When 2022 first started, I wondered if I would be like those girls from Christian colleges—the ring before spring crowd. Sure, Brad and I had our problems. It felt like things were strained even as we pretended everything was normal. I pushed for more philosophical conversations like when we first started dating. Asked about the state of the world, how we the oh mighty youth might solve the problems if only the old curmudgeons got out of the way.
Okay, I did not phrase it quite like that. But, 2022 entered stage right with my relationship in the forefront. It was the star of the show—every one of my friends was a mutual friend of mine and Brad’s. Even casual conversation with my English professor always came back to sincerely asking how things are with Brad. We were a package deal. We carpooled to campus, ate lunch together, were golden.
The ground had not even begun to thaw before cracks were forming in the foundation of most of my life in Virginia. Here is the thing no one tells you when you’re in the midst of being consumed by one person—your entire life is connected to that person like you signed a waiver for a trial period of being a conjoined twin. When the cracks form, when the trial period ends, and you’re being cut from that other person, you think you’re dying.
I made it one week living in Washington, DC for a semester before problems floated to the surface. I texted every couple of hours with updates from my day. His replies were forced. You know the drill. It’s the slow suffocation of a relationship. Robotic replies sour into the request for space. And, naturally, in a place where I did not have any close friends. I just met most of these people or only talked in passing with them, and now I was living with them. I was not even close to comfortable telling one person that suddenly my two year relationship was hanging on by a thread.
I eventually told one person. We hiked as a group in Rock Creek Park, one of the housemates hanging behind with me. She was kind enough to ask about Brad, and I was too wound up from the two days of no contact to come up with a lie. By February, the thread snapped, and suddenly a weekend trip to see my boyfriend at home became a rush to bring my car to DC, arrange for my cat to get back to Tennessee, and a quiet agreement to remain friends at least until graduation.
Maybe I was a late-bloomer, but this was the first break up I had ever experienced. I had not known the hours of staring at a wall, of struggling to look at my phone, my laptop, anywhere really because all of my personal belongings were etched with memories of him and what we had, all past tense things which make living in the present feel wrong. So people got me new things.
My sister was the first to start the trend. She sent me a mug from Amazon. It was a marble pink with the words “I will shank a bitch for you, right in the kidney” embossed on one side. Another housemate gave me a box of tissues with funny sayings. A different one had me throw the sweaters to the back of my wardrobe. I got dragged out of the house to just be somewhere else, as if new experiences could halt my mind from dwelling on the old. I got emotional intimacy from a group of people that were not connected to my relationship. That whole semester felt like I was stitching scar tissue where I had been severed from my conjoined twin, yet I was also standing on my own two feet.
Nothing is original. Every thought, story, phrase, or action comes from somewhere. We might get our accent from our parents and our teachers. We learn behaviors from watching others, learn words from copying someone else’s words. Ideas are synthesized and marinated amongst every book we have read, every person we have interacted with, every TikTok we have watched. For a majority of my quotidian tasks, I was reminded of Brad. I thought was the little things: the music he listened to, how he took his coffee, what comedians he watched late at night to sleep.
By the time I left DC, I did not find Brad in the every day. I made French toast for my sister in December. As I dipped the bread in the egg batter, I thought of the last day of classes when I made breakfast for the house. Noah came downstairs and made it his job to dip the bread. He even slapped my hand away when I tried to do his job.
When I lay on a couch, I remember the feeling of Sarah, Noah, and E curled up around me. I think of how E liked having his head scratched, and how Sarah gripped my arm tight. Sitting, doing solitary activities with other people—my friends all on their phones after a day of work in one of our cars—takes me back to evenings on a futon in the basement, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Jeremiah while we both worked on our projects. I cannot hear “When it Rains it Pours” without thinking of hearing that song being blasted throughout the house while Justine was in the shower. There are very few things in my life now that I cannot be reminded of someone else. If I did not experience it in DC, I got it while working in Minnesota.
I worked in Minnesota on crews of five. We mostly worked for the Forest Service preserving historical sites. I still think about the conversations I had—from discussions of racial justice in the music industry and in the Elvis movie, to bonding over a love for racoons with another. Sitting in a lead-painted bunk house up in Ely, Minnesota, it was one of the times I felt closest to a group of people.
This year was defined by those people. Not one person, not a relationship that was supposed to be the one person who was my everything. No. That is not how communities work, not how people work. Platonic attachments are the ones that bring the most consistent joy and pride. I did not think about then, but one night I was talking to my housemate Jeremiah. We were discussing dating, and I remember very distinctly that Jeremiah told me he did not date. Because, and I quote, “society undervalues friendships, and I prefer those.”
To be frank, I gotta hear something at least twice before I realized God wants me to learn something. Angela Chen echoed this notion in her book ACE by describing the role of expectations to have a partner and what a partner meant in a cultural context versus, say, a friendship. Chen also questioned the need to label and put the two—friendship and romance in exclusive boxes. That is what I got out of her book anyway. My happiness has come from solid friendships that uplift and prioritize a mutual community. I was my happiest frolicking in the Minnesota wilderness because I had this community of people that cooked with me, joked around with me. I cannot listen to Taylor Swift without thinking of my birthday gift. My coworkers serenaded me as I drove off to the Minneapolis airport with a rendition of “Twenty-Two.”
Most of society has prioritized romantic relationships as the number one source of happiness. It’s ingrained in us to see that point of view. Our parents ask us who our girlfriend/boyfriend is when we introduce them to a friend from kindergarten. Grandparents start asking about great grandkids at Thanksgiving. Even with how mainstream fan culture has become, we see how easily every strong friendship can be viewed as something more, something romantic. Even phrasing it as ‘something more’ illustrates how romantic attachments are placed up on this pedestal because it equates to significant other > friendships. With no academic sources to back me up, no statistics, purely anecdotally, it seems that by placing significant others in this greater than category only increases fears of loneliness, increases the brokenness that comes when a romantic relationship ends.
Now, I have not read this book yet, but I have been recommended to read Tribe by Sebastian Junger. It is supposedly a study of Western culture’s pervasive loneliness because we de-emphasize community and family ties. Friendship is just a smaller circle than a community (as I have been reminded that a community could be just ten families), and I hope to see if I find resonance with Junger.
Every person has entered my life in 2022, and it was a conscious choice to be close, be vulnerable with these people. That vulnerability—to rely on people as I went through a break up, as I was feeling lost about what to do next, even now when I’m confused as to what career I want to try on like a new pair of jeans—brought me out of my loneliness. Even now, as I sit back at home with my parents and sister, all my friends off in different states doing cool things, I do not feel alone because I know there is this network out there that I check in on and that checks in on me.