What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

All things in moderation, including moderation. —OSCAR WILDE

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 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’m someone a little different on the road, and that vacation from being my home self feels like a great sleep after a long day.

I began to need my trips like other people need religion.

I love to do the thing you’re supposed to do in the place you’re supposed to do it. That means always getting the specialty of the house. That means smoking cigarettes I don’t smoke at the perfect corner café for hours at a time in Paris, and stripping naked for group hot-tubbing with people you don’t want to see naked in Big Sur. It means riding short, fuzzy horses that will throw me onto the arctic tundra in Iceland, or getting beaten with hot, wet branches by old naked women in stifling banyas in Moscow.

I love that I am but one of millions of single girls hitting the road by themselves these days.

A hateful little ex-boyfriend once said that a house full of cats used to be the sign of a terminally single woman, but now it’s a house full of souvenirs acquired on foreign adventures. He said it derogatorily: Look at all of this tragic overcompensating in the form of tribal masks and rain sticks. But I say that plane tickets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women’s progress as a gender. I’m damn proud of us. Also, since I have both a cat and a lot of foreign souvenirs, I broke up with that dude and went on a really great trip.

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.

She wanted him to have a life about more than us, he wanted her to have a life that was more about us.

Getting married young is gambling on a game you don’t know how to play. You don’t know who either of you is going to become. If you get married before you are fully cooked, you have no idea if you are marrying someone who will ultimately be compatible with you.

Marriage is a limiter. It limits your freedom, and it limits your capacity to follow your dreams. If you do make the mistake of growing while married, your marriage will end.

“With no thoughts, with no words, what am I?” Dead. Immediately, with medium-size panic and a shortness of breath, that was my answer. Without thoughts, words, speech … death.

I eventually got used to being without words. I could still smile at people, and pass the bread, and look friendly. I was not just the words that came out of my mouth. I was still there without them.

There is the right way to travel, and the wrong way.

You say yes because it is the only way to really experience another place, and let it change you. Which, in my opinion, is the mark of a great trip.

You are aware of your travel companions, and of not being contrary to their desires/​needs/​schedules more often than necessary. If you find that you want to do things differently than your companions, you happily tell them to go on without you in a way that does not sound like you’re saying, “This is a test.”

You can figure it out. How to read a map, how to order when you can’t read the menu, how to find a bathroom, or a train, or a castle.

You know what the trip is going to cost, and can afford it. If you can’t afford the trip, you don’t go.

You know what the trip is going to cost, and can afford it. If you can’t afford the trip, you don’t go.

Attractive single people almost exclusively stay at dumps. If you’re looking for them, don’t go posh.

You are aware of cultural differences, and go out of your way to blend. You don’t wear booty shorts to the Western Wall on Shabbat. You do hike your bathing suit up your booty on the beach in Brazil. Basically, just be aware to show the culturally correct amount of booty.

You behave yourself when dealing with local hotel clerks/​train operators/​tour guides etc. Whether it’s for selfish gain, helping the reputation of Americans traveling abroad, or simply the spreading of good vibes, you will make nice even when faced with cultural frustrations and repeated smug “not possible”s.

You behave yourself when dealing with local hotel clerks/​train operators/​tour guides etc. Whether it’s for selfish gain, helping the reputation of Americans traveling abroad, or simply the spreading of good vibes, you will make nice even when faced with cultural frustrations and repeated smug “not possible”s.

you are able to go with the flow in a spontaneous, non-uptight way if you stumble into something amazing that will bump some plan off the day’s schedule.

I hadn’t found true love, but I had stumbled onto the people who were going to make my life without it happier. My life was starting to become what it was supposed to be.

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.

“You’re always rushing to fill up your life with fun fun fun. But nothing new or good can come in without a void to fill. Voids are necessary and wonderful.”

But I didn’t want to be my grandmother, never going to Paris in case it was a letdown, so I took a deep breath and went.

I am not convinced that Jesus was anything other than a world-changing ethicist,

(He was getting his degree in marketing. I met another guy once who had left the Episcopalian monkhood, and he went back for his degree in marketing, too. I guess spreading the Good News is essentially a sales job.)

it was amazing that we didn’t have any entertainment other than each other, and yet were completely entertained.

even if your life seemed quiet and typical, you never knew if around the next bend you were about to become something spectacular.

“When we are old we will smile about these times we have together when we where young.”

when you find yourself sick in a foreign country, ignore the cost and check yourself into the nicest hotel in town.

You set your expectations too high for a particular version of perfect and then you get so crazily sad when it isn’t,”

they didn’t look at travel the way I looked at it, like medicine,

they were the kind of in love that made you want to take pictures of them in the sunset.

don’t overplan, and don’t book expensive trips if you want to meet fun, single people.

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,

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

Everybody needs a little bit of that’s crazy, a little bit of way too much.

find balance. All work or all play is no way to live.

My “tragedy” felt much less like a tragedy in the face of these real tragedies, and more like what it was: a really lucky experience that just didn’t last forever.

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

if you don’t ever lose yourself, it means you’re not entirely in the game.

All that fighting, all because of geography.

I always say that I need to travel to keep from dying of boredom from my own internal monologue.

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.

Do we want the same things out of life? Do we bring out the best in each other? Do we find each other attractive?

if you get married a few dates into meeting someone, you clearly can’t love them yet. You’re just betting that you someday will.