What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

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.

After that, one scary moment became something I was always willing to have in exchange for the possible payoff. I became a girl who knew how to take a deep breath, suck it up, and walk into any room by herself.

We sat over the river, and talked about how the river had become something unique and amazing just by cruising along on its path. How even if your life seemed quiet and typical, you never knew if around the next bend you were about to become something spectacular. Or fall spectacularly in love.

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.

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

But let’s be honest: if you don’t ever lose yourself, it means you’re not entirely in the game.

I always say that I need to travel to keep from dying of boredom from my own internal monologue. I think that, generally, most of us have a total of about twenty thoughts. And we just scroll through those thoughts, over and over again, in varying order, all day every day.

“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.”

there were thousands of places out there still. And discovering them would always be my way out of the blues.

This is, of course, why we are a good match. I am on constant alert to impending disaster, and he is constantly certain that everything is going to be okay.

And if you can somehow remember that all of life, and every relationship, is going to end, man, every moment becomes sweet.

It’s all as fleeting as a once-in-a-lifetime weekend on an exotic island. The challenge is to hold on to that.

being in a relationship has done the opposite of limiting me. It’s emboldened me to try something much scarier than I would have tried if I were alone. Maybe Rachel the Hasidic journalist was right: love frees you to be the person you actually are.