasonable idea that we should establish boundaries and stretched it into something that occasionally resembles indifference.
We are so concerned with what we don’t owe people that we rarely stop to consider what we do.
I also don’t think we owe everyone the same things. There is nothing wrong with having casual friendships. Not every person you enjoy spending time with needs to become a major priority in your life. Some relationships are perfectly meaningful within the limited space they occupy.
But I do think there is a responsibility that comes with claiming someone is important to you.
If someone is doa person you’ve chosen to prioritize, I think that relationship should require more from you than simply enjoying their company when it’s convenient.
Meaningful relationships require participation, not just presence.
And I think that becomes particularly important when something significant is happening in the life of someone we love.
Your Milestones Are My Milestones
One thing I’ve never understood is the idea that you need to personally care about an occasion to recognize its importance.
I don’t need to be interested in someone’s career to celebrate their promotion. I don’t need to love weddings to attend one. I don’t even need to understand why a particular accomplishment matters so much to someone to recognize that it does.
The fact that it matters to them should be enough.
I think this is one of the simplest ways to demonstrate that you see someone as an individual. You learn what excites them, what they’re working toward, what they’ve always dreamed about, and what they consider worth celebrating.
And when one of those things finally happens, you act accordingly.
I have friends whose interests are completely different from mine. There are things they care deeply about that I would never think twice about if they weren’t in my life. But because they’re my friends, those things have become important to me too.
Not because I’ve suddenly developed the same interests, but because I care about the person who has them.
I think that’s what love is supposed to do. It expands the number of things in the world that matter to you.
But I also think celebrating someone involves more than acknowledging that something good has happened to them.
Sometimes it means contributing to the occasion itself. Helping them prepare, offering to take care of something, or making an effort to ensure they can actually enjoy the thing they’ve been looking forward to.
I’ve always thought there was something particularly lovely about helping create an experience for someone else. It’s one thing to attend a celebration and enjoy the finished product. It’s another to care about the work that makes it possible.
And that willingness to get involved extends beyond celebrations. It’s a fundamental part of how I understand support.
Listening Is the Beginning of Support
I have an overwhelming number of friends. I mean that in the best possible way. I have a life full of people I can call when I’m upset, excited, confused, or just need to talk something through. I am incredibly lucky in that regard.
So while I appreciate having someone listen to me, I’ve never considered listening alone to be the full extent of emotional support.
To me, listening is the entry point. It’s how you figure out what someone needs. What happens afterward is what really interests me.
If my friend has an event coming up, I’m happy to spend an afternoon helping her find an outfit. If she’s organizing something, I’ll research options, help contact vendors, arrive early to set up, or stay late to clean. If she needs another set of eyes on something, I’ll look at it with her.
Sometimes I’ll volunteer to do something before anyone has asked. If I know a friend has a lot going on, I might offer to handle one particular task. It’s not because I think they can’t do it. I just know it would be nice for them not to have to.
I am not doing any of this because my friends are incapable of doing these things themselves. Most of the people in my life are incredibly competent. They could manage perfectly fine without me.
But I don’t think the point of having people who love you is that you should still have to do everything alone simply because you’re capable of it.
I think that’s what being helped means to me.
It isn’t always someone taking over an entire responsibility. Sometimes it’s someone sitting beside you while you figure things out. Sometimes it’s having another person care enough about your problem to spend time thinking about it. Or maybe picking one thing and taking it off your plate.
And I want to be clear that I’m not opposed to emotional validation. There are absolutely times when I just want to vent. Sometimes there isn’t anything anyone can do, and being listened to is exactly what I need.
But sometimes, I want help.
I want someone to recognize that I’m carrying a lot and be interested in making the load a little lighter.
I think there’s an important difference between being heard and being supported. I can feel completely heard by someone and still feel like I’m handling everything myself.
And with the number of people in my life who are willing to listen, the thing that makes practical support so meaningful is that it requires someone to move beyond understanding my circumstances and actually participate in them.
That is how I tend to love people, and it’s how I most naturally recognize love in return.
What We Owe the People We Love
I think the word obligation makes people uncomfortable because we’ve come to associate it with doing things we don’t want to do.
And sometimes that’s exactly what it means.
There are going to be moments when showing up for someone isn’t particularly convenient or exciting. Maybe you’re tired. Maybe you’d rather spend your Saturday doing something else. Maybe the thing they need help with sounds incredibly boring.
But I don’t think love is supposed to operate exclusively within the boundaries of what we already feel like doing.
That doesn’t mean every request needs to be accommodated. We still have individual lives, competing responsibilities, and limitations. But I do think there should be some willingness to inconvenience ourselves for the people we’ve chosen to prioritize.
I don’t expect the same involvement from an acquaintance that I expect from one of my closest friends. And I wouldn’t expect a casual friend to treat every milestone in my life as though it were their own.
But if we claim to be important parts of each other’s lives, I think that should mean something.
It should be reflected in how we spend our time, what we pay attention to, and whether we’re willing to make an effort when something matters to the other person.
And while I genuinely enjoy helping people, I don’t think enjoyment is what makes that responsibility worthwhile.
Sometimes I participate because I want to. Sometimes I participate because I know it would mean a lot to someone I love, even if it wouldn’t be my first choice.
Both are expressions of care.
I also don’t believe an investment in a relationship is wasted simply because that relationship doesn’t last forever.
I’ve spent hundreds of dollars attending friends’ weddings without once considering whether we’d still be friends twenty years from now. I didn’t need a guarantee of permanence to believe that celebrating them was worthwhile.
If I spend an afternoon helping someone prepare for an important occasion and we’re no longer close five years later, that doesn’t make the afternoon a waste of time.
The relationship mattered when I was in it. The person mattered to me. That’s enough.
I think there’s something strange about treating our contributions to relationships as investments that only become worthwhile if the relationship lasts.
Not every meaningful relationship will be permanent. That doesn’t make the love, effort, or generosity we put into it any less real.
Being Loved Should Feel Like Being Celebrated
I don’t believe relationships should be measured by the number of gifts exchanged, parties attended, or favors performed.
But I do think our willingness to celebrate people reveals something about how we understand love.
To celebrate someone is to acknowledge that something meaningful has happened in their life and that their happiness matters enough for us to participate in it.
It’s a way of saying, “I see what this means to you, and I’m happy it’s happening.”
And for me, that acknowledgment is most meaningful when it becomes something tangible.
A thoughtful gift. A helping hand. An afternoon spent running errands together. Someone remembering what needs to be done and offering to take care of it.
I want to be surrounded by people who don’t just tell me they’re proud of me but are excited to help me enjoy the things I’ve accomplished.
Not because I couldn’t celebrate myself without them. I’ve always been capable of making my own life exciting.
But I don’t think love is supposed to leave us entirely responsible for creating our own joy.
I know that not everyone will approach celebration the way I do. I don’t need them to. But I do need to know that when something wonderful happens in my life, the people who love me won’t treat my happiness like an inconvenience.
Because I don’t want to spend my life convincing people that the things that matter to me are worth caring about.
I want to love people who understand that sometimes the occasion is worth celebrating simply because it’s mine.
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