What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

Anyway, everyone around me was engaged in a lot of engaging, marrying, and breeding while I remained resolutely terrified of doing any of it. I did want to have a family someday … it was just that “someday” never seemed to feel like “today.” I wanted love, but I also wanted freedom and adventure, and those two desires fought like angry obese sumo wrestlers in the dojo of my soul.

I would eventually realize that I didn’t want to be with Ferris any more than he wanted to be with me—we were way too much alike. Remember that in the movie, Ferris doesn’t date a female Ferris. He dates Sloane—the one on the ground looking up at him adoringly as he goes by on the float, wondering, How does he do it? I wasn’t that girl. I wanted to be up on the float.

In really important ways, Argentina was my first love. It was the first place I went all by myself, and I fell in love with it hard. A little because of how Argentina made me feel about me, in the way you fall in love with that crush at summer camp because he’s the first person who’s ever looked at you like that. Argentina made me feel backlit, like the girl who makes the music swell when the camera hits her, like the girl who first broke your heart.

The man she finally fell in love with was a dashing European-born, American-educated businessman who lived in Mexico City … and who broke her heart. His name was Laszlo, but Sasha gave him a cute nickname: “Promiser of Everything and Deliverer of Nothing.”

I had learned I was brave. But, most important, I felt just as free and alive and sure of where I was and what I was doing as I had on that car trip, lost in the middle of the country with my first boyfriend. And I was feeling that way all by myself. And that made me feel as unambivalent about myself as I had been about my first love.

Accents also, I would add, mysteriously make men seem older, which is a handy way of fooling oneself into warming one’s lonely hotel bed with an inappropriately young suitor, another no-no for me on home soil.

Right?! I had learned in previous correspondence with men in foreign lands that they tend to use exclamation points and ellipses like tween American girls, so I didn’t judge him for that. (Kristin-Adjacent is so much less judgy!) Also, what’s more fantastic than a “jajajaja”? “Jajajaja” is perhaps the best argument I can think of for taking a Spanish-speaking lover.

I realized they didn’t look at travel the way I looked at it, like medicine, like my chance to right all of the wrongs that might exist in my life.

The experience also illuminated another fact: regardless of how you travel, as you get deeper into your thirties you might be the only person your age out on the road at all, whether it’s in the hostels with the twentysomethings, or on the fancy cruises with the sixtysomethings. In your fourth decade, your compatriots are mostly at home, working, raising humans, getting husbands through rehab, living for someone besides themselves. Suckers. That’s what I told myself.

You can’t control everything. Just enjoy what the world is giving you.

I learned in the hostel that my ability to take the more expensive helicopter option made me a “flash-packer” in this part of the world, which basically means you are a backpacker who can afford private rooms in the hostel and helicopter rides. I liked that—it sounded age-appropriate, but still fun.

But also, I realized … done. Not like I was ready to die, or change careers, or leave L.A. forever, but I realized at the end of this day of spectacular experiences by myself that I had a lot of days full of spectacular experiences by myself. The whole Lone Woman at the Bottom of the World thing was pretty checked off. Perhaps, finally, even played out. Just as I had proved to myself that I was a real writer, I had proved to myself that I could be happy and brave and tackle the planet by myself. So … I didn’t need to prove anything anymore. I could stop. I was ready to stop doing all of this alone.

This is my best travel advice for solo grown-up travelers: shoot for the middle.

Back at home, or even back on land, all of the little things that keep you from falling in love a thousand times a day when you aren’t on vacation come flooding in, and ruin it.

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.

Everyone I knew, no matter what they chose, was at least a little in mourning for that other thing.

She was thirty-five, beautiful, smart, well-traveled, successful, and acutely aware that her romantic history comprised a long list of less-than-worthy men who had all eventually left. Getting on a plane was her medicine, too.

When you travel you’re forced to have new thoughts. “Is this alley safe?” “Is this the right bus?” “Was this meat ever a house pet?” It doesn’t even matter what the new thoughts are, it feels so good to just have some variety. And it’s a reboot for your brain. I can feel the neurons making new connections again with new problems to solve, clawing their way back to their nimbler, younger days.

She told me that since they date exclusively with the intent to marry, the conversation is very direct right from the start. You’re not sitting quietly next to each other at a movie wondering if you can get over his awful shirt. You’re interviewing. And from your first date, you’re focusing, apparently, on only three questions: Do we want the same things out of life? Do we bring out the best in each other? Do we find each other attractive?

“In Judaism, the way you learn to love someone is by giving to them,” she said. “The more you give to a person, the more you end up loving them. If love is just a feeling, and that feeling changes, then what? Love has to be something you choose to build.”

She also talked about why she thinks that a higher percentage of religious marriages are happy than nonreligious: they have all of these rules to follow that basically lead to them working really, really hard on their marriages.

“The deep feeling of oneness you have with someone when you’ve done all of the work on yourself you have to do to make a marriage work doesn’t take away your independence. It frees you to be the person you actually are. It wipes away all that nasty ego stuff, and lets your soul shine through.”

Now, do I wish I got married at seventeen? Do I hope my daughter gets married at seventeen? Of course not. But these women were certainly doing a lot less internal wrestling than Astrid and I were. And seeing how happy they were in marriages that in no way started with that “feeling,” but, somehow, over the years, grew into plenty of feelings that sounded deep and rich and happy … that stuck with me.

Israelis are some of the best in the world at living in the moment, and shrugging off possible disaster. Statistically they are also some of the happiest, which I believe is directly connected.

I was also not ready to follow the advice of a book Sasha was currently recommending to me, Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. That, I hope we can all agree, is the most depressing advice any woman has ever uttered.