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To The Edge of Almost-Love, and Back

posted 9th February 2010    Written by: Nicole Antoinette    CATEGORY: All Posts, Love/Relationships, Nicole Antoinette, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 2

There are two versions of the “I’m so spontaneous that I just up and moved to San Francisco” story.

There’s the version I usually tell, the one about how I was tired of being a professional nomad, how I wanted a fresh start, and how I was intoxicated with a city I barely knew.

Then there’s the deeper, more complete version. The one where I also moved to San Francisco for a guy I easily could have fallen in love with, had we made a left somewhere instead of a right.

I’m skipping over a few parts, of course, or rather I’m skipping over all the parts because now that I’m thinking about the perfect 21st century storm of it (girl writes blog, boy reads blog, girl and boy go from online to offline and back), it’s easy to see that he and I were all kinds of wrong for each other.

Isn’t that always how it is though? Retrospect sure is a feisty little bitch.

So that was then and this is now, and my roundtrip journey to the edge of almost-falling-into-someone has lead me to question what role love is really playing in my current life.

I look at my friends, the ones who are so much farther down this particular path than I am, women in their 20s who are engaged, or married, or starting a family, and I wonder about the process of loving the same person for the rest of my life.

I mean, if change is the only constant, and if I’m confident in the knowledge that I’m not exactly the same person I was a month ago and won’t be this same person a month from now, then how is it possible to be in love with one person for 50 years?

Maybe it’s not possible. Maybe the key is finding someone that you’ll be able to keep falling in love with, over and over, as you both change. For me, that means someone who’s so smart it makes my brain hurt. Someone who loves tea, and The West Wing, and Tuesday night dinners at outdoor restaurants. Someone who will play with my hair and read to me in bed, who isn’t uncomfortable with full frontal honesty, who knows what he wants, says what he means, and shows up when it matters.

And, since I’m pretty sure I can’t just Google “home address of my future husband,” I’m choosing instead to just enjoy the hell out of being deliciously single in a new city where there are a seemingly unlimited amount of people to meet and a dizzying number of possible dates to go on.

Oh, and that guy I moved here for? We’re friends. Or, more honestly, I’m working on us being the kind of friends who can talk and laugh and drink vodka and watch The Rachel Maddow Show without accidentally making bad decisions.

We’ll see how that goes.

Photo credit: suchitra

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