Innocence and experience
Godard, Lillian Fishman, and hurrying up to wait
I spent the better part of my twenties in one relationship. In many ways, we grew up together, but remained children the whole time. We played house on-and-off over the years, convincing ourselves we had time to be independent when we pursued graduate degrees at separate institutions. We loved each other deeply. We clung to our history. We were content with being college sweethearts, unembarrassed when confronted with a sea of couples who’d found each other after they found themselves. He knew me better than anyone, and vice versa. We were best friends, roommates, and at times, allowed ourselves to be the other person’s entire world. We rejected the experience of experience in lieu of the comfort of being together.
Our relationship had weathered several moves, job changes, and disappointments with the expectation we’d keep going no matter what. We hadn’t really faced the inevitable question of what to do with ourselves if we grew differently. All of sudden we did.
We broke each other’s hearts when, six years in, we discovered we were no longer the people who fell in love in a college dorm when we weren’t yet of drinking age.
We decided, at different moments during our long break-up timeline, that we needed to experience a world beyond each other. In the end, it was me who wanted experience, after six years of wanting the opposite.
wrote recently (in the most stellar essay I’ve read on this platform in a long time) about the dichotomy between the experience one’s twenties promises and the safety of maturing within an all-encompassing love through the lens of Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney. Fishman argues it’s a radical position Rooney takes in her depiction of one character’s consideration that the freedom of her twenties was perhaps not as worthwhile as the alternate future she could’ve had if she’d settled down with her childhood love.What’s radical isn’t the very idea of the twenties being overvalued, but instead the question itself marking a departure from the self-actualization obsession of our current culture. We crave, in Rooney’s words, the feeling that “no door [is] shut behind us.” Our generation of young women has been conditioned into desiring the pursuit of experience, claims Fishman, and it’s true. In my previous relationship, I often felt at odds with those friends of mine who hadn’t yet settled into their momentary version of forever, and I won’t lie to you and tell you I didn’t, at times question, what it was like on the other side.
But during that relationship, I chose, and continued to choose, that person with whom I stayed safely behind the closed door. Those years weren’t lost. I don’t regret the six years we spent in harbor of certainty. And I also don’t regret when that safety came to an end. It gave me experience, which admittedly, I did desire. But I don’t see the end of that relationship as a failure of the project of safety.
That relationship showed me the possibility of security. That should I choose to be with someone for a long-term period, I could trust I wouldn’t miss out on things I didn’t value at that particular point in time. Only I had to discover those things after the relationship.
Parties where I vied for the attention of people I wasn’t interested in. More time dedicated to my job, often at the expense of my art (I bring this up to tell you that when I’m in love, I find it more generative than when I’m not, but I’m not claiming that’s the case for everyone). Nights spent alone, wondering whether or not I was searching too hard for something that wouldn’t find me again.
Of course, love did find me again. Again, I find myself valuing the promise of our future rather than imagining what it would have been like to finish my twenties as a single woman—or begin my thirties that way. The promise of continual self-discovery isn’t mutually exclusive with being single. I discover this again in the experience of being in a committed relationship.
However, I do see the period when I was single as a critical moment when I articulated that whatever relationship I found myself in next, I needed to remain invested in myself as much as I invested in the other person. Being younger in a relationship makes it easier for the lines between couple and self to blur, but it isn’t the rule. Some of the most self-actualized people I know are in long-term relationships. I was maybe less good at that part than I hope I am now.
A few weeks ago, my current partner and I fell into an argument about the future. I was ready for something sooner, and he wasn’t. It was silly to argue over and I started the fight because impatience has always been my default state. There’s more there there, but I’ll spare you the details and reduce our argument to the dichotomy I’ve seen come up time and again in disagreements in romantic relationships: one person asks, “Why hurry?” and the other, “Why wait?
Recounting this argument to my friend, they told me how in the first year of their long-term relationship, they had a conversation with their partner that went a little like this: There will be times when we want different things, but we’re in this despite those differences.
We had just watched Godard’s A Woman is a Woman. The heroine Angela schemes to convince her boyfriend into having a baby when he’s not ready. We watched it the same day as the argument had went down, and I found myself relieved to see a similar “comedy or tragedy” play out in earnest slapstick antics. Angela is in a hurry, Émile wants to wait—although he’s made no indication that someday is a possibility. Of course, my mind wandered to the very gendered dichotomy the film sets up as a somewhat reductive reflection of real life. The woman isn’t afraid of settling down whereas the man has commitment issues to the future, even if he’s committed in the present.
That gendered essentialist view is not as rich or interesting as the conflict within. Why can’t either person resolve to meeting halfway, that is, where they both are in the present moment? Why, as Angela laments, when we’re with a person, we’re not really with them, and the other way around? When will both people be ready for one experience to end and a new one to begin? Does one person really have to forgo their independent choice making to ensure the endurance of the relationship?
I was misguided to think being in love meant wanting the same thing, at the same time. If one person wants something different, then that means it’s not the right time to pursue that thing jointly. This is not to say one partner needs to bow to the other’s demands, but the self’s desire to choose independently all of the time must occasionally be abdicated to make the other happy. I was uncomfortable being the one to choose, but freer when I learned I had to own up to that choice.
It surprised me to discover that the argument our argument boiled down to a choice between experience and comfort. While I’m not claiming my boyfriend desires the experience of being single, he does value the experience of waiting. There’s nothing wrong with this, just as there’s nothing wrong with my desire. To him, there’s more to discover in the experience of our admittedly young relationship. For me, there’s something to discover in the comfort of our future relationship. But I imagine, like Eileen in Beautiful World, the path that we’re choosing now will be the key to understanding wherever we arrive later.
Fishman quotes Mark Greif in her essay that experience as a concept gives us the sense that we’re “really living” but conversely, makes us “unsatisfied with whatever life we obtain.” That haunting inadequacy, as Fishman calls it, has always deterred me from idealizing the unknown, and pushed me towards envisioning a future with certain tangibilities.
But then again, the times I’ve chosen experience have highlighted how my desire for comfort. Who would I be now without that choice, whether it was mine to begin with or happenstance? How would I know what I wanted without the experience of not having it?
At almost twenty-nine and a half, I’ve come to tell myself certain stories to comfort myself. Life is slower than it was in my early twenties. It’s not totally out of bounds to think about the big next steps. I do want to participate in certain grand traditions of being a person. I’m in love and will continue to be, why wait?
Every story has its counterpart of experience. I still go out dancing most weekends. I like waking up alone some mornings, the whole day spread in front of me, the little ways I know how to fill it. It’s fun to daydream about that glittering someday that’s still not quite tomorrow. I’m in love and will continue to be, why hurry?
so lovely to read this 💕
This was a lovely read