COSMO: You really ought to hurry up and get sprogged up, you know, old girl? Time’s running out. Tick tock.

Out of Touch

Who invites a bachelorette to a couples’ only dinner party? No one you need or want in your life, I can assure you.

That’s what happens to Bridget Jones though. While she enjoys a glass of wine, dinner host Cosmo throws barbs at her for being single. The whole time he rubs at his wife’s pregnant belly. The smugness, the judgment, the superiority.

It’s not that Bridget chooses to be a spinster. She simply has not hooked up with the right man, at least not yet. For now, the man of her dreams, aka Mark Darcy, is seated across from her with his self-absorbed girlfriend Natasha.

Failing to Meet Expectations

There will always be people who try to put others down to raise themselves up. It’s a sad and unfortunate reality.

After I entered a non-fiction writing competition back in 2010, my husband asked to read it. Instead of encouraging me for trying, the first thing he said was “the first sentence is grammatically incorrect”. Great, I thought to myself, how is that is going to help now that the piece has already been submitted? That didn’t stop me from winning the contest.

Then there was the time I attended a writer’s conference, looking to inspire my fiction writing. I was stoked, energized, and actively brainstorming when someone asked me to share my story idea. They quickly shot it down. “I would never want to read a book like that,” they said. “Maybe if you thought of writing as just a hobby, it would be okay, but not a career”. This person who never read a word I wrote told me to hang up my dream.

There’s constructive criticism and there’s plain old negativity. When faced with the latter, don’t let it bring you down.

Living Up to Your Own Expectations

Supporting others is a far better way to boost your ego than tearing someone else’s down. Being a light of hope for someone else allows you to be a part of their growth and even their success.

Some people cannot stand to see others succeed. Instead, they want to be the one on top. They stroke their own egos and distance themselves from those they see as beneath them. No one wins in that game.

Back at the dinner party, Bridget knows that being single has its privileges too. Some of the couples at that dinner party may have wished they had the freedom Bridget had. Mark sure did. You can tell by his rapid quip on divorce. Bridget did not fit into her host’s expectations of being married with children by a certain age, but she did not have to. Life is full of choices and a woman can be whatever she wants to be, married or single.

The lesson? Don’t let someone tell you how to live your life. Take the good they offer but don’t let them take your spark. The only expectations you need to live up to are your own.