Lets talk about relationships

Something that's been on my mind lately is relationships, we'll get into why it's on my mind later but I want to talk about structure to this blog.

I will never ever use the names of the people I talk about, that's just rude. But I have a large bank of anecdotes from friends and acquaintances. I will share these along with any information I can rustle up about the first lost generation (fair warning, I'll be doing very little research unless I have no idea what was going on in the culture at the time).

So lets get going.

I want to look at the start of relationships.

We see a lot of media about the 1920's and their colorful, dancing, alcohol fueled evenings. In the urban areas these situations were one major way people could meet to start a relationship. There are also church organizations, community organizations, and family all as options for meeting that possible future spouse. Of course at this time in history there are large considerations to starting a relationship. This is a time before a few of the big realities we have at our disposal now, specifically divorce and family planning.

In the early century marriage was a lifetime commitment, and access to birth control was more or less nil. Before the pill launched the sexual revolution every time a couple was intimate could end with a child, this is a time when you wouldn't blame a person for staying a virgin until they married (not that there is anything wrong with that).

The concerns about relationships are different for today's 20 something.

At the age of 24 (my current age) my mother had already been married, not to the man she eventually married and recently celebrated her 30th anniversary with, but married none the less. My brother, a tail end gen x, got married in his early twenties. While I do know a handful of people who I only really interact with in terms of facebook updates who are currently married or have kids, but none of these people are close friends. These are people who either didn't go to college or went to college with the mindset that they would be married by the time it was over. I don't want to belittle their choices but they have moved in a very different way than the world I know and understand.

A friend of mine, S, recently went to visit her family for Christmas. Her parents, as many parents of those of us who are single at our age, of course began to ask about her love life. Hers is basically non existent, she has just moved to a new city, very busy with her job, and not in the place where she's ready to get out there and start meeting people (though we're trying). She's a lovely girl and will end up fighting 'em off with a pole when she's ready to move in that direction. Anyway, back to her parents. They first floated the idea of her attending church again, something she has shed from her life and doesn't care to return to, they suggest she could go to church to "find a nice mate." They then suggest she could turn to the internet telling her "a third of people find their mates online now!" They are fully supportive and seem energetic about her finding a "mate." mate. This is the word they use. They're sending her a message, the message is "we don't care what gender, just find someone." S has never indicated in any way (other than some masculine fashion choices) that she would be interested in women, much like many people our age she would be open but it's not her first choice.

So what can we learn from this? First, the word "mate" is really creepy. Second, it scares the older generations to see such a large single population in their mid twenties actively enjoying single life. Or, S's parents want to see her happy and can only frame that information in the way they could at her age, through a romantic relationship. S has an amazing circle of friends and rarely feels lonely (at least from what I see). Is this something that may be indicative to this second lost generation? I know many people who have spent most of their young life single, and really happy about it.

C is not one of those people. She's a wonderfully sweet girl who is hard to pin down because she has a tendency to jump from relationship to relationship, morphing her personality in little ways each time. When I met C, in 2005, freshman year in college, and she was dating a guy she had been seeing for a while. This relationship, predictably, ended, it took longer than expected but it got there. Her first true college boyfriend (Guy 1) was a tall, goofy, comedy obsessed guy. She began to gain a real interest in comedy and found her goofy side. Guy 2 was darker, moody, suddenly C was darker, and moody. Guy 3 was a balance between the two, but with an obsession with mixology, guess where C turned then? C moved with Guy 3 to a different city and the relationship dissolved, I don't see her too often any more but New Guy happened to have lived on my floor freshman year. I don't know how this relationship may have changed her at this point, but it should be fun to watch.

I have more anecdotes but we'll save those, lets talk about me.

Until about a year ago I was completely content, as S is, with being single and enjoying life in the city. Going to bars, meeting new people, making friends. Unfortunately about a year ago I met the perfect guy, of course he had a boyfriend, but we hung out that night until 4am. Eventually we kept seeing each other over town, exchanged phone numbers, started hanging out all the time. Some people began to ask me about my boyfriend. But he still had his. Eventually we fooled around, and the boyfriend found out and left. PG was perfectly fine with that, but followed it up with a string of week long relationships. Which is when I swore off breaking up relationships for 3 months.

Enter bartender who caught my eye, my friends insist he wants me but, of course, there is a problem of his boyfriend. Still well within my 3 month self imposed moratorium I do little but flirt back and enjoy the free drinks. So I run into PG out one night, and suddenly he's back in my life, we're texting and hanging out, he's having a hard time right now so he needs a shoulder (and I do have really good shoulders). And I'm coming up on the end of my moratorium, so B may become more of an option (he's been dropping hints that his relationship is not going well, including the big one in which he told me they were fighting on v-day). He even spent time at his bio-father's wedding reception to text me, not his boyfriend.

So basically, my love life is a huge mess, which I think is pretty standard for my age in this time.

Our options have become more vast, and so the mess gets bigger.

I think these three examples are pretty indicative of this generation, there are many who are fully happy and fulfilled being single, some who want something from a romantic partner, and those in between who are making a mess. I guess when you put it that way, I'm sure we're not that different from other generations.

The Second Lost Generation

I almost titled this blog "to be young, gifted, and queer." but upon reflecting on what I want to write about in this space I realized it was more about what it's like to be a 20 something right now, living in the second lost generation.

What do I mean by "Second Lost Generation?"

The term "lost generation" is generally attributed to Earnest Hemingway in one of the epigraphs for The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway attributes it to Gertrude Stein, who later stated it came from a mechanic who said "That is what you are. That's what you all are...All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation."

Referring to those young people who came of age during the first world war, their lives were pocked in struggle. Their early lives tinged by the war, in which many served, followed quickly by the dichotomy of excess and prohibition of the 1920's, depression of the 1930's, then World War 2, in which many of their children fought and died. Their children eclipsed them in what is now known as the greatest generation, forever giving the "losts" their lot in history.

You see images of these people from time to time, road worn faces living hand to mouth searching for jobs in any place they can find them. This is the era of the New Deal, big name bank robbers, and extreme poverty. I don't want to romanticize these people but I truly feel they have been given a bad historical place, as much of what we consider to be the bastions of modern life are built on their back.


What about the second lost generation?

I was born in the mid 1980's, which makes me in my mid 20's. I am not generation x, that generation slightly older than me that brought teenage angst to an art, with flannel and grunge music, for a time in the 90's it seemed that everyone lived in Seattle, at least culturally. I also don't feel that I'm what some are calling "generation Y" or the "millennial generation" which is a generation which will be known for being completely unaware of a time before mass media, social networking, and constant availability.

I am neither, and the people near me are not either. I remember a time before the internet, I used to know all the pay phones in the areas in which my friends and I were allowed to hang out, and I very much recall a time that if you agreed to be somewhere at some time you were there, or it was considered highly rude as you couldn't quickly call ahead with a "oh, I'm running five minutes late."

We are a generation raised in a "just say no" world, seemingly constantly in war, and always lied to by our politicians. Elementary school was a time in which I was in one of the last classes to ever learn how to use a card catalog in the library and research was only done via books. Even if you had internet access the speeds and reliability of the sources were so sketchy you would use the internet to find books that you hoped were carried at the local library. It wasn't until middle school when the internet became a must have for all students, things started speeding up the MLA style solidified for internet citations, and internet became respectable.

Although people of my generation were some of the first to pick up the new technologies we still hold on to some of those ideals of a time before. In the parallel between the lost generation and this second lost generation the war is our war on drugs, the 1920's boom times are our 1990's boom times, and we're sitting in the middle of our version of the great depression.

Of course without the 80 years of hindsight to understand what's going on right now It's more difficult to understand what's going on with the 20 somethings of today. I hope to explore the life of being a twenty something in the early twenty first century, I'll probably use the framework of the lost generation to help out at first, but I'm more interested in seeing where this goes. Yes, this is going to have some queer bias as I'm gay, and will definitely romanticize both the lost generation and the second lost generation.

I don't know if anyone will read this but I'm excited to get this out of my head and written for the world to see.