ANAÏS

The plane touches down in Montreal, and here’s what I do. Actually, it’s so stupid and embarrassing that I almost don’t want to say it. The plane touches down at Montréal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport, and I’m clenching the armrest and turn to the seat next to me and I swear I’m ready to put my hand in the person sitting next to me’s hand, something that I always used to do with my brother, but, well, for one, you can’t do that with strangers, and what’s really worth mentioning is that there’s no one there. No one in the seat. It’s first class and there’s no one next to me even though every other seat in the section is full. So, we touch down, like I said, and I’m shaking for no reason I can discern, digging my nails into the blue leather so hard that I leave scratch marks, and we’re skidding along the runway and finally get to the gate. The pilot says, “Bienvenue à Montréal” incredibly loud. Everyone around me is clicking their seat belts undone, you know, that sound that is so totally distinctive, and I’m still sitting even when the flight attendant opens the gate and all of the first class passengers start leaving and then everyone else in coach does, too, and I’m hearing “au revoir, au revior” every second and when the plane is finally empty, when I hear the last clatter of an overhead bin being emptied, I unclick my seatbelt, too, and finally stand up. I hit my head on the compartment. The flight attendant, she’s watching me closely and she asks me if I’m okay, first in English, then again in French, adding, “Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle?” I nod and rub my eyes, and she goes to open my overhead container but doesn’t say anything because she has no idea which language to continue in, and this sort of pleases me for whatever weird reason. She gets my carry-on—it’s this beaten-up-as-shit tan bag I’ve had for a million years—hands it to me, and then looks over my shoulder at the vodka mini-bottles sticking out of the seatback pocket. I nod again and she says, “Enjoy Montreal” as I walk past her and out onto the jet bridge. And then I pass out.

I wake up in an airport wheelchair in that little room where they take people who are suspicious or carrying produce or both, and I see two fat guards eating big sandwiches and plates of fries and talking to each other. One notices my eyes are open and says to me, “Ça va?” and I say, “Yeah, I’m fine” in English but he continues on in French and asks me if I need to see a doctor or if I need some water. And I reply, “I think I made a mistake.”

Here’s the thing about big decisions. About figuring out big things. Once you do, everything is sort of…funneled through that. Whatever big thing you’ve figured out controls all of your thoughts, basically. So when you figure out that very little matters, and the only thing that can shake you back to living a reasonable life, maintaining a reasonable existence (or at least one that’s not haunted) is like, death or something else just as big—nothing in your life from that point forward has the right feeling anymore. I kind of always knew my brother thought like that, but never really got it. I do now.

Here’s the thing about my parents, which is what I thought about the whole plane ride over. I don’t remember them ever reading me a bedtime story, or having spent a Sunday night before Christian’s and my birthday making cupcakes for school. You know, doing the things from the films that no one took us to see. But here’s the thing about it all, and the reason why I knew I made a mistake the second I woke up in that little room. Those things, the family trips and cookie-baking sessions, they aren’t things we ever knew parents were supposed to do, or at least never stopped long enough to think that they were. I didn’t really resent my parents or hate them or get angry at them or anything because there was never a reason to even stop to think that might be an appropriate thing to do. Like, I had my friends and my life and most importantly Christian, my brother, and it’s not the kind of thing where you stop and are like, “Oh, it’s not like this for anyone else.” Like, it’s not that I wasn’t aware that most people’s parents were around more than ours, or around at all, I just wasn’t hyper-aware that there was something so fundamentally wrong with the way we were raised (or not raised, I guess). Never had much of a reason to believe that nannies were any less qualified to do the things that everyone else’s parents were doing until Christian and I split, really. That’s why it’s really hard to blame my brother, because I basically had the same reaction to our upbringing as he did. He just thought everything through more than I did, and thought it through sooner. Was always more about the big picture than me. Didn’t really have much else to focus on besides that. I always felt sorry for him, honestly. He was always so angry. I never knew why. I get that now, too.

But all of this shit, this self-indulgent, troubled-childhood shit, this putting-together-the-pieces-of-the-life-that’s-no-longer-mine-while-sitting-on-a-plane shit, none of that’s actually the part that’s embarrassing. Neither is what happened with the flight attendant, nor passing out in the airport. Okay, I drank too much and got anxious. This really isn’t news or anything. The part that’s so absurd is that after I clear customs and get into the main part of the airport, I take a look at the departures board, and not three hours later, I’m sandwiched between an Asian guy and a teenage boy on a plane to New York. And I’m going to find my brother.

Image by Jacob Van Loon.

WHEN I MET my girlfriend, she couldn’t tell what gender I was and I couldn’t tell what country she was from. It was October 2009, and we’d both found ourselves at the only lesbian bar in Prague, where we were both studying abroad.

We didn’t actually introduce ourselves to each other until after three hours of making out on the dance floor, when we were about to leave the bar. I took her back to my dorm room, and the next morning as she was leaving I gave her my Czech phone number, but told her to Facebook me in case I’d misremembered it. She friended me a few hours later, and I went through her photos to try to get a clearer picture of what she looked like; I’d kind of forgotten, since I had been really drunk and, furthermore, not really engaged in our interactions. More stalking revealed photos of her in a cheerleading uniform. “Three words: lesbian French cheerleader,” I texted to a friend, “It’s not the walk of shame, it’s the walk of triumph.”

She texted me first, or I probably wouldn’t have seen her again. I didn’t make it easy for her to get to know me — we both knew what we were after with those ‘hey want to come over’ texts, so why pretend it was anything else? — but about a month into our casual sex and hanging out, something gave. We cared about each other.We decided we were actually “together,” whatever that meant — knowing I would leave Prague a month after that, in December.

We had agreed that we would break up when I left. What was the point of long-distance relationships? What was a relationship without sex? Neither of us thought we could do long distance. Furthermore, we thought we would never see each other again anyway, or at least not for a long time, as I went to school in New York and she lived in France. All we could do, and all we resolved to do, was try to live in the moment, to cherish the moments we could spend together, and move on with our lives.

But I don’t think either of us made an effort to move on. Instead, I learned that I could text international numbers from my phone (and then I learned how much texts to international numbers cost). We Skyped, emailed and Facebooked (and drunk dialed) often, all while making attempts to seem like just friends. It didn’t feel like we’d broken up. I decided to go back to Prague for spring break, using money I’d saved up from my summer internship. I asked my then ex-girlfriend if she wanted to see me again. She said yes. This is when we first decided to try being in a long distance, open relationship together, almost a year ago.

We knew ourselves well enough to know that we would probably not be able to remain “faithful” to each other in a monogamous sense, but we could also separate sex from emotional attachment. If we still had feelings for each other, why let distance and sex with other people get in the way of that? We agreed to follow a set of rules we came up with together. We told each other never to feel as if we had to hide anything from one another, and promised to tell each other if we realized our feelings for each other had changed.

Still, as we waited for March to arrive, distance strained us. You can tell on Skype when people aren’t that interested in what you’re saying, when they’re browsing other pages while listening to you speak, or regularly late to Skype dates.

March came, and there I was in Prague. The second night I was there, we went to a bar, talked about our future, concluded that we basically had no future, and then decided that the only logical course of action was to break up again when I left at the end of break. Our feelings for each other had dissipated anyway, or so we thought.

But it felt so normal to live with my girlfriend in her apartment, to plan around each other’s schedules, to play escalating games of truth or dare in nightclubs using other people. Our feelings for each other returned, perhaps stronger than before. Towards the end of the week, we returned to the same bar where we had first met. There, on the dance floor, we told each other we loved each other for the first time. Two days later, I left, and we broke up, again.

I returned to New York and spent the next few nights sitting in the dark listening to Dashboard Confessional. But my sulking was short-lived, because three days after I was back in the states, my now ex-ex-ex-girlfriend informed me that she was looking for summer internships in New York so she could come and see me again. She asked me if I wanted to be with her, at least until it was certain she couldn’t come, at which point we would finally stop trying to make it work. I said yes and we re-entered our long distance, open relationship.

While we were together in New York that summer, I realized that it wasn’t even the sex that made the distance hard to bear, but the little things, like being able to hold hands, or kiss, or cuddle in bed at night, or have conversations about things we both went through together, instead of recounting experiences we had separately to each other. Even though we said we wouldn’t, we started tentatively speculating about a future together. But even if it was fun to talk about what a future together might look like, we knew at the same time that it would be extremely difficult, and maybe not worth the effort.

The last time I saw my girlfriend in person was in October. She came back to New York for a week to interview with a couple of companies for possible internships in New York next year, just in time for our one year anniversary of meeting each other (we don’t really know when we actually became a couple, so our initial one-night-stand date will have to do). The next time I’ll see my girlfriend is this month, when I’ll be going to Paris, where she currently goes to school, for most of my winter break.

I forget that people are sometimes offended by the concept of open relationships. Some people think it means we’re sluts, or coercive, or manipulative, or afraid of commitment, or they don’t take our relationship as seriously as that of monogamous couples. I can’t speak for others, but for me, this kind of arrangement makes sense to me, for us. Even if we were to be in the same city for more than a month at a time, I don’t know that we would necessarily become monogamous. Our relationship works the way it does because we share the idea that life should be about new experiences and living life as fully as you want, and sex is a way through which one can experience new things. We trust each other enough to tell each other the truth, and to know that our actions, if hurtful, were not meant to be. We’re careful to acknowledge each other’s independence and not make each other feel caged or held back. We don’t need each other, but we would like to share our lives with each other. We can live without each other, but we would prefer not to.

It’s not easy to maintain this kind of relationship, but I don’t think any other kind of relationship comes effortlessly either. It certainly takes more effort to keep in touch due to the distance, and more energy and creativity to keep our feelings for each other strong. It might take more effort for us to understand each other due to language barriers (though her English is better than my French) and cultural differences (I’m a lesbian Asian-American; she’s a bisexual white French woman), but the more different we realize we are, the more similar we discover we are at the same time. I never assume anything about what we mean when we talk to each other, and make sure to ask for clarification if I don’t understand something before reacting. From previous experiences and from what I’ve witnessed from my friends’ dating behavior, my relationship with my girlfriend is much healthier and more mature than a lot of my peers’ monogamous, local couplings.

It hasn’t always been good. Since March, the time we’ve spent apart have gotten progressively longer, and harder to bear as we got to know each other more. Our feelings for each other have fluctuated accordingly. Doubt over how much we actually love each other, how real our feelings are, seeps in at times. But despite all this, we hold on. We’ve grown closer and our relationship has gotten stronger each time we’ve met in person and each time we parted, and each time we’ve seen each other I’m reassured that it is indeed worth it to keep this going for as long as we can.

Every time I think of how I came to be in this relationship, I think, I am so lucky. I am lucky that I met this one girl out of all the girls in that bar, out of all the girls in Prague. I am lucky that this girl turned out to be a relatively well-adjusted, sane individual with the patience and determination to bring me out of my shell. I am lucky we both have the resources to support our expensive relationship, in terms of airfare and foreign living expenses. I am lucky we have access to technology that helps us stay in each other’s lives. I am lucky we both have the intellectual capital necessary to find ways to be together through work or school or internships, even for short periods of time. She makes me want to be a better person, and I know that, for now, I love her, and she loves me. There’s not much else to say, except that we’ll see what happens, when it happens. What else can I ask for? What else can I expect?

DEAR READERS,

What’s Modern Love? Well, first off, it’s a New York Times column that claims to represent the state of love in our time, the trials and travails of romance in the post-2000 era. Unfortunately, what it ends up doing is collecting a rose-tinted series of memoirs and mishaps of divorcee couples, suddenly-enlightened middle age women sleeping with younger men, and the odd young person flouting all digital norms and actually going out on dates.

The column is a collection of foregone conclusions, archetypal stories that end before they start. We want to provide a different perspective. With our version of Modern Love, Millennials Magazine Issue 2, we’re not going to give you any answers. What you will find here are questions and arguments, searches for the meaning of intimate relationships in a time where closeness is more easily conducted in a chat window than in person, rather than conclusions about The Way We Love Now. We don’t know how we love now. We’re not even sure we know how to love, much less do it online.

Whether it’s the developing relationship between family members who have barely met outside of a computer screen in Jessica Roy’s Sister in a Computer, the bond between Cassie Boorn and her son as a young mother, or the difficulties faced in maintaining a long distance relationship over the internet, these are complexities rather than fairy tales. Modern Love is pretty complicated, and not just on Facebook. Still, Facebook is pretty complicated, as Zach Subar will tell you in The End of the Affair. But even though things are different in this world of online dating services, love doesn’t always change. Parker Hu returns to contribute this issue’s poetry entry with Let’s Fall in Love.

Our mission at Millennials Magazine is to present the world as a new generation sees it: inexorably altered by technology, undergirded by social media and embedded into the internet. These things are no longer novel nor new; they simply exist as reality. They are us. How we relate to one another, not to mention ourselves, occurs through these omnipresent pathways and networks. This is the space that modern love finds itself in, struggling to pin down meaning in a world we all move quickly through. Take this publication as a snapshot, and compare it to your own view.

Got a different vision of modern love that we haven’t covered? Get in touch at Millennialsmag [at] Gmail.com. Otherwise, hit us up on our Facebook, through our Twitter account, or just check out the site. Our first issue, What is a Millennial?, can be found here. You can get in touch with me personally at Chaykak [at] Gmail.com, all complaints welcome. Please enjoy.

-Kyle Chayka

MM Founding Editor

In the early 2000s, it was considered stupid to marry in your early 20s. Whose idea was that?

THIS PAST SUMMER, my brain developed a strange new set of reflexes without any warning. As the days lengthened, I found myself continually drawn to unprecedented thoughts of saving every penny, the rapper Drake, and getting married. These desires arrived intrusively, as if my train had come sooner than expected and I’d been standing too close to the tracks.

I moved into to a $625 room in Park Slope. This seemed promising – I was no longer living at my mom’s apartment and my boyfriend could stay over without pushing his luck. I started a temporary job at a pop culture factory (see: Viacom, not Warhol) the next day. I was hired to help disguise a credit card advertisement as a social media contest, which meant I was under contract to take Twitter screenshots and caption them with a mix of awe and branding. It was my first “real job,” but not quite — there were few benefits, and definitely no medical ones.

As the stream of empty filler details refreshed in real time, the longer days seemed like a curse. Despite all the dead moments of free time, I kept missing deadlines on unpaid freelance articles and claiming writer’s block due to ridiculous reasons like the wrong desk, nonexistent cat allergies, and the rising cost of IKEA furniture. My most productive initiative was a blog called The Daily Sadface, whose commentary only ever consisted of a photo above a colon and a right-facing parenthesis.

I’d never really played with more than a MASH-like “Politician, artist, Spaniard?” concept of my own marriage before, but I’d also never been 22, confronted by a void-like future, and living in a constant state of dread. (I’d never been so in love with someone, either, so let that stand in my defense.) I celebrated the first anniversary of my college graduation with a new plan: replace my fledgling career efforts with a life as a wife. I couldn’t let any more time pass without a single certainty in my horizon. In the vision of a proposal, a honeymoon, and a family, I found the comfort I was missing in my career (or lack thereof).

At first, it was as if the idea get married had been generated as a survival tool, like an adrenaline rush to strengthen me during bursts of aimlessness. The first noticeable change happened on my commute — I was no longer busying my sleepy gaze with fellow subway riders’ headphones, nail color or brand-name perfume. I stopped eavesdropping, and I hardly read. All I could see were diamonds. Soon after, they popped up on line at Starbucks, on TV shows I’d seen too many times, on Facebook ads next to my ex-boyfriend’s new photos. (Mark Zuckerberg proved his worth with that one). I realized I’d never paid attention to these rings because I’d never felt a pronounced difference between their owners and me. But now, these women all had something I desperately wanted: an indication of an exciting future, and with it, an enviable life of purpose.

The more sensible stopgap may have been to just apply to grad school, but I didn’t want sensible anymore. (Clearly.) I wanted romance; the challenge of human interaction under those close conditions. I’d never not killed a plant, but maybe it was finally the right time to be that better version of myself, to keep things alive. It wouldn’t be about the rent, or the dress, or the insurance — neither of us had the money for those to factor in, anyway. It would be about love, and family, and cooperation. I didn’t care if we lived in a shack. I just hoped we could be free, together. Free to sleep in, stay out, write in silence or at full volume, eat junk, cook healthy, read for work, work on books. Why couldn’t we live our lives like a legally-bound pair of halfway-cool sixteen year olds? (Well, because that’s all we could afford, as my salary was about the same as my allowance, but that’s not the point.)

The delusion continued past the point of the Park Slope den, carrying over (more sporadically) when I signed a lease for a tiny Greenpoint apartment. At one of the lowest points, I spent a subway ride drafting an email to my roommate, letting her know she’d probably have to look for another sublet since I had plans to turn her room into a nursery, probably in the coming year.

I love paradoxes, but being one was taking it a bit too far: I felt like a savior to myself, but a traitor to my generation. It eventually became impossible to stop the signals — it was as if I’d performed inception on myself, and even though I welcomed this new form of comfort, it troubled me that I could sense a lack of control over it. Getting married is surely the least cool thing you can do as a girl at 22, but how could I believe in the “end of marriage” if it was the one thing keeping me excited?

By the fall, I managed to snap out of my pity coma, but having eliminated the depression component of my marriage instinct, I fixated on finding the objective logic in it. I can see now that getting married to feel better about being unemployed is a terrible idea, but that doesn’t mean I’m completely over it. I was in love with someone who I wanted to be with and be better for, so why did I feel so dirty about even considering it? I came to judge my initial impulses as deluded, and I wasn’t even sure why.

Somewhere between gen X and Y, “marrying young” gained a negative connotation, and my generation has taken it as a badge. But I’m not convinced that the shift had anything to do with the actual young people who now live under it. What if we just internalized top-down warnings and intellectual admonishments to the point of manifesting them? Take these common arguments against it: Our parents married young and now they’re bitterly divorced; the economic situation is so bad that it would be stupid to even try to start a family; marriage trumps a career so I have to wait until I have the latter to even think about it. None of those explanations leave room for change or effort, and if we employ only the “hook up culture” narrative and combine it with the effect of newly-updated studies about the failure of traditional marriage, the result is a generation that doesn’t want it, and even when some do, is destined to fail at it. It’s both a wonderful excuse and a miscalculation of our character.

Through a combination of external influences and personal choices, 20somethings are more unstable than any previous generation, so much that scientists want to give us a new name and societal identity — but why are we so willing to do it under their terms? We’re considered underemployed, overmedicated, and non-commital by an older generation who I’ll just go ahead and consider overemployed, undermedicated and way too divorced. The relativity of these measurements is astounding, and it’s particularly magnified under the lens of millennial marriage. If our parents are bitterly divorced, can’t we learn from their mistakes? If the economic situation is so shitty, can’t we reconsider the family budget? And if we balance our careers with supportive partners, can’t we have both?

The fantasy I came up with during the summer was sparse, motivated not by visions of picket fences, but by ideas about how I could figure out my first stage of adulthood under the conditions being handed down to us. I’m tired of hearing analysis of my generation that both patronizes and manipulates us — and I could tell that part of my dizzying reactions to my marriage push had to do with this top-down identity conflict. But I think that fact that the college-educated millennial clan is growing up without the economic stability of previous young adults gives us the opportunity to affect marriage positively — not only because our environment is different than our parents’, but because this financial void might help erase the problems that plagued it in the first place. If there’s less about which to be selfish, greedy and individualistic, maybe husbands and wives could focus on building something other than swimming pools and credit.

It seems crazy that if a young person wants to make the commitment to get married, it can only happen if they’re rich, but that’s partly what we’ve decided for ourselves, and it makes no sense. Maybe we could start with the ring, that wasteful object of validation and envy. Girls could make a point to marry only if the ring were saved up for something much more important, like, um, anything other than diamonds. Then we could go from there.

MY PARENTS DIVORCED when I was 13 years old, which is arguably the worst possible time in a kid’s life for parents to get divorced. An awkward, depression-prone teen, my increasing angst was constantly engaged in the struggle for an outlet, and I had more friends on the Dave Matthews Band message boards I frequented than I did in real life.

But one of the things you learn when you are a teen and your parents tell you that they want to end their lives together is that, contrary to what the TV and the radio and Tiger Beat tell you, the world does not actually revolve around you. Beside the credenza on the cheap embroidered couch, my parents told my sister and me that they were separating, and instantly the focal point of our intimate family life shifted. Immediately our lives had very little to do with the small victories of childhood—the straight-A report cards and soccer games and birthday parties—and everything to do with the fact that my parents did not love each other anymore.

This is an earth-shattering realization to have at 13, when every single event in your tiny universe is divided into two opposite camps: everything is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever. How simple and black and white life is at 13! How simple it was to forget and resent that the pottery project I made in art class was meaningless next to the reconstruction of a solid family unit. Celebrating these things felt like worrying about what to wear to a funeral. The details and minor accomplishments and joys of childhood were continually eclipsed by the larger picture—mainly, that our small, quiet, suburban life would never be the same again.

In college I would become maniacally selfish, perhaps in an attempt to make up for those years when the dissolution of my parents’ marriage wavered on the court docket. But in 2001, my teen years ceased to be about Britney Spears and MTV. Instead, life became about things like what to make for my little sister for dinner, because my father, wholly obsessed with his job, was running late again.

I always made spaghetti. I was 13 and didn’t know how to cook anything else.

IN THE LIVING room, when my parents told us it was over, I did not say a word. My sister—who was nine, sparked like a firecracker and proudly wore her heart for all to see—shot straight up on stick legs, locked her hands on her hips and demanded after letting out a wail, “BUT WHAT WILL MY FRIENDS THINK?” I did not even cry, just observed stoically and then ran up to my room to record the event in my private Livejournal. I had the feeling even then that the detailed recollections of that night would be valuable to me some day. But analysis, the attempt to wrap this messy time in our lives into a coherent narrative, is possible only in retrospect. “They finally did it,” reads my diary entry from that night. “My family has completely fallen apart.”

Looking back, I don’t know how my parents kept it together for almost 15 years. My mother was 24 when she had me, and my father’s passion for teaching often demanded the attention my mother wished he’d give to us. When I was a toddler, my father used to wake me up at dawn before leaving for work. We’d take quiet walks around our city neighborhood, the sound of chattering birds and garbage trucks scoring our steps. I was young, but I have a distinct memory of these sunrise strolls, because it is one of the only times I can recall when the child/parent dynamic between us was so pure, unencumbered by the demands divorce would eventually thrust upon it. I did not have to worry about parental duties like making dinner and tending to my sister, activities I’d inevitably shoulder come the division of our household. In those bright, brief mornings before my family split, I was just a kid and my dad was just an adult: our relationship was so easy, so clearly defined. Though we would strive to return to that comfortable place, our rapport would never be quite that uncomplicated again.

What I remember most about the beginning of my parents’ separate lives is how important time suddenly became. They did not have a scorebook but one would have served them well, as every second spent with one parent was obsessively documented by the other. My parents collected these moments like precious jewels, hoarding them, unleashing the wrath of their unfair distribution on my sister and me only when the time was right. My mother stopped calling us, claiming she didn’t want to “intrude,” but even at that tender age we recognized her actions as a passive-aggressive grab for attention.

My father got the house, and with it by default came my sister and me, because the house was close to school, to our friends, and included the bedrooms we’d proudly decorated with posters and IKEA furniture. For our family, there was no court battle, no batch of subpoenas–custody was settled behind closed doors, and since my Dad worked in our school district, it just made sense for him to keep living there. My mother moved to an apartment in a part of Philadelphia 20 minutes from our school district, and on nights when we came home grumpy and exhausted by math tests and field hockey practice and play rehearsal, we simply didn’t want to make the trip to my mother’s apartment, where we did not have rooms of our own but instead slept on the lumpy living room couch.

We didn’t realize it until much later, but the fact is that my mother kept careful track of every night we canceled on her, of every plan we made with our father that did not offer a counterpart with room for her. Our parents were playing a game that we were not, one where seconds were precious and every moment spent with the other parent was a narrow betrayal. As these betrayals built and collected and grew into the fractures that threatened our relationship during my teen years, I remained essentially clueless. I just wanted to know which parent would drive me to the mall. I was young and I had all the time in the world, and I wanted to spend most of it away from my father, who did not like my attitude or my red-lipsticked friends, and away from my mother, who siphoned cruelty from small gestures, whose own hurt over the divorce manifested itself in clinging desperately to one of my arms while my father yanked stoically on the other.

I HATE ONLINE dating. Which is odd, since there are multiple reasons why I should be the poster child for the online dating movement:

1. I’m really hilarious online, often much wittier than I am IRL. I’ve closed many a dating deal via Twitter, G-Chat, or even Facebook Chat (which is a very underrated flirting tool).

2. I’m a huge nerd (I mean, did you just read the above sentence?)! I LOVE the Internet. I join almost every new social media network that pops up. I spend most of my time on the Internet. I wish I could date the Internet.

3. I have a frustrating tendency to only date people I already know, or know though close friends. It’s a long-standing running joke among my friends that I’m incapable of dating outside of my social circle.

So about a year ago, prompted by general malaise and the fact that I had just run into THREE of my ex-boyfriends at the same birthday party, I made an OKCupid account.

It was horrible.

Okay, at first it was fun. I highly enjoyed writing about my favorite novels, “Top 5 Things I’d Need On A Desert Island,” and “What I’m Usually Doing on Friday Night.” Who doesn’t like writing about herself? I devoted a substantial amount of time to constructing the perfect profile, starting with a lengthy inner debate regarding prospective profile photos. It made me nervous to show my face; what if one of my friends recognized me? Then s/he would – gasp – know I joined OkCupid! The obvious fact that s/he would have to also be an OKCupid member did not assuage my concerns about appearing pathetic.

I finally chose a photo of myself holding a Nintendo 64 controller in front of my face. That way you couldn’t identify me, but my hair looked really nice and you could tell I was awesome because I played Nintendo 64. Hiding behind cool things in what I hoped was an ironic way became my overall OkCupid strategy.

I don’t remember the specifics of my profile, but I know my username referenced Joan Didion and that it was all very clever. At least, I cracked myself up. I wrote that my talents included speed typing and martini-drinking and made a few mean cracks about people I did not wish to hear from: Don’t message me if you wear baggy pants. Don’t message me if you don’t know the difference between “Your” and “You’re.” Etc. Everything was a joke (except for the pants and grammar snipes, those were very serious).

I finally completed my profile. I looked like an asshole, albeit one with pretty hair andgood taste in literature. “Play QuickMatch!” the Cupid offered. QuickMatch is a tool that shows you photos of different members that its algorithms think you’ll find sexy in slideshow format. You get to rate them on a scale of 1-5.

I kid you not, the FIRST person that showed up was a former GSI (Graduate Student Instructor) from a class I took in college. I almost had a heart attack. But I remembered liking his glasses and enthusiasm for cultural landscape theory, so I sent him a message. He never responded. (Sometimes I run into him at bars and promptly hide. If you’re reading this, GSI, please stop running into me! Thanks.)

After that traumatizing non-interaction, I stayed away from OKCupid. I only logged into the site when I got emails from admirers, and I was consistently unimpressed. Sometimes they were clearly mass emails (um, how do you know I “have a pretty face” when you can’t see it?), other times they were angry messages about how I clearly thought I was too cool for OkCupid so why was I even on it (they had a point). Other times I simply wasn’t interested.

Then, this one guy – let’s call him “J” – “winked” at me. “Winking” is a total cop-out, like Facebook poking, since it displays one’s interest without requiring even a modicum of effort. Nevertheless, I checked him out and was for the first time impressed by an OkCupid member. His profile was sparse in an aesthetically pleasing way, kind of like an Ikea store, and his pictures highlighted his attractive stubble and hip friends. The only details I could determine were that he was 6’3’’, majored in gender studies, and was in a band. Under the “Message Me If” question he wrote something along the lines of “if you publicly eschew gender stereotypes but secretly like them a little bit.” Clever!

I wrote him a message. He wrote back. We added each other on Facebook. I showed my friends his profile and they approved. Then, our correspondence petered out. One of us would suggest meeting for a drink, and then the other wouldn’t respond for weeks (I only messaged him when I was annoyed with my non-virtual love life).

Finally, maybe about three months after the initial Wink, we met at a nearby (we both lived in the same neighborhood) dive bar. It was… okay. He was cute, nice, funny. We talked about our favorite Indian food restaurants and he asked me to go on a date to one sometime soon. But then he never called. I never called him, either. We would still half-heartedly message each other occasionally, until one day when he sent me a Facebook message with a sad-faced emoticon, and the next time I looked at his Facebook profile I saw that he was in a relationship with somebody else. I was not upset.

My OkCupid experience taught me that while I am attracted to and respect men who are earnest, I am repelled by men who are earnest via their online dating profiles. I realize this is unfair, but so is any subjective preference one might employ when looking for a prospective mate. Unfortunately, people who make everything on their profile into a joke are either a) not serious about it, b) immature or c) assholes.

Another reason I don’t think online dating is for me is that I’m uncomfortable with the idea of dating someone solely based on his popular culture references and other sundry likes and dislikes. In my experience, chemistry isn’t based on whether someone likes The Wire or Flannery O’Connor. Sure, having similar interests is definitely an important plus, but I already have a tendency to look for my own qualities mirrored in the opposite sex, and online dating only exacerbates my inherent pickiness. No one really has any idea what chemistry is actually based upon, and I personally haven’t figured out a way to successfully start sparks without physical presence.

I also learned that I might be insane. But hey boys, I love Mario Kart!

EPILOGUE: I showed a draft of this piece to a male friend, who said (via Gchat, obv), “Do you realize the whole piece is like a meta OkCupid profile? There’s an underlying question of how successful you are at presenting yourself as a romantic object online, and you get a weird revisionist chance to do so, because readers will invariably ask themselves if they would date you.”

No, I did not realize that! In totally unrelated news, I’m currently single and you can contact me at katiejmbaker@gmail.com. Here’s a photo of me:

ON TUESDAY NOVEMBER 30th, dozens of people gathered for a funeral in Wakefield, Massachusetts. If you didn’t recognize the people who presented the readings and the eulogy when they first stepped to the front of the church, you might have when they started speaking: They were all voices from Boston-area news radio stations.

We were there to say goodbye to Kevin McNicholas, a 61-year-old radio correspondent who died on Thanksgiving Day. Kevin spent his life working as a stringer in the Massachusetts State House. Every day for decades, he would collect sound at press conferences, Chamber of Commerce breakfasts and Legislative sessions and send them over to the Greater Boston Area’s news radio stations.

I met Kevin in the summer of 2009, when I was a radio intern at WBUR-FM. A month into my internship,  I was tasked by the newsroom’s managing editor with babysitting the verdict at the kidnapping trial of the Man Known As Clark Rockefeller. This zany dude had spent years pretending he was a millionaire, but had skipped town with his daughter after his wife left him.

My assigned mission was to go to the Suffolk County Courthouse, record the closing arguments of the trial and then wait for the verdict. Maybe it sounds easy, but I had no idea what I was doing. I’d never so much as stepped into a courtroom before, and hadn’t a clue how deliberations would unfold or what courtroom etiquette involved. I had no experience navigating press scrums. But someone at WBUR told me to find a grizzly-voiced man named Kevin and I’d be fine.

So I did, and I immediately had a friend.

Jury deliberations are very, very, very uneventful if you are not part of the jury. This jury deliberated for a week, giving Kevin and I a good deal of quality time. He showed me where to sit, when to record, whom to avoid, when to pepper the lawyers with questions, and where I could find the best napping spots. He delivered his lessons in that blunt yet non-patronizing way of his, where you didn’t realize you were actually in the middle of a pretty intense learning experience until afterward. At lunchtime, I’d share the fruit in my lunchbox with him (well, actually I offered him some and he would proceed to eat most of it) and he’d tell stories of his years covering trials and politics, or introduce me to the folks around. I was a new and clearly naive face surrounded by the weather-beaten guard of Boston reporters who covered that trial, and Kevin’s immediate acceptance and friendliness helped me stay afloat in a group I was learning I wanted to join.

KEVIN SPENT HIS whole life doing one of radio’s more thankless jobs. He went to hearings and trials and press conferences, listened through some of the dullest speakers around, and sent cuts of sound out to stations, rarely voicing stories himself.

Kevin didn’t have a car or a cell phone. He didn’t use email and he certainly didn’t know how to use new media fodder like Twitter and Facebook. But the man knew everything about Massachusetts politics. Everything. By the time he died, he was called the Dean of the State House press corps. He was constantly making connections that many of us couldn’t grasp without his encyclopedic memory. Kevin’s expertise in itself made Boston’s news coverage better.

And Kevin never kept any of that to himself. It made him long-winded at times — but it also made him a very, very good teacher. That’s why we were all asked to pray for mentorship at his funeral. “May the experts in this field continue to teach and guide those who want to learn,” said the priest. I could feel the room sigh. Kevin’s only family was his sister, but the room was full of people ages 22 to 70 or so, and I think he acted as a mentor and teacher to most of us there. He had something to teach to producers and reporters thirty years my senior–and helped those of us newer to the business find our feet.

WITH EACH NEW hire at the Daily Planet or the National Journal, each live tweet from a courtroom or crowd-sourced piece of information, journalism is changing – and it’s happening awfully fast. Old journalistic models fail to hold up to the demands of today’s market and it seems like the only way survive is to experiment ourselves as far away from them–and as far into the future–as we can. Young journalists compete for fewer jobs than ever, and to get ahead things sometimes simply get snarky.

That means many of us young’ns are tempted to look anywhere but old media for lessons in how to get ourselves jobs and–-if we care enough–-keep this industry alive. But there is still so much to we can learn from people like Kevin, a man who might just epitomize old media. He did the same job for decades, but made it his business to become a total expert at it. He didn’t try to make his stories about himself — but he was a stalwart in his reliability. He always had a strong, insightful question for the politicians, lawyers and businesspeople he dealt with.

The worth of these lessons to journalists (and other folks too!) will endure no matter what medium we work in. Me and the dozens, maybe hundreds, of people who learned them from Kevin were lucky. We got the chance to listen to a man who spent his life listening to others.

This is part one of a series of excerpts from Meredith Turits’ second novel, which is still in-progress. Check back with us next week for part two.

ANAÏS

WHEN WE STARTED fucking, since that’s all it was, he was up front.

“I have a girlfriend. She’s still in school. Lives in the suburbs.”

I really, really didn’t give a shit. “We’re fucking,” I told him.

Nate shrugged and put his head between my legs.

I ended up in L.A. because there was nowhere else to go. I quit school, left my brother and Boston behind, and went back to Montreal. Montreal, the place that was supposed to be home. But it was cold in every sense of the word. Stale. I’d been back for three days, mostly asleep for two of them, and had already realized that the city was full of people who meant nothing to the new version of me. I started to detach myself. Convince myself there was no reason for me to be there. (Empty mansion. Snow. Rooms I couldn’t bring myself to step into. Ce n’est pas my maison. It didn’t take much convincing.) My parents came home for a couple of days, asked me how I was, absorbed my lies and ignored the trash can full of empty plastic vodka handles and the still-packed boxes the movers had dumped in the foyer. Then they asked about my brother, told me he wasn’t picking up his phone, but that the money in the bank was still moving, so he couldn’t have died. My father laughed. My mother picked at a nail. I booked a one-way ticket to LAX. I was glad I never unpacked the boxes. Sort of wanted to drink bleach for a second.

Los Angeles is repulsive, even to a pretty girl like me to whom nothing much matters. Every vapid, gross stereotype materialized. Every expected sentence uttered. Every thing that’s not actually something, that people think is everything. So that’s why it makes sense to be here, or at least made sense to come here. Because being pretty matters, because little else does, because it’s not so fucking cold. It’s another kind of cold, I guess.

I took an apartment by the pier in Santa Monica for no other reason than that envelopes there said something other than “Los Angeles,” and because it was expensive, so I was pretty sure that meant it had to be nice. That people might think of me in a certain way when I gave my address. That the right judgments would fall into puzzle-piece place. Il est parfait. I drank a lot and smoked a lot and slept with about a billion men who didn’t know my name whose names I didn’t care to know, either. It’s really easy to do all of that when you’re a shell of yourself and there’s no identity laid down for you to compete with. Nothing to live up to. No desire to even make something to live up to. I was a body that night on my bed that night in Boston and I’m a body now and after sitting and thinking about it I am a body to my parents and at some point it’ll expire, either by my hand or someone else’s. I’ll figure out who gets the honor of the final blow. Probably won’t be me. I am probably okay with that.

Nate was one of the guys who I met in all of the million places that I met the men whose names I didn’t care to know. I guess I started talking to him because he never asked my name. We were on the same page. It was a good sign. I hadn’t been on the same page with anyone for a while. It was a Wednesday. People in LA can’t count and don’t know the names of days. He took me back to his place, a shitty one-bedroom in Silver Lake. There were girls’ things in the corner of the bedroom and all over the bathroom.

“I have a girlfriend. She’s still in school. Lives in the suburbs.”

“We’re fucking,” I told him.

And we did. I’m not going to sit here and talk about the sex or whether it was any good or whether I was even attracted to him. (I wasn’t, really.) But he told me his name and we kept fucking for a couple of weeks and then this thing happened. He started getting kind of obsessed with me. Like, saying my name constantly, loudly. Touching my hair all the time. Spending hours in bed with me even if I couldn’t honestly have given a shit and didn’t even feel like hiding it. But then another thing happened. Something went off, like this ridiculous metaphoric lightbulb and all of a sudden something familiar happened as he doted more and more, and would do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Girlfriend or no girlfriend. They get infatuated with me. Nate was infatuated with me.

When Nate’s girlfriend moved in with him nine months after we started the whole thing, after I started fucking him, I didn’t care. The only thing it meant was that he came to Santa Monica to have sex with me, which was a relief, really, because who wants to spend time in Silver Lake? Who wants to spend time anywhere? A coffee shop is a coffee shop is nothing. I didn’t stop wearing perfume because I was afraid the girlfriend would find out or something. (I never asked her name.) I didn’t change anything. A shell is a shell is nothing, too. But then one more thing happened. She was around. A lot. So much that he wasn’t coming over. That part I didn’t mind. But his obsession with me got the wind knocked out of it. And that knocked the wind out of me and I ran my hands along the insides of my thighs and decided I wasn’t okay with that.

“I want to be with you. Really, Nate. Like, with you.”

“Nate. Leave her.”

“You already know you don’t want her as much as you want me. Just leave.”

Two days later he did.

Five days later I was on a plane back to Montreal.

NATE

We went to dinner for the first time ever in the almost two years we’d been sleeping together. We’d only been having sex, that’s it, first in my bed always, but then Paige moved in, and that made it impossible to be there. Anaïs and I never left whatever house we were at together because we didn’t want to get caught. We’d definitely never been out to dinner so when she asked me to dinner, I was happy. Like, out in public with the rest of the world. I’ll be honest here — she was fascinating. But we sort of left it at that. She was fascinating and exotic and wild and mumbled to herself in French and was something I’d never had and never expected out of Paige or anyone I’d ever seen or been with or whatever because I didn’t think that people like her actually existed. So when I met her by the pier one night and saw her drinking, just out in the open like it was nothing, I figured I’d just talk to her, sort of get my rocks off just by seeing if she’d acknowledge me, you know? I figured it’d be fun or something and she was a coked-out model. She wasn’t either. She was just sort of like that. Like, just sort of pretty because she had good genes and probably drank more than she ate, not because she tried or anything like that, and just sort of coked out and detached because that’s how she sort of felt about the world.

Let me at least say this before I get policed as the total bad guy here — I’d never cheated on anyone. It was never supposed to be that. Just to get my rocks off, you know? She never asked my name and I didn’t ask hers until a while later and I only did it because the whole thing did sort of become something that wasn’t meant to be any more than that little something. If that makes any sense.

So after all of this nothing becoming something and staying like that for a couple of years, even after Paige moved in, which made it hard and made me want to just fucking die over and over again because I really did love her and had since I started taking care of her from her first day of school, for Anaïs to ask me outside of this little sex lair thing was a really big deal.

So she meets me at this place that I suggest so it’s not too close to where I live and like, everything comes at once. She tells me to leave Paige. She just says the words “leave her” like it’s nothing. And after I stopped thinking about the wad of cash hidden in this book I have that I set aside for Paige’s ring, I stopped thinking about that long enough to just think about how freeing and sexy and sort of sinful I guess the whole way she just said “leave her” was. Like she’d never even asked Paige’s name in two years or known a thing about her except like maybe the kind of shit she liked to use in the bathroom but she just knew she was better than Paige. Anaïs just knew. So then she tells me, “Just think about the last few months, I mean really think about them,” and I do and I’m realizing shit, she’s right. Because the thing that was happening was that she was telling me all of these things about her that she’d never told me and the light went off and it was like, well, yeah this is like her coked-out version of telling me she loves me, too. So we’re sitting in that diner thing and I’m like, shit, yeah, maybe I can do this. And so we’re getting ready to leave and she’s barely eaten because what girl actually does? The ones that don’t are the hottest ones anyway and so like, she picks up her stuff and then she fucking kisses my cheek for the first time ever.

So of course because this all makes tons of sense I get in my car and go back home and Paige isn’t there and I take a shower. And then Paige walks through the door because she lives there too, and she walks in while I’m still in a towel and she kisses the same cheek. So I’m like, “Nate, what are you doing?” So I obviously do the thing that makes the most sense in this situation, which is drop to my knee and propose to her.

Images by Jacob Van Loon.

I HATE TAYLOR Swift. I hate her for how bad she was on SNL, and for the fact that she’s dating #4 on my Freebie Celebrity Fucklist, and because of, you know, that hair. But mostly I hate her because her songs are totally shit, in the sense that they are all kitsch, literally pre-digested. Listening to a Taylor Swift song is like doing lunch, baby-penguin-style: every bite of krill hawked, already chewed, into your waiting mouth. There’s nothing to unpack in her work, no analysis to be done, no production of thought; every square inch of Swift’s oeuvre is nothing but trope chewed over so many times it is, by definition, pabulum.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not some Enid-from-Ghost World cunt who can’t enjoy anything other people like. I watch a pathetic amount of television, and I read gossip magazines like everyone else, and I will freely—not even drunk!—sing along to every single word of many tracks from High School Musicals 1, 2, and 3.

But I hate Taylor Swift’s music — and I really hate Taylor Swift’s video — because none of them tell stories.

I know, you thought they were all fairy tales! Well… nope. That would require character, or plot, or narrative movement. The worlds Swift creates lack all those elements; they are entirely personal fantasies, in which she is the only speaker, the scriptor not only of her own lines but of everyone else’s. This is demonstrated most dramatically by Swift’s favorite lyrical device—placing the final chorus of a song in the voice of the lover to whom she’s been singing all along, thus ensuring that no one but Swift gets to have words all to themselves.

Several of her videos share the same flash-forward-fantasy framework, in which we’re treated to the following progression: Swift sees Boy, Swift imagines life with Boy (including, now that she’s “matured” as an “artist,” marriage and kids); finally, Swift snaps back to reality, where she approaches Boy, dewy-eyed and as yet chaste. Nothing actually happens; everything is narrated from a timeless perspective in which the real Swift either lolls on a bed of flowers or twirls in a well-lit wood. Swift as figured by her music videos is a girl who is totally without agency; rather than chase after the one she want, she will envision their perfect ending and wait for the narrative inevitability of her self-contained daydream to bring them together. This psychological retreat gets imposed, in turn, on her listeners: Swift’s songs encourage you not to feel but rather to be force-fed feeling, to accept into your veins an injection of pure emotional gratification.

Then there’s how she looks. I hate to talk about this. But SRSLY. The girl is attractive in exactly the way she should be to do what she’s trying to do, a way that satisfies every culturally received notion of youthful beauty while still seeming, somehow, approachable, unthreatening, easy to take. She is blonde, and thin, and her hair looks like the yellow crayon spirals you drew coming out of a mermaid’s head when you were five. She’s a Disney princess in a way Disney princesses haven’t looked since political correctness happened, and there are still lots of white girls with hot rollers and tutus who simply must grow up to look like that or they’ll just, like, die. All of this only serves to underscore her role as the girl-next-door-cum-prom-queen par excellence, despite her lyrics’ insistance that she’s an outcast who “wears t-shirts” and jealously watches cheerleaders “from the bleachers.” How can a girl who looks like that ever be taken seriously as an antihero?

But Swift’s music doesn’t just deliver a double-shot of undiluted pop satisfaction. There’s also Kundera’s second tear—the pleasure you get from knowing that others will have the exact same reaction to her, that the clinical precision of her emotional manipulation is so effective it can’t help but evoke in you the same feelings it evokes in everyone else. I defy even the most virulent strain of angsty teenage nobody-gets-me-ness to resist the camaraderie formed by a tearful Swift sing-along. Listening to her songs gives you a joy that transcends her emotional bludgeoning and goes a long way toward fellow-feeling. There’s something comforting about the knowledge that everyone you know, everywhere they are, would be hit over the head in the exact same way you are by this curlicued caricature. She has accomplished her goal of feeding female youth back to themselves so thoroughly as to make her public persona essentially selfless, a cipher, a Platonic form of the Perfect American Girl, Subsection: Happy and In Love. It can feel incredibly unifying—almost makes you wanna, you know, march somewhere.

Of course, in another sense, all art is meant to do something like this, to cause a reaction, if not one as immediately and as unmeditative as the one Swift’s does. Could this all be just a matter of degrees? Is it really so important to take the long way around, wearing lumpy sweaters in dull light, watching mumblecore movies and thinking our way to elation? Sometimes, surely, it seems much better just to relax, and lean into impotent fantasy, and allow ourselves to be thin and golden-haired, carried off in a ballgown sewn from stars. After all, it’s so easy; all the work’s been done for us by Swift, the angel of instant emotional gratification, the bow-mouthed nurse with a tray of the opiates our frayed modern nerves so urgently crave. And isn’t that okay?

Um, no. I think it’s important to force yourself into the world, and, in the end, her reneging on that responsibility is what makes me give such a shit about how much Taylor Swift sucks (even when I couldn’t care less about similar critiques that could be levied at, say, ALL OTHER FORMS OF POPULAR CULTURE EVER). What bothers me most about Swift’s work is how perfect it is–and in its icy perfection–how terrifyingly mindless. Plenty of other things that are bad make me smile, while still at some point stimulating a prickle of irritation at some cheesy chord change or an amused snort at a flat line of dialogue. But Swift doesn’t itch, or bother, or in fact cause in me any negative reaction at all. She pushes all the buttons, and hits all the notes so well (if often just a bit on the flat side) that I can’t ever escape her three-minute dream worlds, or get my internal critical engines to turn over and start. She’s so good at this glittering thing that it beggars my ability to evaluate, to analyze, to apply the mind.

And once that happens, I’m over the edge into an abyss of animal numbness, a vacuum in which stimulus-response-repeat is the only valid mechanism of human action. By the end of every one of Swift’s songs—in fact, by the end of writing this essay—I feel just a little too tired to think about any of it anymore. And that thoughtlessness, is, most of all, why I motherfucking hate Taylor Swift.

MY FRIEND CALLED me a few days ago, and we were chatting about what we had been up to. I shared silly anecdotes and told her about recent conversations I’d had with my son, going over our plans for the holidays and what we had been up to. My friend stopped me mid-sentence, giggling. “Seriously, Cassie,” she asked, “What would you do if you didn’t have him? You would be so incredibly bored.”

She’s completely right. I’m 23 years old. I didn’t expect I’d be a mother by this point — but I can’t image things any other way. And I’m very, very happy.

I WAS 17 YEARS old and had just graduated high school. Summer was well under way, with bonfires planned, parties every night, and sleepovers with good friends. This was the time we had to celebrate our newfound freedom. To make mistakes, explore the world, finalize goodbyes before heading off on our life adventures.

One night during all of that, I was sitting with a good friend reminiscing about all of the crazy things we used to do. It occurred to me, almost as an afterthought, that I was late. I wasn’t panicked nor stressed as we headed out the door to Walmart in search of a pregnancy test. Neither of us expected it to be positive. We simply thought we should probably check it out.

An hour later I was standing in her bathroom staring at two pink lines.

Well, shit.

There is no graceful way to approach motherhood at seventeen. There is no easy way to share the news with wide-eyed friends and worried adults. I approached motherhood like I might any challenge. There wasn’t time to figure out the benefits and disadvantages strung out before me — a baby was on its way and I needed to prepare. This was something that I had to handle and the only way I knew how to approach it was with action. So, I bought the crib and I folded the onesies. I went to the doctor and balanced bills and went to school. I made plans and worked out details.

Looking back at this time now is sincerely shocking. I am not a tactical person. I run solely on emotion. When something is good it is the best thing that could ever happen. When something is bad it is so devastating I will never survive. Logical thinking? Not so much. Looking back at the way I responded to the news of motherhood seems so silly. I didn’t for one second consider how great this was going to be. Actually, I didn’t consider that it could be great at all. News of motherhood when you are 17 isn’t celebrated with congratulations and stories of joyous parenting moments. It is celebrated with concern and reminders of all of the challenges you are about to face.

I was sitting in a waiting room with a good friend while she picked up her birth control. I was a few months pregnant and left staring at a poster of a teenage girl with a large pregnant belly. The poster read, “It is like being grounded for the rest of your life.” I get it, I was in a place that gave out birth control–this poster is somewhat expected. However, if that is the way in which we approach motherhood at a young age, is it any wonder that young mothers most often fail to succeed?

It’s hard to be a mother — and it’s harder to do it at seventeen. Millenials grew up in a world of divorces, mixed families, adoption, gay parents, straight parents, single parents, and a whole mix of other post-modern living conditions. But as a society, we are very careful not to encourage motherhood at a young age. It is a problem, an epidemic, a statistic that needs to be brought down.

But over the past several years, I’ve found that being a young parent isn’t all that bad.

I was able to spend more time at home with my child because I was in college when I had him and not working a 9-5 job. I was able to stay home when he was sick without a cut in pay or getting behind in work. I was able to take online courses during maternity leave and balance my role as mother and student. I found and created opportunities that provided me with the balance I needed and experiences I craved.

No, it’s not for everyone — but motherhood left me with a new view on life. It sent me in directions that I may not ever had explored if I weren’t a mother. It taught me lessons that are un-teachable. It encouraged my ambition and taught me how to tackle tough choices. I would not be the person I am today if I weren’t a mother.

And that’s what it boils down to, after all of the stress and worries and questions about how you are going to do it all. Once you enter motherhood, it’s impossible to imagine your life going any differently — and I really like the person that I am today.