Sometimes I write stuff and don’t share it with anyone. Or I write stuff and only share it with a few people until a lot of time has passed.
This is one of those times.
Four years have passed since I first wrote the scattered thoughts that I’ve transformed into the blog post below. That’s enough time that I don’t think anyone will recognize themselves in this story.
The only time I ever attended Furman’s Homecoming as an alumna was in 2011. I was in Disney World this year. Last year I was already traveling too many times in October and November to justify another plane ticket. In 2012 and in 2013, I was flat broke.
Homecoming was an amazing weekend. I loved getting to see so many of my friends again.
But it also reminded me of all the reasons I left South Carolina after graduation.
I’ve changed a lot since I was in school. I’ve grown more into my own person. I’ve always been fairly confident and not overly concerned with what people thought of me… but without even realizing it, I still allowed myself to be confined by good old-fashioned “southern values.”
At Furman, it didn’t matter that I was smart and ambitious, with my adviser telling me that I should consider top-tier grad schools outside of South Carolina.
It didn’t matter that despite a lack of popularity (whatever that means), I had a lot of friends. My sisters in Kappa Kappa Gamma all liked and respected me. I was close to so many Tri-Delts that I was often the only non-sister hanging out with them.
I was friends with the conservative Christians at RUF and the liberal feminists in Feminist Initiative. I never had a problem finding a date for my sorority functions. Sometimes my guy friends even asked me to set them up with my sisters so they could attend our functions.
It didn’t matter that I had studied abroad nor that I was moving to France after graduation.
Everything about me was secondary to being perpetually single.
“I think you intimidate guys. I’m not saying you should dumb yourself down, but maybe guys would like you more if you weren’t so obviously smart.”
“Guys can’t tell if you like them or not because you’re so bubbly. I’m not saying you should change your personality, but maybe guys would like you more if you didn’t flirt so much.”
“I know you’re more interested in France/books/theatre/etc, but guys want to talk about what they like. I’m not saying you should stop pursuing your own interests, but have you thought about learning to like football? Or at least faking it?”
“You need to stop getting stuck in the friend zone with guys. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have guy friends, but maybe you should you shouldn’t have so many.”
I touched on this advice last year when I shared bad dating advice. Well-meaning friends and family offered me way too many variations of the comments above.
I might have hated the advice thrown my way, but I was just as caught up in turning my crush/best friend into my boyfriend as all my friends were.
It wasn’t until I moved to France that I realized how amazing it can be to be single. You simply can’t move to France for two years with a husband, or even a fiancé. You can do it with a boyfriend, but you miss out on so much of the experience. Most of my friends who started out with long-distance relationships broke up with their boyfriends. The few who managed to survive the distance spent more time skyping with their boyfriends than enjoying the local culture.
(That’s not a criticism of the women with long-distance relationships. I totally spent more time skyping with Dan while living in New York and in Toronto than exploring the cities).
I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t still carry a torch for one or two guys back home while I was in France… but I saw them as potential boyfriends in the future, not during my séjour abroad.
In June 2011 I finally finally FINALLY totally, completely, 100% got over McPhee, the aforementioned crush/best friend, for whom I’d had feelings on and off since we first met my junior year.
(My crush on him was like the worst-kept secret of all time, just FYI. Also, we’re still best friends).
I was excited to spend the summer single, in Columbus, Ohio, where I didn’t know a soul. I was even more excited to move to New York and explore my singledom further.
For the first time, not only did I want to be single, but I was looking forward to being single for a set period of time.
And that is when I met Dan.
I fought tooth and nail against being in a long-distance relationship. I wanted to be single, damn it! Spend time focusing on me! Explore my blossoming sexuality that I had suppressed for so long in the face of southern Purity Culture.
But I couldn’t help it. I knew there was something wrong with me when I stopped wanting to kiss other people, a feeling I discovered after our first skype date, ten days after I had said good-bye to him my last night in Ohio. We started talking more and more and more until I realized I was falling in love with him. A few weeks later, he asked me to be his girlfriend, and, as they say, the rest is history.
Which brings us back to Homecoming 2011. Of course, everyone was catching up and finding out what’s changed and who’s doing what. Most people asked me about four subjects. Living in France, living in New York, interning with Kappa, and having my first boyfriend.
Guess which one garnered the most interest?
Apparently having a boyfriend for a week is WAY more interesting than working in France for two years or interning with your sorority for three months.
To this day, I still love talking about Dan, so it’s not like I was offended that everyone wanted to know all about him. But I also love talking about France and my sorority. I was disappointed that while catching up with all my old college friends, they pretty much only wanted to know about my relationship.
I realize this is easy for me to say at 28, married for 1 1/2 years already. But I did marry my first boyfriend. I was single for the first 24 years of my life. I do remember what that was like.
There is SO much more to life than having a significant other. Screw getting a ring by spring. Yeah, a candle pass is nice, but you know what else is nice? Seeing the world. Meeting new people. Living outside your comfort zone. Backpacking across France all alone and befriending the people you meet in your hostels. Being free to make mistakes and to learn from them.
Figuring out who you are, as an individual.
I love marriage.
More than that, I love being married to Dan. He is everything I could ever want in a partner.
But who I am, as a person, is more than Dan’s wife.
I’m only glad I learned that lesson well before I ever met my husband.
Clearly you are more interested in discussing “France/books/theatre/etc” than in discussing boys, and obviously you only go on about relationships because others push you to do so.
Which is why here, where you can write about any topic at all… most of the posts are about boys, marriage, relationships…
Ok
Ugh those quotes of “advice” make me cringe so much! I may not have much experience being single. I married my high school sweetheart. We dated 6 years before we got married. But, I certainly didn’t change myself for him. When we started dating, marriage was the farthest thing from my mind. I just liked this boy and he liked me back and we had fun together. We grew a lot while we were together and we introduced interests to each other, but we are still each our own person. There are things I enjoy that he has no desire to do and vice versa. And we acknowledge and respect that. We are not the same person nor do we need to be.
If I were single during college, maybe I would have felt differently, but it always really bothered me when girls thought about nothing else besides men. Some thought their whole life revolved around them and they would only be worth something if they were in a relationship. It drove me crazy!
I love this! The “advice” you received from your friends makes me want to punch someone, as much as the fact that they were more interested in your relationship than your extremely interesting and exciting life. But I’m from the south too, so I totally get it. I think it really is a “southern girl” thing!
Also! Your “falling in love with Dan even though you really didn’t want to” story is very similar to my “falling in love with Dan even thought I didn’t want to” story! (Down to the name “Dan”!) So funny. It’s amazing when you just know.
What?! No way! Have you blogged about it? I’d love to read your “falling in love with Dan even though I didn’t want to” story.
Haha no I haven’t! Basically I was in one of those places in life where I told myself, “You’re not allowed to date for x-amount of time. (I chose one year.) I met Dan in month two, haha. By month six we were official.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing this. It resonated with me so much and I can just simply relate right now, as I could in college. I’m going home for Christmas and I should be excited to show everyone the best parts of my life, instead of mentally preparing to dread the ultimate question, “So have you met anyone yet?”
I tell myself every day that my relationship status doesn’t define who I am as a person, and most of the time it works. Lately though, I’ve been a bit down about it. Thanks for the reminder! xx
You’re doing so much! You have so many adventures! Why should your relationship status determine your worth?
Still, yay for getting to come home for Christmas, prying questions aside.
Also, I’m glad you’re okay. Thanks for checking in on Facebook. My cousins are safe too. <3
I truly hate that type of “advice”. There is nothing wrong with being a relationship but when people disregard everything a girl has accomplished in her life because she is single, it makes me so angry.
Exactly! I love being married, but I’m not somehow more superior than I was before I met my husband.
I’d argue that it’s totally possible to move to France for a few years with a husband–but seeing as I’m the girl who moved to China (to work) with a husband and then to Malaysia (to work) with a husband, I’m probably not the right one to ask. 😉 I’m one of those kinda people who think you can adventure the world and get outside your comfort zone with or without somebody by your side. Who ever said marriage slows you down? There IS so much more to life than having a significant other, but I enjoy appreciating the “so much more” with the guy who’s been an undeniable presence in my adventurous life since I turned 17. I think people should have adventures of the type they enjoy most at all times, whether they’ve found someone they want to be hitched to or not. My little sister is 22 and has never had a boyfriend and she’s lived in Israel and has had a variety of interesting adventures during her college years. I can only imagine she’ll get even more adventurous once she’s free of the burden of college classes–and if she gets married in the not-too-distant future, she’ll take him along on all those adventures she has planned.
Maybe since I’m from the northern midwest, it was considered way more scandalous to be married in college than to be single in college. To this day the vast majority of my closest friends from college are single. A higher percentage of Angel’s friends are married, but then he’s 31 and graduated a few years before me.
It’s certainly theoretically possible to move to France with a husband, but considering the challenges working in France vs. working in other countries (trust me, I’ve done the research because I really wanted to move there with Dan), it’s difficult for a married American couple to both get jobs in France. This is especially true if pursuing either of the jobs I held in France. TAPIF has an age limit, plus you must already speak French. Some families have live-out au pairs, but most want live-in au pairs, and definitely not live-in married couples.
Adventures are wonderful, but adventures abroad while married are more difficult unless you both have a similar career path. I chose Dan over France. I love France more than I can express, but I love Dan even more. Living in France just isn’t possible with his career and with his complete lack of language skills. Although I haven’t looked in about 6 months, I used to regularly research jobs in France for American civil engineers who didn’t speak French. Alas, I never did find one.
If by “single,” you mean “unmarried,” then I’d say that even in the South, it was rare (but not at all scandalous) to be married in college. My university even had special housing for married students! But a large number of my peers got engaged in college and got married immediately after graduation or within a year of graduation. “Single” as in not in any relationship was certainly still common, but those of us who were received quite a bit of subtle (and direct) rude remarks about it.
Fantastic post! I love the ending the best. I highly doubt if I hadn’t taken the three years I took to really find myself, when I met Scott, I wouldn’t have been ready to be his wife. Plus, we would have missed out on a LOT of the fun and awesome things we have in our marriage if I hadn’t been ready to embrace who I was first.