Holly's Uncomfortable Life Lessons #1: Relationships and the 20-Something Myth of Adulthood

One of the most anticlimactic experiences of your life will be the moment you graduate from college. Actually, to be fair, it’ll be the ride home after graduation, with all your dorm shit packed in the car and your mini-fridge left in the hands of a capable rising senior.

Though technically, you probably became an adult your senior year of high school and did what all 18-year-olds do on their birthdays in America—walk into a sex-shop and giggle—graduating from college is the actual moment many young Americans are forced to come to terms with their mortality…maturity. Oh, trust me, I had plenty of friends from high school getting married and having babies (not necessarily in that order) while I was in college who loved to tell me how mature they’ve become as a function of getting married and having babies.

I didn’t buy it.

Now, though, I’m 24 years old and watching the next batch of my intra-generational colleagues take their vows and procreate, and again, I’m told how mature they’ve become as a function of cohabitation, engagement, marriage, spawning, learning how to poach an egg correctly, etc.

Yeah, I still don’t buy it.

There are new skills that accompany each of these supposed linear life stages which individuals use to announce to the world, “Hey, look, I’m an adult now!” Mostly, from what I can tell based on my extensive research of facebook statuses, these skills revolve around doing things as a couple. You know, shopping for furniture as a couple, throwing couples-only dinner parties, attending the weddings of your friends as a couple, vacationing as a couple, coming down with gastroenteritis as a couple, so on and so forth. Retreating into coupledom is the definitive mark of having “grown up.”

Apparently.

Call me bitter, call me inexperienced, call me immature (that’s exactly where I’m going with this, by the way), but the idea of coupledom defining adulthood is for me a charade. In fact, I’m of the camp who believes adulthood is a made-up concept used to sell shave gel and lawn mowers. Now, living in what is now primarily a middle-class, 20-something world, I’m a minority in this camp. There are many women only a few years older than myself who love to tell me how it is. That with age will come wisdom. Or—my favorite—you’ll understand when you meet that someone special (as if by being single in the present, I’ve never been in a meaningful, long-term relationship). I am honestly one of these people who if you tell me any of these things, I’m inclined to play out scenes in my head where I’m spraying your face with a high-pressure hose . It’s not that I don’t appreciate the “I’m just trying to help” sentiment, but at 24, I’ve lived a pretty—I’ll use the word “rich” because that’s more flattering than “bat-shit crazy”—life. I didn’t come from a sheltered home in any sense of the word and I’ve experienced a rigorous gamut of, let’s call them “interesting,” life experiences. I dare not say that I’m an A+ student of life here nor would I say I haven’t in recent years made serious efforts to live in a bombshelter of my own design, but I’ll say that I would never consider myself naïve or ignorant of how the world works.

That said, when someone touts out their relationship status to me as an indication of maturity, I don’t buy it. Instead, I’m of the opinion that the need to play house is the need to legitimate to one’s self that they’ve grown up. It’s an incredibly powerful legitimation, especially since so many other 20-somethings believe in the exact same thing. And even after that first relationship more often than not fails, many will go back and try it again, because, like I said, so many 20-somethings really believe in it. And these are typically the women who love finding a girl just a few years younger than herself and tell her that she will someday know what it’s like to finally grow up once she follows her in making life choices. Why? Because the boundaries drawn between one’s coupled-up self and the poor, pitiful single girl are the socially-significant boundaries. These are the women who love having their coupled-up girlfriends over to complain about the woes of 20-something domesticity like picking up socks and taking care of sick boyfriends. Why? Because the ongoing performance is necessary if one is to fend off the feelings of insecurity, to stifle the question, “Am I a grown-up, yet?”

But there are others who learn their lesson from that first failed cohabitation that a relationship can’t define adulthood for you. There are even some, like me, who don’t believe in adulthood. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I believe in maturity. I do believe there will come a time in my life when I will feel settled and stable enough in my crazy to decide that it’s time to spawn. But never for a second would I say that acting of spawning makes the adult. And I certainly wouldn’t say that sharing a toothbrush cup and staring red-eyed at each other over watery coffee makes an adult, either.

The hard part to disentangle from all of this is that cohabitation isn’t necessarily a bad thing, at least not in my mind. There’s something to be said about loving someone enough that his late-night Taco Bell farts are something to laugh at rather than something to yell at them about. There’s something to be said loving someone so much that you bite the bullet to make small talk with his mother when she calls because he’s too hungover on Sunday to talk to her. There’s something to be said about loving someone so much that you put up with her apparent inability to keep her clothes off the floor of the closet. Cohabitation is a growing process, and as such comes with its own set of growing pains. The sooner you realize there’s no one “right” way to live, the sooner you realize there’s no one “right” way to be an adult. And as such, I’ve come to appreciate that there are a lot of life lessons that can be learned in cohabitation. There are a lot of lessons learned from loving someone that can only be learned in caring for them. And there’s a lot to be learned about yourself, who you are and what you need and want from a partner when that relationship fails.

My problem with so much of 20-something relationships is that they aren’t seen as legitimate until you’re literally on top of one another 24/7, because you can’t imagine adulthood any other way. Cohabitation in this scenario becomes the gauntlet you throw down to the world and say, “See, motherfuckers?! We’re real adults now!” And the hard part is pulling apart how much of that desire is genuine love and how much of that desire is insecurity. I watch so many people jump stages so quickly in their first serious relationship outside of college and sometimes I wonder how much of each is actually going on.

For women, I think the need for such legitimation is stronger. Women are held to higher standards for maturity and I’ve said in the past, women are evaluated largely on not only the men they can attract, but also on the men they can make commit. The committed woman crosses a status boundary that is—in many ways—made socially real by the shared belief amongst many women that the “chosen” woman is “better” than the single woman, reinforced endlessly by media tabloids and grandmothers the world over. For men, this need is less palpable and more confusing to understand. There are warm feelings that one derives from being in a relationship, but men rarely have their social statuses pegged to their girlfriend’s affections. To explain to men why men and women value relationship stages differently—especially ones that require public acknowledgement like cohabitation and engagement—is to explain exactly how the worth of women is largely being evaluated by her relations vis-à-vis men. Which is why, ultimately, this essay is categorized as one of my unfortunate life lessons and less about dating as a social phenomenon in general.