The Unrecognized Milestones of an Unconventional Life

As a clinician, I support many people who have opted into a more “traditional” path in life. When we’re talking about romantic relationships, we sometimes refer to this as the relationship escalator, a set of culturally recognized milestones that often includes dating, becoming engaged, getting married, cohabitating, and eventually moving into raising a family together.

There are many wonderful things about these experiences, including the fact that people who follow these more traditional paths are often able to reap the benefits of the recognition and celebration that are embedded into our cultures. We have weddings, engagement parties, bridal showers, baby showers, anniversaries, and countless other ways of honoring people as they move through different chapters of their lives. And I think these rituals are lovely. There is something deeply meaningful about having the people we love gather around us to celebrate our relationships, our commitments, and the lives we’re building (and who doesn’t love a themed photobooth & donut bar at a wedding).

Alongside these clients, I also support a great deal of clients who have opted out of many of these institutions and experiences, or whose lives simply haven’t followed the conventional trajectory.

I work with many partnerships who have embraced more expansive relationship structures, including people who are polyamorous or in various types of open relationships. I support couples and individuals who have made the decision to remain child-free, as well as clients who deeply wanted to become parents but, because of circumstances outside of their control, were unable to have children. I work with foster parents, adoptive parents, and people whose families look quite different from the traditional nuclear family. I support people who are nomadic, who don’t work in traditional corporate settings, who create their own schedules and routines, and who have challenged many of the expectations we’ve inherited around employment and labor. And I work with people who are choosing to remain single, sometimes for a season of their lives and sometimes indefinitely, because that is genuinely what feels right for them.

What all of these experiences have in common isn’t necessarily the same set of values, or even the same level of choice. Some people have deliberately opted out of traditional milestones, while others have found themselves living outside those expectations because of loss, circumstance, identity, or barriers that were never of their choosing.

But there is something that I don’t think we talk about nearly enough, which is the grief that can come from living a life that isn’t as readily recognized, understood, or celebrated by the dominant culture.

I’m someone who is child-free and multi-partnered, and I’ve always found it interesting to reflect on how differently we celebrate various forms of commitment and life transitions.

For example, one of my relationships has lasted 20 years. That’s two decades of building a life together, navigating the inevitable challenges that come with long-term partnership, growing alongside one another, and making a series of ongoing decisions about what we want our lives to look like. And yet, beyond the celebrations we create for ourselves, there isn’t necessarily an established cultural ritual for recognizing that commitment in the same way that there would be if we had gotten married.

I don’t share this because I feel that my relationship is any less meaningful without that recognition. Quite the opposite. I think it’s interesting that something can feel so deeply significant within our own lives while remaining relatively invisible to the larger culture around us.

And over time, that invisibility can carry a certain amount of grief.

In clinical language, we sometimes refer to disenfranchised grief, a concept developed by grief researcher Kenneth Doka. It describes experiences of grief and loss that are not readily acknowledged, validated, or socially supported by the people and institutions around us. While the concept is often discussed in the context of bereavement, I think there are ways that it can help us understand some of the less recognized losses and experiences that accompany unconventional lives.

For example, someone might be in a deeply committed partnership that their family doesn’t recognize as legitimate. They might spend years celebrating the marriages and anniversaries of their friends while wondering whether anyone will ever gather to celebrate their own relationship. Someone who is child-free might feel very satisfied with their decision while also noticing that the people around them are moving through a series of highly celebrated milestones that they will never experience themselves.

And for someone who wanted children but was unable to have them, there may be an entirely different and particularly painful grief around the family they imagined, alongside the experience of repeatedly attending celebrations that remind them of that loss.

These aren’t identical experiences, and I think it’s important that we don’t collapse them together. But there can be a common thread around feeling that certain aspects of our lives, our relationships, or our losses aren’t being witnessed in the same way as those of the people around us.

I also think this can be particularly painful for queer people, especially those who are not fully out or whose families have struggled to embrace their identities and relationships. There is a grief to being invited into celebrations and family experiences that you may never be able to participate in in quite the same way, simply because your life doesn’t perfectly fit the mold.

And here’s the thing: I don’t think feeling this grief necessarily means that we’re unhappy with the lives we’ve chosen.

We can feel deeply satisfied with our decisions, experience tremendous joy in the freedom of living a life that feels authentic, and still occasionally feel sad about the experiences, rituals, or forms of recognition that are unavailable to us. We can grieve aspects of a life we didn’t choose without wanting to exchange the life we have for that one.

I think that distinction is incredibly important.

Beyond the lack of recognition, there is also the reality of stigma.

When someone is living outside the dominant culture, they may find themselves navigating microaggressions, criticisms, judgments, misunderstandings, and sometimes flat-out bigotry or discrimination because of their identity or life decisions.

And stigma isn’t something that we can simply dismiss as other people’s opinions. We have a substantial body of research demonstrating that discrimination is associated with meaningful mental and physical health consequences.

For example, a 2009 meta-analysis by Pascoe and Smart Richman, examining 134 samples, found that perceived discrimination was significantly associated with poorer mental and physical health outcomes, as well as heightened stress responses. Research on minority stress has also helped us better understand how anticipating rejection, feeling the need to conceal aspects of ourselves, and internalizing negative cultural messages can contribute to psychological distress.

There is also research specifically examining stigma toward people in consensually non-monogamous relationships. A 2024 study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin identified experiences including disapproval, devaluation of relationships and character, and threats to resources. In a second sample, researchers found that experiences of stigma were associated with greater psychological distress.

Of course, we should be careful about assuming that all forms of marginalization carry identical experiences or health consequences. But what we do know is that navigating a world in which important aspects of ourselves or our relationships are viewed negatively can create additional stress.

I see this particularly among people who are in expansive relationship structures. Many people who are polyamorous or in open partnerships make very deliberate decisions about who they disclose their relationships to, including in professional environments. Depending on where they live, legal protections may not explicitly extend to their relationship structure, and there can be legitimate concerns about discrimination, employment consequences, or simply being treated differently by the people around them.

And even when someone hasn’t experienced overt discrimination, there can still be the burden of anticipating how others might respond.

Something I encourage my clients to do is spend some time processing what that stigma means to them, how they’ve made sense of the judgments they’ve encountered, and what their wise adult self might want to bring into those moments.

For example, if you’re anticipating a difficult interaction with a family member, colleague, or friend, it can be helpful to consider what you actually want from that conversation. Are you hoping to be understood? Are you wanting to establish a boundary? Is this someone who has demonstrated enough curiosity and respect that engaging in a conversation feels worthwhile? Or is this a circumstance where protecting your privacy and emotional well-being might be the wiser decision?

I think there is value in preparing ourselves for some of these interactions because, unfortunately, they are likely to happen. We can’t necessarily prevent other people from making assumptions or judgments about our lives, but we can become more intentional about how we respond and how much access we want to give certain people.

And I also want to be careful here, because there are circumstances where stigma creates very real safety concerns. We shouldn’t place the responsibility on marginalized people to endlessly educate others, disclose personal information, or tolerate mistreatment in the name of being authentic. Sometimes choosing not to engage is a perfectly reasonable and protective decision.

One of the first things I would suggest to anybody grappling with this sort of grief is to validate it.

It makes sense.

We all value feeling recognized and seen by our communities. We want the people who matter to us to understand what is meaningful in our lives, and we often want them to share in our excitement, our commitments, and our transitions.

There’s nothing unreasonable about wanting your life to be celebrated, even if the things you’re celebrating don’t resemble the milestones that other people are accustomed to.

Something I encourage a lot of my clients to do is think about ways to create their own milestones, markers, and celebrations. I’ve really enjoyed seeing people have fun with this, whether it’s throwing a birthday party for their dog, celebrating an anniversary that doesn’t correspond with a wedding date, or hosting a gathering to recognize some other meaningful transition in their lives.

I’ve actually thought it would be very funny to have a child-free celebration at some point. We have baby showers to celebrate the decision to welcome a child into someone’s life, and I think it would be quite fun to gather friends and celebrate someone making the deliberate decision not to have children.

Because in many ways, that person is also entering a new chapter of their life. They are making a meaningful decision about how they want to spend their time, energy, resources, and the years ahead of them. They may be imagining a future filled with particular types of friendships, community experiences, travel, creative pursuits, professional goals, or passions that are important to them.

And I don’t see why we couldn’t have a party to celebrate that.

Of course, having a child and choosing not to have a child are very different experiences. I’m not suggesting that they’re interchangeable. What I am suggesting is that there are many meaningful decisions and transitions that shape the trajectory of our lives, and we don’t necessarily need to wait for society to develop a formal ritual before deciding that something is worthy of celebration.

I also wonder what it might look like for us to be more deliberate about inviting the people we love into these experiences. Sometimes our friends and family genuinely don’t know that something is meaningful to us, particularly when there isn’t an existing cultural script to follow. We may need to communicate that we’d love for them to acknowledge a particular anniversary, or that we’re excited about a major life decision and would like to celebrate it together.

This doesn’t mean that everybody will understand, or that we should have to continually campaign for our lives to be taken seriously. But I do think there can be something quite lovely about creating our own traditions and inviting people to participate in them.

Another piece that I think is incredibly important is figuring out how to surround ourselves with people who get it.

I consider myself quite fortunate that many of my friends are therapists, are fairly progressive, and have done a great deal of their own questioning around conventional relationship structures and cultural expectations.

Many of my friendships are with people who have also opted out of certain traditional milestones, and there is something really lovely about having a community where these choices are understood without requiring a great deal of explanation.

Because it can be pretty painful to spend a substantial amount of your time around people who fundamentally don’t understand your life experience.

This isn’t to say that we should only maintain friendships with people who share our identities, relationship structures, or life decisions. I think some of our richest relationships come from connecting with people whose experiences are quite different from our own. And as a therapist, I also believe that clinicians can do meaningful work with clients whose identities and experiences differ from theirs.

But there is something deeply soothing about entering a space and knowing that you don’t have to explain parts of your identity, intersectionality, or lived experience because the person across from you already understands.

I think about this in my own clinical work with people in diverse relationship structures. When someone comes into my office and tells me they’re polyamorous, they don’t need to spend a portion of their session explaining why they’ve chosen that relationship structure, convincing me that their relationships are legitimate, or worrying that I’ll automatically attribute their relational difficulties to the fact that they aren’t monogamous.

We can simply begin with an understanding of their relationships and explore whatever it is that they’re actually coming to therapy to work through.

And I think that experience of being understood, without first having to establish the legitimacy of our lives, is something we all deserve to have in at least some of our relationships.

I also think we underestimate how important representation is when we’re trying to make sense of an unconventional life.

One of the things I’ve gone out of my way to do, particularly as I’ve thought through my own decision to remain child-free, is to be intentional about the people I follow online. I specifically seek out women who are older than me and who have also chosen not to have children.

And that has been incredibly important to me.

I’ve spent my entire life surrounded by representations of parenthood. I’ve witnessed people raise children, spent time with families, worked with mothers in my clinical practice, and had countless conversations with people about what that experience has been like for them.

When I was deliberating whether or not I wanted to have a child myself, I spent well over a decade reading about different mothers’ experiences, considering what parenthood might look like, and trying to understand the emotional, relational, and practical realities of raising a family.

Now, I want to be clear that none of that means I actually know what it’s like to be a parent. There is an enormous difference between observing an experience, learning about it, and actually living it.

But what it does mean is that I’ve had a tremendous amount of exposure to what that particular life path can look like.

And I think this is an interesting part of living outside the dominant culture. We are all exposed to conventional life choices, whether or not we make those choices ourselves. We see representations of marriage, parenting, and traditional families in our media, in our communities, and in the people around us.

But we don’t necessarily have the same exposure to people who have built fulfilling lives outside those structures.

I can easily find examples of women in their sixties who are mothers and grandmothers. I have many examples of what that life could look like. But finding women in their sixties who have deliberately remained child-free, who are deeply connected to their communities, who have built meaningful relationships and rich lives outside of parenthood, requires a bit more intentionality.

And I want those examples. I want to see what those lives look like. I want to hear about what those women value, what they’ve enjoyed, what they’ve struggled with, and how their relationship with their choices may have evolved over time.

This is why I often encourage people to train their algorithms a bit more deliberately. Seek out creators, writers, educators, and people whose lived experiences resemble your own. If you’re polyamorous, find people who have been navigating expansive relationship structures for decades. If you’re intentionally single, find people who are enjoying and building meaningful lives outside of romantic partnership. If you’re child-free, seek out people who are further along in that experience and whose lives offer some sense of what your own future might look like.

I don’t mean that we should only follow people whose experiences affirm our existing decisions. I actually think there is value in hearing about the complications, grief, and ambivalence that may accompany these choices as well. I’m much more interested in seeing a full and nuanced picture of someone’s life than a carefully curated version suggesting that everything is wonderful.

But visibility is critical. We need opportunities to imagine futures that aren’t exclusively organized around the conventional milestones we’ve been exposed to our entire lives.

And sometimes, seeing someone who is twenty or thirty years further along in a life that looks a little bit like yours can be tremendously reassuring.

I think there’s one more piece of this that is worth considering, and that’s the responsibility we have to one another.

While I’ve spent much of this article talking about what people can do to process their own grief, navigate stigma, and find community, I don’t think the responsibility for creating recognition and belonging should fall entirely on the people whose lives have been marginalized or overlooked.

If we want to live in communities that are more inclusive of diverse family structures, identities, and life experiences, then I think we also have to become more curious about what matters to the people around us.

That might mean asking a friend about a partner whose relationship doesn’t resemble our own, taking an interest in someone’s decision not to have children without immediately questioning whether they’ll regret it, or recognizing that a person who has built a deeply meaningful life outside of marriage and parenthood may have plenty of things worth celebrating.

It might mean showing up for someone who is grieving a relationship that other people didn’t recognize as legitimate, or making space for a loved one to talk about the complicated feelings that accompany a decision they’re otherwise happy with.

And I think it also means recognizing that our own experiences aren’t necessarily the universal template for what a fulfilling life should look like.

One of the things I love about working with people from so many different backgrounds and relationship structures is that I’m continually reminded of how many ways there are to build a meaningful life. I’ve seen people find tremendous fulfillment in marriage and raising children. I’ve also seen people create beautiful, deeply connected lives through chosen family, expansive partnerships, friendships, creative work, community involvement, and experiences that don’t fit neatly into any particular cultural script.

I don’t think we need to romanticize unconventional living or pretend that opting out of traditional institutions somehow frees us from grief, conflict, loneliness, or the ordinary challenges of being human.

There are very real joys that can come from choosing a life that feels authentic, deliberate, and aligned with our values. There are also losses, compromises, and occasional moments of feeling misunderstood that deserve some compassion and recognition.

And maybe part of what we can do, both for ourselves and for the people we love, is become a little more intentional about honoring the lives we’re actually living, rather than only the milestones we’ve been taught to celebrate.

I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing a few more child-free parties, unconventional anniversaries, and celebrations that don’t come with an engagement ring or a baby registry.