I have been to a lot of weddings in the last year or so. Weddings on weddings on weddings. For a person who is single, my Instagram is overflowing with photos of floral arrangements, bridesmaid dresses, and bachelorette party hashtags.

I’ve got another one coming up next weekend and another one at the end of the summer. All of the real adults I work with promise me that this season of never ending weddings is actually going to last for another five years. If this is a real and true fact, it has the primary benefit of presenting me with ample opportunities to wear my expensive bridesmaid dresses.

(They’re all nice fun dresses — many thanks to the lovely brides for picking such nice, fun dresses — but the reality is that other weddings are basically the only occasions to wear such things.)

Having purchased a few now, I can also spot them a mile off. “I see you, girl, I see you re-wearing that bridesmaid dress. I see you and I respect it.”

A toast to getting some mileage out of bridesmaid dresses.

Watching someone you have known forever get married is such a strange and surreal experience. Last month I was in my college roommate’s wedding and the whole weekend gave me whiplash from the alternating sensations of, “EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT FOREVER!” and “Some things never actually change.”

On the morning of the ceremony, I sat around with my dear friend and two of her other bridesmaids discussing her Hogwarts sorting, as is standard practice before grownup activities like weddings. The other two ladies in question were her younger sister and childhood best friend. Our bride-to-be said that as an adult she has come to accept that she is a Hufflepuff, a sentiment I fully agreed with. The people who have known her forever, however, vehemently disagreed — she’s all Ravenclaw. (Given that they knew her at the age when she would have been sorted, their votes had automatic priority over mine.)

It made me think about the way that friends tend to become somewhat frozen in time in our understanding of them. My college friends are so tied to particular moments in my own life and understanding of myself that when I’m around them I forget that it has been four years since graduation. An entire class of students has entered college and then graduated in the time since we’ve left.

To me, she’s still the first person I met in college. The girl who poked her sleepy head around through the bathroom door after my army of child laborers woke her up at 7am because we drove all night to get there and be the first ones in the building. (Gotta claim the best bed!) I picture her in multicolored scarves and gold cowboy boots with fringe.

She’s also that mythical unicorn of twenty-somethings: a person who has her shit together. She always was — really. Her college self was only frazzled because balancing your love of bright colors and tassels with your need to have Senate internships and shit is exhausting.

And sure enough, even at her own wedding, she was still more concerned with making sure everything went smoothly and that everyone else was happy than with basic self-care tasks like eating. Watching our other roommate haggle with her about squeezing bites of a sandwich roll between all the primping and photographing brought on a giant wave of nostalgia-packed feels. It felt like college and that little piece of home that these people represent to me.

Except this wasn’t college. It was a wedding day. It was watching someone who was so essential to starting a new chapter in my life start a new one in her own.

I love weddings. I have all sorts of squicky feelings about marriage and weddings when I try to imagine those things for myself, but holy shit do I love other people’s weddings. I love how excited and happy everyone is and I love that for all the ways the whole game is formulaic, people make all these choices that leave guests with the feeling of, “Aah, yes, that’s all very them.”

Because even in this big something new, there are always all these little hints of the things that stay the same.