What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

All things in moderation, including moderation. —OSCAR WILDE

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. That wrestling match threatened to body-slam me into a veritable Bridget-Jonesian-sad-girl singlehood, which I was resolutely against, both personally and as an archetype. And so to ward that off, I kept moving.

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.

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. 2. 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. 3. No matter how in love you start out, no matter how much you dance in the kitchen and lock the bedroom door on Saturday mornings, love will die.

1. I couldn’t say it while under the influence of alcohol. 2. I couldn’t say it in any sort of hyperromantic situation, like on vacation or at a wedding. 3. I couldn’t say it during sex.

Over the years, more than one of them would eventually give me some speech that added up to the notion that I was “not one to be trifled with.” That you didn’t kiss someone like me if you didn’t want to marry her, and that was far, far too scary a proposition. This “compliment” frustrated me many a night, in the face of chemistry with one friend or another who just wouldn’t kiss me.

“Kristin, a void is a good thing,” my mother said. “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.”

Ultimately, this trip was me proving to myself that I hadn’t lost myself. But let’s be honest: if you don’t ever lose yourself, it means you’re not entirely in the game.

I’m not looking for a particular person, I’m looking for a particular feeling. I wanted to feel over-the-moon in love with someone. I thought that was how I would know he was The One. So I found it amazing that couples were committing their lives to each other before they knew each other well enough to know if they could love each other. “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.”

“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.”

“All tenderness comes from your first pain.”