5 Things You Learn When Your First Relationship Happens at 25
Up until this year, my longest romantic relationship was a few weeks of infatuation and awkward makeouts that I’d shared with another knock-kneed fourteen-year-old during my freshman year of high school. My store of relationship understanding was pulled in equal parts from having watched Friends from pilot to finale two times through; having read novels, many of which featured a romance as a key plot point, at a pace of roughly 30/year since I got my first library card (a conservative estimate would put me at 500+ fictional relationships studied); and observing and cataloguing my friends’ romantic exploits, successes, and failures with a rotating mix of jealousy, pity, and curiosity. I often was asked for, and gave, romantic advice, but my mental maps were composites of lives that did not include my own.
I was an exceedingly happy single person, especially once I learned to not feel embarrassed of having never had a successful mutual love connection (if you’ve been there, you know what I’m talking about; the heady mix of self-consciousness and frustration that leads you to question everything about yourself and your life every time you find yourself without a date to a family wedding or New Year’s party—am I too picky? Too loud? Too confident? Not confident enough? Am I going to too few bars, or too many bars? Did I pick a career and hobbies completely bereft of attractive, available men capable of monogamy?—and if you’re the type who’s been happily wifed- or husbanded-up since middle school, congratulations on having skipped that cocktail of confusion). I had a lovely existence going to friends’ weddings alone and still tearing up the dance floor, lifting up and being lifted up by a circle of wonderful girlfriends, and being really comfortable in my own company.
I didn’t go on my trip in order to find someone. I did not even begin to expect it would happen. In fact, in the first conversation I had with Diego, sitting on the floor across from each other in the Montevideo hostel dorm we were both staying in, he asked me if I’d been dating while traveling, and I told him it wasn’t a goal of my trip (but that I did have several other goals, categorized and sub-bulleted, if he was interested in reading them), that I didn’t want to get sidetracked from my mission of self-discovery and appreciation of the world by an international romance, and that while I had been on a few dates here and there during the first three months of my trip, they were mostly to practice Spanish with locals versus a serious attempt to find somebody.
But alas! The world works in its own ways, and I ended up talking to Diego throughout my months in Peru, Ecuador (where he came to visit), and Colombia, slowly finding myself deeply charmed by his thoughtfulness and impressed by his focus and giddily looking forward to nightly FaceTime calls that ranged the full limit of my Spanish vocabulary from cooking repertoires to political structures to family traditions. I came back to Buenos Aires to visit him in July, before heading to the other side of the world to spend a month in New Zealand with my sister working on farms and such, and during that visit, we decided to date. Like, really date, like, committed-relationship-date, native languages and geographical boundaries and confusion over pop culture references be damned.
And then I came back from New Zealand (…six weeks early, because it was not for me) to Buenos Aires and I’ve been here ever since. It’s a little (okay, a lot) nuts, all of it, the living here and the living with Diego and the conducting of my life entirely in Spanish and the change in pace from moving cities every three days to walking the same route to the same subway station every morning, but it’s been wonderful. He’s wonderful. And I’m learning that dating someone is kind of a version of traveling in itself—a way of getting our of the comfort zone of your existence as a single person and plunging you into a new world, with new customs, new peaks and new valleys, and new experiences ripe for reflection. So I’ve been doing that reflection, and thinking about my (fledging) (months-old) (first ever real) relationship, and that led me to want to write about it. (Because writing is how we extroverts, living in new cities with only two (2) friends [who we don’t want to fully scare away by calling them every few hours to discuss new insights on the human condition re: romantic relationships], figure out what we think about stuff.)
So here you have them: five things I’ve learned from my first real relationship.
1) Compromise is really important, and not needing to compromise is even better.
That is, not going into every little moment in life with an already-decided version of what I want, versus approaching things more open-mindedly, is good all around.
Previous to meeting Diego, I mostly did exactly what I wanted exactly when I wanted. (Setting aside government-mandated things like going to school and reality-mandated things like going to work.) You could maybe apply some birth order psychology here—maybe because I’m the oldest of my sisters and had plenty of opportunity to decide on what all three of us would do, being decisive and having opinions became such a big part of my daily life—but regardless of the reason, it’s true: I tend to decide things. Things like what the cream cheese in the fridge should be used for, like what extra money should be spent on, like the relative levels of a fun that a concert versus a play versus a beer tasting are and what that means the optimal Friday-night plans should be. And when I only had my own opinions to consider, that was fine and good; I’d go so far as to say it was extra-efficient, because I had a plan for everything.
But now that my life includes someone else, it’s really not that helpful. If Diego’s friend is having a birthday party on Saturday but I was thinking we’d finally watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone together that night, I have to then unwind the plans already cemented in my head (which were cemented without checking with any other parties, to be clear) to consider the possibility of changing them. It’s way easier if I just approach the little things—like what to do with specific groceries or what our weekend plans should be—with more open-mindedness to possible options I hadn’t seen. When I loosen the reigns of my daily existence and give up a little bit of control, and get comfortable in that not-knowing ambiguity, I’m better able to think about things from Diego’s perspective. And I don’t lose anything in the balance.
2) Articulating what I need is really important.
It’s unfair and inefficient to assume the other person will just magically pick up on it.
As written about in the above, I had gotten pretty used to a certain level of individuality in my life pre-Diego, and many of my learned methods for being a functioning adult in this world rely on it, i.e., spending an afternoon alone when I have a bad day, or retreating into my journal to figure out something I’m struggling with. The first time Diego and I fought, I needed to get out of the apartment and find some pavement to tread to help me figure out what I wanted to say to him, and I really hurt him by pursuing that need to be alone, because that’s not something that he gets comfort from in stressful times. I’ve learned to now communicate that upfront: “Hey, I need some alone time to process this; I’m going to go for a walk. See you in a bit. Love you.”
It works for positive things, too; I feel like there’s some kind of ingrained aversion to advocating for our pleasures in life (maybe it’s a female thing?), but when I tell Diego what I want—for him to read to me when I’m having trouble sleeping, or cook with more vegetables, or practice his English so he can communicate better with my family—the chances I’ll get it go up. Just putting it out there, versus being unproductively and immaturely peeved when I don’t automatically get it, is a much better move.
3) I need to remember that I’m not losing myself to the version of me that’s in a relationship.
I’m finding more of myself, and I should let myself enjoy the process—I don’t have all the answers, not even to questions about what kind of person I am, and that’s okay; we’ll figure it out as we go along.
This one’s hard to articulate. Basically, it stems from how I first started to think about my identity as someone’s girlfriend. It was the first time that phrase could be used to describe me, and I was mightily curious about what it would mean. Would being a girlfriend somehow mean I was a worse, or different, friend? Or less of an independent person? For so long, I was only ever completely my own person, and I was worried about what that meant, coming into a relationship. Would I have to give up some parts of myself? Which? Would I realize as I was doing it, or would I wake up in a year and be surprised to notice changes to my personality and values? Specific examples: what kind of relationship should I have with his mom? What kind of stance should I take on PDA? How would I prioritize spending time building my own life and my own friends in Buenos Aires versus assimilating into Diego’s? How would I come to the answers to questions like that (and many more in between!) based on my system of values and my personality and my experience?
I was talking to a friend of mine who recently exited a long-term relationship, and she was going through these questions in reverse. Who will she become now that she is on her own? How will her habits, her coping mechanisms, her other relationships evolve?
It made me realize that in both of our cases, the core aspects of who we are won’t change. I’ll still be competitive and driven and thoughtful and communicative, and she’ll still be passionate and generous and empathetic and brave. But some of the ways in which we express those things may change—and not even change so much as be invented anew.
New habits will arise from the same values, or we’ll figure out new ways to balance our various identities. And that’s as it should be. That’s how we grow.
4) I shouldn’t stress about the future before it’s here.
But I shouldn’t ignore it, either; I want to walk the line between living in the moment and thinking about the possibilities that the future may hold.
Until recently, the idea of planning my future with someone else in mind absolutely terrified me. Buying flights was a peak moment of planning paralysis. Dropping hundreds, maybe thousands, of money, planning to return to one person and one place? And telling my friends to drop hundreds or thousands to come visit me (and him) here? It was LatAm-official proof of commitment that gave me serious anxiety. What would happen if it didn’t work?
It spilled out from planning flights to planning life, too. I loved imagining a future with Diego—what country would we live in, would our hypothetical offspring get my eye color or his, would his family in Italy put us up for a month if we wanted to learn how to make pizza from scratch?—but it also terrified me, because I didn’t want to paint myself into a corner, either with my own expectations or with his. I didn’t want to promise something I couldn’t deliver, or something I wasn’t positive I would even want to try to deliver when that far-off future day arrived. I didn’t want to live too much in the future and not get to spend any time in the present.
But after getting some very helpful advice from figures as diverse as my dad, Ariana Grande’s new album, and that recently-single friend, I came to realize that there is a perfectly accessible happy medium, one that includes thinking about the future in a productive way (because why invest in something if you see no future in it?) and a happy way (because daydreams are fun!), but doesn’t mean that I’m signing in blood for bassinets and mortgages and decades of monogamy just yet.
And now I’m happy, enjoying these early months of getting to know Diego and building a life with him and gaining more and more information about what a future with him would look like, and getting excited about the possibility. And buying flights, and yoga studio memberships, and new dishware, all without anxiety, still enjoying every moment of the present even as I build the scaffolding for the future.
5) Fighting is okay. Having the same fight over and over again isn’t.
I got so frustrated when Diego and I fought for the first time. I felt like a failure because my relationship wasn’t perfect. I slept poorly that night, stressed out about what it meant for our future, wondering if we’d be plagued by unproductive arguments.
But then I thought about it the next day, removed by the immediate feelings, and realized that every significant relationship I’ve ever had has included disagreements and arguments. I’ve fought with my best friends, my closest coworkers, both of my sisters, the majority of my roommates…and the relationships that I still have, the ones that really matter, were made better and stronger by the disagreements.
Because a disagreement is really just an opportunity to understand the other person better. To understand how they communicate, what they need, how they tick. So as long as I’m learning from the times that Diego and I don’t see eye to eye, and using it to be a better partner, a more empathetic listener, a more productive problem-solver—and he does the same—fighting is better than okay, it’s good. It’s helpful to unearth issues and deal with them and add to an issue-solving toolkit to bring into the future. I don’t know why it took me a few months to see that was true, when I already knew it from my relationships with my friends and family, but I see it now.
I feel a little bit silly about posting this on the internet and sharing it with you all. Maybe it’s all obvious to you! Things you learned in your stable, committed college relationships! But I want to share these little hard-won nuggets of wisdom anyway, because in reflecting on my romantic relationship, I realized everything I’ve learned applies across the board, to the kind of person I want to be in all settings. The advocacy of my needs, the open-mindedness, the independence, the blending of moment-by-moment enjoyment and proactive planning, the productive disagreements—those are things I need in every relationship I have, whether with my friends or family or coworkers. And in my relationship with myself—the thing that’s gotten me here, gotten me through 11 months of traveling and learning and living away from home, and will get me through whatever the future holds—most of all.
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