“This is going to come out the wrong way because my brain is fried, but I was thinking about you today, and… well, you’re just not as happy now as you were with him.” She said almost through her teeth, clearly not trying to offend me, but worried that she did.
This was my roommate, best friend, and frankly the only person who had fully understood the last two years of my life in Chicago. She knew every variation of me — sad, angry, anxious, free, joyful. The list continues.
As offensive as it sounded, I knew what she meant. She was referring to the version of me who, with a partner, radiates joy effortlessly. At this point, I had done the work to be whole again after multiple broken relationships, but in that wholeness, I was emitting a more subtle contentment. The space that was filled with beaming was replaced by quieter moments of bliss.
We began comparing the fulfillment that one feels in and out of relationships, illustrating a perpetual motion in our minds. There is an ebb and flow of highs and lows that we experience through the human condition, and the wavelength of that, or the time it takes to get from one high to the next, can often depend on the source of that exhilaration and the drive to seek it out in the first place. For a lot of people, myself included, that source is connection. With friends and family and partners, that connection can evolve into love.
As the conversation continued, a juxtaposition emerged. Imagine one person that has never felt in love with a partner. When she is alone, she balances happiness by pursuing her interests of exercising, cooking, and creating music. Compare this to another, who finds euphoria in being “in love” and in between loves, discovers tranquility in putting herself back together through reading, writing, and traveling. In the most extreme moments, nothing can stop me from getting on a plane just to feel closer to myself (we’ll unpack that one momentarily).
At the time, I was reading “What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding,” Kristin Newman’s memoir about spending her 20s and 30s experiencing foreign places while in and out of vacation romances as her friends get married and have babies, and then divorce and repeat. The book taught me that while a lot of pleasure comes from spontaneity and assuming a new identity in a new place, there is an unproductive void filling that can occur by adventuring when you are not fully whole.
I resonated deeply with this approach to healing. Since I was 15, I have been in love with places and people and experiences around the world often at times when I was rebuilding myself. I had no shame in growing through learning about different cultures and people (and myself as a result), but a pattern developed in that every time I felt broken, complacent, or scared of settling down somewhere, I felt trapped and needed to leave. The world was enormous and could not force me to stay in one place for too long, especially if things were out of my control.
Interestingly enough, when I am in what seems to be a “healthy” relationship, I do not feel the overwhelming fear of getting stuck. That was confusing to me because for a lot of people that is often the biggest concern, especially in our mid 20s. Why would we decide to make decisions aligned with someone else’s when we have the opportunity and freedom to prioritize our own? Why would we not fully optimize as an independent person, professionally and emotionally, before making the choice to involve others?
Over the weeks following this conversation, I questioned what I was receiving from my relationships that made it obvious to others that I was happy. The answer is security and safety, which fulfills a need specific to how I have grown into the person I am today. I challenge you to think about the same, in or outside the bounds of a heteronormative lens, when identifying your own highs and lows and what wants versus needs are fulfilled through the various sources of joy that we are lucky enough to experience in our lives.
I face conflicting pressures to either be alone and find fulfillment in independence and personal interests, or do the opposite and plan the rest of my life with a partner. Both are proven to produce positive results and still will in a few decades. Realistically, there is nothing wrong with discovering different shapes of joy in different chapters of our lives. I am not convinced that life is a pursuit of happiness, but is rather a discovery process of oneself through every experience, alone or not alone.
She and I found no resolve to the existential tennis we were playing. I looked up from my keyboard and couldn’t help but smile. The idea of two analytically driven people attempting to measure something so intangible was entertaining to say the least. Inspired by the inconclusiveness, she looked at me and said, “I think I’m going to write a song about it,” to which I replied, “Cool, I’m going to write a blog about it.” And so the search of the two mid 20 somethings to find the meaning of happiness persists.
Fondue Me 