Howdy.

How’s your week?

I hope it’s going better than the kid’s behind me in lecture this morning who I overheard tell his friend that he hasn’t opened his laptop since last Tuesday. Or the guy I went out with who told me that he wishes he could just be a bug. In a way, this is about that.

DATING IN YOUR EARLY TWENTIES

Let’s talk about dating. Which, in my experience, is a painfully educational experience. I can only take so much of it at any given time. Each bad or, worse yet, mediocre date, unlocks a new level of information about myself that I didn’t have prior to awkwardly greeting another stranger in a coffee shop. Meaning, over the years, I have accumulated a list of things that I do and don’t want in a partner. Most of these things are pretty standard. Someone who’s funny, intelligent, and confident, without being immature, arrogant, or a player. But I knew that much when I was twelve.

What I didn’t think about as much back then were the things that I am learning how much I value as an adult. I don’t want this to be another two thousand word post, so I will just speak to one of them. Let’s call it ambition.

Part of the reason that I think it is so hard to make friends or date in your early twenties is that everyone is kind of just floundering in the deep end of life, trying not to take in too much water. That’s part of the fun, I suppose. A right of passage. And I’m floundering too. I want to move to New York and be a writer, so, I mean, enough said. But I suppose that that’s the difference. I have something that I want, something that I’m working really hard to get, even if it feels like I need to stand on my tippy toes, and a few dozen precarious ladders, just to come close.

THE ISSUE OF APATHY

This difference first occurred to me when I was watching Soul with an ex-boyfriend, a story I’ve told before, and I made some comment about feeling grateful that I know what my passion is, about how lifeless life would feel if I didn’t. It was a casual remark, a passing statement. But he looked at me with eyes that said he did not have such gratitude. I spent that day watching him spiral down an existential pit of depression as he explained that he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, that capitalism and labor exploitation made any job seem utterly pointless, that there was just nothing. Nothing that he wanted.

And that’s a hard thing to hear because you can’t help it. You can’t tell someone what they should do or what they will love, you just can’t. I hated that feeling. I hated feeling like I needed to dull my dreams in order to not make him feel bad about not having any. It became one of the reasons that that relationship didn’t work. He was always falling into these pits of despair over the state of the world and his place within it and nothing I said could ever help it.

To be frank, I have dark, broody, and emotional covered. I know that these are humans experiences and that to love someone is to accept them even in their pits of despair, that that’s kind of the whole deal, but I think it’s fair to say that my partner cannot be more prone to dark thoughts than I am. It wouldn’t even be responsible to procreate at that point. We would just be churning out little Sylvia Plaths. I need a little sunshine. I’ve learned this.

So fast forward to recently, when I met a guy for coffee and was taken right back to that previous relationship. Here was a twenty-something year old guy, telling me how completely disillusioned he was with any kind of work at all. Which, was even worse. It’s one thing to just not know what you want yet. That’s everyone at some point. But it’s a whole other to not even want to want something. I understand hating on the corporate world or the necessity of having to practically sell your soul to America in order to survive, let alone thrive, but to not want to do anything? He told me that the best time of his life was the pandemic because he didn’t have to work or be anywhere. Oh, uh. Nice.

THE MOST ATTRACTIVE QUALITY

I didn’t realize how much this bothered me until I went to class and watched a quirky middle-aged man, my professor, be unbelievably enthused for an hour straight about the underlying meanings of a single shot from a film. Or when a few students in the class got equally as excited and there was this air in the room of something that I had tried desperately to breathe into those other guys like it was CPR. So I sat in that room and I watched my professor gesticulate like one of those blow up figurines at the car dealership, but on speed, and I understood that there is nothing wrong with admiring people who have passion. People who, even if they are a little broke and anxious and unsure of how to do it, are eager to contribute something to this world. Just something. Cause I mean, that’s hot.

I suppose what I’m getting at is that it is not so much about what you want or whether you even know what that is yet, it’s just about wanting to know at all. It’s about having some degree of excitement for life, even when life is hard and confusing and difficult. Because life is usually these things, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable or pretentious to want a partner who makes you smile amidst the storms.

This goes for all relationships though, romantic or otherwise. It’s nice to surround yourself with people who inspire you to be better and brighter and who care about stuff. Caring is cool.

Love, m.

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