Young and Committed?

Where do you go when you are 22 and in a long-term relationship?

I don’t know.

In truth, I used to believe that it was impossible to be in your early twenties and in a long-term relationship. I saw dating as an organic process. You meet others. You date others. You sleep with some of these people. You have one or two relationships; and finally, presto, you move in together. This is how I thought everything worked.

I was wrong.

My past reads like a deranged version of this process. I meet people. I sleep with people. I have awkward encounters with these people; and, from the small pool that I do not alienate, I move in with immediately. I am almost twenty-four years old and I have gone “full circle” in this process. It is at this point that I wonder where do people like me go?

I see a lot of people my age, people who have been in long-term relationships, looking around, unsure, about what they are supposed to do. If you have had a two plus year relationship with someone, you are in the stale phase, the wear your old laundry phase, the limited sex phase, the domestic phase. The funny thing is, as I have said before, this phase does not coincide with being in your early twenties.

To begin with, the average twenty-something has the emotional stability of a middle schooler. We don’t know what we want let alone what we need to do to support ourselves. The early twenties character is not prepared for serious commitment choices, such as whether to move in or to change cities with someone, but to make meaningless decisions like what should I drink tonight?

The early twenty-something is not shallow but in a state of rapid transition. We are the children of America the day after Halloween, riding sugar highs and insulin lows. We don’t know whether to go back to school or to take a job with our old man—so to speak. Our minds are skewed and so is our ability to make rational choices about the future.

I don’t need advanced research to prove my point either, just look at my life. I have one friend, “Jonathon,” who broke up with his yearlong girlfriend to take a job across the country. After being away two weeks, he decides that he misses her and drives across country to get back together. One week later, he breaks up with her. Two months later, he gets fired and returns to his old city. The pair are living in the same city again but this time not together. Another friend, “Linda,” broke up with her two-year girlfriend because she wanted to be free to play the field. Linda and her girlfriend went threw a weeklong fight to get to this point. A month into the decision, the pair still talk everyday and have plans to be together this summer. These are the choices I am talking about. These are the what-the-hell-are-you-thinking decisions that come a dime-a-dozen amongst my friends.

Under other relationship circumstances these choices would be fine, weird and stupid but fine. This is not the case. These are instances of adults choosing to fuck long-term relationships not because of bad luck but because they can. It is like building a house of cards and then testing whether the house can survive an Earthquake. It does not make sense. These decisions do not make sense.

Now we are back at the beginning. Why are semi-adults, i.e. sugar-high middle schoolers, placing themselves in choices and relationships that they cannot handle? We are greedy. Our recent access to 24-hour bars and no school has fucked with our heads. We believe that because we have a little freedom that we are suddenly able to skip the baby steps of decision-making. Wrong! We are still getting sick at bars, still getting screwed by out inability to make good decisions. Just because we can keep someone for a year, does not mean that we are capable of being in a real long-term relationship. I argue that until we earn and keep health insurance, or some other symbol of dependability for a year, we should leave couple-dome to the big-kids.