Your Friends Are Happy You're Getting Married—But Don't Love Using Vacation Days to Attend

Sometimes you need to take time off work to attend a friend or family member’s wedding, baby shower, or birthday. Chances are, you're not too happy about it.

Considering that many U.S. private companies do not offer paid vacation and independent contractors don’t get paid time off anyway, taking a day or two off might not be the most ideal scenario. Business Insider reports that solo traveler-geared site Flash Pack hired London research company Mortar to survey 1000 men and women of all ages, income brackets, and U.S. regions about their vacation days. They discovered that the average American worker receives 10 vacation days a year and spends 35 percent of those days on other people’s life events. Sixty-one percent of people aged 25 to 44 said they had attended around 10 local weddings in the past three years.

“In a life that’s already bursting at the seams, you’re frittering away all your spare time and money on other people's dreams,” Flash Pack co-founder Lee Thompson said in a statement.

The truth is, 80 percent of surveyors said they’d rather use the time off on themselves, but 20 percent of selfless responders said they were fine with using their precious vacation time for loved ones' events.”

And it doesn’t help that research shows that people may have more one-sided friendships than they realize. Maybe think hard about those vacation days and if sacrificing your time (and Netflix) to attend a wedding of a “close friend” is really all that important.