Saturday, March 2, 2013

Is Dating Somebody Emotionally Half My Age Illegal?

The worst thing about being a millennial is dating millennials. We're selfish and indulgent. Engage any 20something in a conversation about dating and they will quickly prattle off a dozen things they think they deserve. Yes, I have my own foolish preconceptions about what I deserve. But at least I have the jaded wisdom to know I'm probably never going to get those things / I'm going to die alone in Arizona.

I had a moment of clarity a few weeks ago. I was sick with a cold and my boyfriend came over to take care of me. Somehow, the gay agenda shifted into me buying him raisins and crackers at CVS and making him soup while he was on the phone with his mother.

This is not to say that he has never done anything for me and I resent doing things for him. But I have always felt a tension, as if our "acts of love" weren't truly selfless and we always expected something in return. More than that, he expected the both of us to fulfill certain roles that he had carefully laid out. I was supposed to be the responsible, corporate boyfriend who paid for everything. He was supposed to be the free-spirited, sociable boyfriend that planned our weekend calendar. I never really felt comfortable playing those roles, and honestly, why does everybody think they are Jessa Johansson?

I've gone along with it because I want to make promises that make him happy and I want to keep those promises. But at some point, I'm running around the city doing things I don't want to do just so somebody doesn't get mad at me via passive aggressive texts. Maybe that's what love is. I don't know. 

The ultimate problem with millennials is that our sense of empowerment has devolved into a sense of entitlement. I give him everything I have and he thinks he deserves more. I ask him for something and he "doesn't feel like it." And he just lacks the self-awareness to recognize the hypocrisy.  I'm sure I'm missing my own hypocrisy somewhere in this post but the lasting impression is that neither of us have finished growing up and being together keeps us from doing just that. In fewer words: I'm too young to be taking care of somebody. And he is too old to need to be taken care of.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

New is the New New

Life is good, comparatively speaking. Looking back on time when I was on OKCupid, I am almost positive that six-month stretch will go down as the darkest era of my entire life, barring a musculoskeletal degenerative disorder that I may or may not be in store for at some point in the future.

I have a boyfriend. My apartment is one block from the metro station. I haven't felt inclined to make up a nickname for my boss that includes the word "cunt" or "poop." But it's during these times of content when I forget that things have been worse and wonder if things could be better. I can't tell if it's the lack of change or the lack of turmoil that makes me anxious. I never really considered myself someone who particularly enjoyed either change or turmoil. But the things we enjoy aren't necessarily the things that make us feel alive.

I've encountered a limit that my relationship cannot seem to grow beyond. Instead of becoming deeper it's become, for lack of a better word, wider. We share every meal, thought, and moment in this circuitous vortex where yesterday's feelings are today's feelings are tomorrow's feelings. Is there anything left to do and discover that won't be a rehash of something from before? Meanwhile the bleeding of our lives into each other's makes it so that there's no longer any distinction between my life as an individual and my life as his boyfriend.

Much of the stagnancy is my own fault. I can be stubbornly distant and seem to be adamant about maintaining the integrity of our individual lives. Is the big picture here that I'm unable to take things to the proverbial "next level." Or am I just unable to see myself at the next level with him? Emotionally speaking, I dont even know what the next level is. We already share a straw at the movies, when did that stop being enough?

I don't know what this says about me, other than I am selfish and destructive and maybe need to do more growing up than I thought. I'm even more at a loss for what to do. Is it ever fair to end a perfectly stable relationship to "find oneself" among the sights and sounds of Grindr? In two weeks time I will have found out that the only fish left in the sea are one-eyed and hermaphroditic.

I met a guy in a bar recently and we've been chatting casually. The initial excitement of meeting somebody always casts a thick veil but even through that I can recognize he represents everything horrible and uncertain and painful about my OKCupid subscribing existence. But he makes life feel new.