A Young Life to Live

I’m only moving eight miles away, but I’m saying good-bye to this place like it’s an exotic, beloved foreign land that I may never see again. I’m really sad about leaving my house, and my life. But how lucky is that? It means despite the lonely moments, the nights in bed saying “I love you” to no one just because it had been so long since I had said “I love you” before going to sleep, that I was happy here. Even though this book was all about my struggle to NOT be a sad, single girl looking for love, that does not mean I was not often a sad, single girl, and I was absolutely looking for love. I just thought love was going to look different than it turned out to look, and so I ran away from it a lot. But my story wasn’t ultimately a sad story. Being a single girl was pretty spectacular. Thank God I’m blue about changing my life. It means I’m trading awesome for awesome.

I was sick to my stomach. I was no longer the girl with an Argentine lover. Now I was just alone, and thirty-seven, and going home to get back on Match.com. It was only in that moment that I realized what a life raft Juan had been for me all of those years alone on my couch, even when we weren’t in contact. He was out there. He made me different. He was a possibility, a maybe, just maybe. And that was now over.

As we drove, Parker and I talked a lot about timing. We had both been girls and women who were very good at setting goals, going after them, and making them happen. Her inability to get pregnant when she wanted was flying in the face of that. Her husband had come along sooner than she hoped, so she hadn’t gotten to choose how long she got to be single, either. I had tried to push pause on my relationship with Ben (and settling down in general), and then restart it when the time was right for me. But Ben’s life hadn’t paused. He had moved on, and the love I went back for was no longer there in the same way. The connection was, but the time had passed for his heart to be really available. Maybe he was too different, or maybe the effects of time and history had made me less attractive to him. But things had kept moving. Furthermore, the world hadn’t paused. The good ones had been snatched up, just like people always said they would be. I had always scoffed at this, because I knew so many fantastic guys who were single into their thirties and forties. But chasing some of those fantastic guys unsuccessfully for years had shown me what everyone was talking about when they said “the good ones.” They meant the ones who want to commit, who are excited to build a family and life with a grown-up. Those do disappear. I didn’t regret my path of fun and freedom for a moment, and really didn’t wish I had settled down earlier, but there was going to be a cost. My friends who met their spouses young have often told me they live vicariously through my adventures. That they sometimes think about the oats they never got a chance to sow. There is a trade-off for both their choice and mine. I used to beat my head over Vito, when he was struggling for years over how he wanted to be with me, but also wanted a life that wasn’t compatible with my life. He couldn’t believe that he couldn’t have everything, and so just wouldn’t choose. And I would tell him, so full of twentysomething wisdom, that life is almost never about choosing between one thing you really want and another thing you don’t want at all. If you’re lucky, and healthy, and live in a country where you have enough to eat and no fear that you’re going to get shot when you walk out your door, life is an endless series of choosing between two things you want almost equally. And you have to evaluate and determine which awesome thing you want infinitesimally more, and then give up that other awesome thing you want almost exactly as much. You have to trade awesome for awesome. Everyone I knew, no matter what they chose, was at least a little in mourning for that other thing.