Table For One

Image via

I read somewhere that 25 is the ‘Quarter Life Crisis’ age. I was surprised that this was a shared belief since I recall last year telling my older friends that I felt like I was going through some sorta ‘quarter life crisis or something’; after which we laughed it over of course. But once I saw my ‘doesn’t drink’, ‘never smokes’ guy friend order a cold Tusker halfway through a maturely smoked cigarette, I realized that this really is the most conflicted time of anyone’s life-working your ass off for your big break, trying to move out of home and what not… During what I think was and could still be my quarter life crisis, I was going through some serious motions of ‘Am I on the right path with my job?’ ‘Shouldn’t I be saving my money?’ ‘How long am I going to sit in this drastic relationship-no wait… fling’ ‘Will I regret that decision, or this decision?’ ‘Is this the sole purpose of my existence?’ ‘Will I ever be happy?’ ‘Am I making a mistake by doing this?’ … 2011 really was the most emotionally trying year of my life and I haven’t even hit quarter life yet!

Translate this to relationships and it only gets worse. You see at quarter life as girls we are pretty much done with the trashy relationships of our recent over active late teenage years and we are looking for something with more substance and a longer shelf life. This is the age when we realize that 26 years sounds ‘Old’ and ask whether we have made anything of ourselves as we rapidly approach 30.It’s when suddenly you realize that every year you say “This year has flown by so fast!”. We also start to wonder if we should start to worry about worrying about our biological clocks ticking. Well thank goodness I still think babies will break and die if I hold them and that they smell like regurgitated breast milk. No pun, please. I like babies. Clean, quiet, sleeping ones.

Sitting at a restaurant I overheard 4 girls at the table in front of me talk about how much their love lives had changed (in their mid twenties). One of them, who I thought to be the most intelligent, said that she had never been so lonely in her life. That she could remember a time when her phone was blowing up cuz of all the calls she got from male pursuants. But the moment she decided to have standards and cherry pick the men she chose to date, suddenly, there was no one. Another girl said that she was not going to leave her boyfriend despite the fact that she was bored out of her wits with the guy because she didn’t want to be lonely again. “At least he is a good guy! Remember how Kevo was an asshole. Don’t even think of leaving him,” another girl warned her.

A week later with my friends at a bar, I brought up the topic. The discussion was pretty much similar to that one of the girls’ at the restaurant; we all now know what we want in a man, nobody wants to settle, but given the insufficiency of the ‘one tree hill’ happy endings we yearn for, settling starts to look okay and even more realistic. It is now that we have a picture of what we can and cannot tolerate in a relationship and we recite the pillars of “he’s just not that into you” like it is scripture from the goddess of love herself. This is not by any means a negative thing but it just so happens that once you have standards in the men you pick, scarcity of love is sure to follow.

When you want that pair of heels so badly, you will save for them and you will buy them. We have been taught to GO FOR WHAT WE WANT. When you want love so badly, it’s never there.

In my learning, love was designed NOT to be sought.

Not that my learning was a dignified knowledgeable and intelligent one. Far from it; very far. In fact it was the exact opposite.

But I can tell you this, you are never going to find love if you obsess over it. Never. So don’t, or do, if you can’t help it…in fact if you can’t help it, do it till you can’t stand it. Go through the motion, date the loser again despite having learnt from your past 100 relationships that you shouldn’t, but then stop and seat at your table for one unembarrassed, go for the wedding without a date, buy a you know what and an extra pair of batteries incase it dies on you at 2.ooam, seriously explore the things you are passionate about, think about everything that beautiful sunrises and cozy downpours have to offer you, think about it all and don’t think about Love.

Because here’s the thing about being happy with that person, you have to be happy alone FIRST. In my opinion, that’s the order.

Yeah, I said it!

Peace & Love

Julia Love