2/17/25

In a little apartment found on the northern side of Downtown Phoenix, things are beginning to heat up. Unlike most cities in which the hue of the sky and weather match the melancholic state of being one of the unlucky ones who find themselves single at this time of year, Valentine's Day is met with the energy that it requires for those of us with someone to truly appreciate it - budding leaves, warmer sunny days, and an overabundance of questionable relationships that force themselves to celebrate despite neither recipients having much enthusiasm for the holiday one way or another. As temperatures rise, I've begun questioning the existence of relationships as a whole, and where it all fits when all you've known is the lack thereof. 

Your early 20s are a time for endless questions and fewer answers. Do I really like him? When is he going to call me? Will I ever be content enough with who I am as an individual to have space for someone else at all? These typical, very casual questions irk at the minds of many, yet without much early education in critical thinking, they typically don't take us anywhere aside from the underside of our comforters with an irregularly quickened heart rate. My 20s have been particularly troublesome in the way of will he/won't he, almost exclusively regarding will I get over myself? Or am I stuck being this dramatic for the rest of my life? Most prominently, however, is the question of whether or not it will ever lead me any place, or rather, to any one at all. Have all these questions been a critical process for being ready and prepared when he finally arrives at my doorstep with a rose and box of chocolate? Or am I simply a victim of the Hallmark of expectations leading me to believe that I need anyone other than myself to stumble into a CVS with $10 and a Valentine's game plan?

 Since childhood, many of us are exposed to such conditional expectations of what adulthood looks like. Though admittedly it comes in a variety of packages, most eventually fall down the rabbit hole of ending up snuggled into a book nook with a glass of wine and the one they had been waiting for all along. I especially have fallen victim to such Disney Channel training. Whether a result of my nearly exclusive consumption of "Happily Ever After" tales in my earliest years, or a growing process of waiting for happily ever after - if not then at least happily after - to arrive. To put it quite plainly, I've been stricken by the thought of falling in love for as long as I can recall, and despite numerous attempts at convincing myself that all good things come to those who wait, I feel I've waited mine, and many others, fair share of time. 

Two weeks ago, I embarked on a quick and hastily planned trip to Seattle as part of a Parents Outreach program in which I "yes and" my way through prolonged hours with my Father as a way to apologize for the teen angst that he will never allow me to live down. Jokes aside, I was admittedly excited, both to see my parents for one of the last college visits I will experience, but equally because of how badly I wanted to go to Seattle. Despite my attitude and admitted hesitance to speak even remotely highly of the West Coast, the PNW was certainly an exception, and for more than one reason. Beyond a clear distinction between the barren deserts and dry sands of Arizona and Southern California, and the lush ever-green forests of Washington and Oregon, the PNW offered a particular variety of something I had a deep-seated longing for: not just men, but liberal, country men who wore Carhart out of practicality rather than discovering it at their local Goodwill bins. As I packed my most Seattle-looking wool jackets and authentic grunge jeans, I found a tingle in my fingers in anticipation of the Tinder-oriented swiping they were about to embark on over the next three days. However, once I deboarded a three-hour flight that felt more like six, my reality hit me harder than anyone delusional enough to expect the finding of love within 72 hours - in Seattle of all places. Not only did I not live there, making my options even slimmer pickings, but I was, in fact, visiting my family. This was not a fun girls' trip in which what happens in Seattle, stays in Seattle. It was a three-day endeavor, ridden with awkward silences and "Well, what do you want to do? "'s leaving very little freedom for eye contact, let alone the finding of love. It struck me that this was not the first time I had had such a thought process either, frequently finding a plethora of dating apps upon my phone on nearly every journey more than 30 minutes from my house. At that moment, I realized I had fallen victim once again, but not to the idea of love in general, but of the forbidden love of a shortly-lived vacation, the Hallmark-ification of travel. 

For decades now, we have been essentially Foie Gras'ed love stories all surrounding the concept of inconvenience, with the takeaway being the less convenient and the more painful, the more romantic in the end. For lack of better terms, we are made to believe that true love can only come from even truer pain, and more often than not, this education is met without the knowledge of critical thinking, allowing this notion to go on without second guessing. This generation is one that is noticeably made more aware of things - in general - than any generation has been before, and in many ways, this dumping of information has often been more positive than negative, but there is still certainly room for improvement. Our relationship with relationships has arguably gotten worse over time, if nothing else but because of our severe lack of accountability regarding the way we go about them. Through the plethora of unanswered 20-something-year-old questions, one question we don't ask ourselves enough is whether or not we should be getting into a relationship at all. On this most intimate of holiday seasons, rather than moping amongst a shroud of "why not me?"'s, I've been considering this very question, among the multiple others that typically accompany it. Are we conditioned to look for relationships no matter how badly we actually want them? Is our lust for love placed on a desire for everything that comes along with it, or simply a want for company? Do we need to be looking for relationships at all, or do good things come to all of those who wait long enough?

This is all new groundwork for someone like me. Despite the multiple accounts for critical thinking acquisition, and even more accounts for bad enough dates that require a moment or two of self-reflection, it has taken longer than I'd like to admit to consider that perhaps I'm looking for the wrong reasons altogether. Many of us grew up with the same forms of media forcibly shoved down our throats. Shirts labeled "lady killer" for ages 3-6, magazines discussing the dating habits of 15-year-old Disney stars aimed at a consumer base between the ages of 8-12, relationships as a whole have been the peak of accomplishment for boys and girls alike for as long as we can remember. Though this is no new feature of romance, it has changed considerably since the time of housewives and working-class husbands in which "love" was a privilege and not a necessity. We like to think our relationships have evolved past such primitive guidelines to love, in that it should actually exist between two people who want to spend their lives together. But no amount of telling ourselves we're in it for love teaches us how to find it. See, part of the problem I find within this generation of dating is this very issue: the entitlement to dating for our own reasons, yet a severe lack of ability to quantify what that reason truly is. 

Despite the time of year, in which my usual and annual response is a feeling akin only to a concrete manifestation of desperateness, Im stuck on this thought process. Do I want love, or do I simply want to be surrounded by it? For the most part, - not to be too self-aggrandizing - I feel my relationship to relationships is a predominantly healthy one. While I do have a habit of liking the inconvenient ones a little too often, I feel I've also had a habit of knowing what I am looking for in broad terms, and not sacrificing those wants for something or someone that isn't going to, or rather, isn't willing to meet them. Rather than feeling pity for myself for having not yet found the one, I feel more of a resentment for those of us who believe they have. Not out of jealousy, or bitterness toward another's supposed happiness, but because, for the most part, many of them have simply found a form of what they wanted before I have. It is no longer a matter of something wrong with me, as I, and the thousands of others have often thought it is, but a sick and twisted combination of being one in a few rare cases of critically thinking about past experiences and wanting to avoid having them more than once, and simply not being in a position to find anything else - whether that be a causality of geography, academics, or social life is a null point. I know that, given my situation, save for the most absolutely 100% perfect match made in heaven, there is nothing more for me to find whilst occupying the same chapter of my life - and if there is one thing I am not, it someone who will settle for less simply because I crave the company. The important relationships that fit right are the ones I know will last as long as I need them to -  the ones I've found when I did think my time had not given me enough to find anything more. The friends, or rather family, I've made in place of the romantic connections I had thought I needed.