Tag: love

So I’ve been wondering

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I’m sure we all have our cultural blindspots. Bits of ubiquitous popular culture that we’re aware of, but have never really engaged in. One of those for me has long been Sex and the City. I could reference some key characters and ideas, tell you that the reboot and second film were rubbish, but not really much more than that. Oh, and that Geri Haliwell cameo.

While visiting a friend in, where else, New York City this summer I was challenged to rectify this oversight. We watched the infamous episode – actually one of the show’s last – when washed up party girl Lexi Featherston tumbles out of a window with a Splat! ‘Why is no one fun anymore?’ I enjoyed the experience, but had many questions. So I took seriously the challenge from my friend to watch the whole thing.

Cut to about three months later and I have just finished watching all six seasons, 2 movies and many podcasts. I couldn’t help but wonder, why have I waited so long to consume this wonderful show?

I’m sure all of us have been asked, with varying degrees of scepticism or eye rolling, whether we are a Miranda, a Charlotte, a Samantha or heaven forbid a Carrie. So much of the success of the show is that these women represented for a generation of women (and gay men…) archetypes that could encompass a vast and varied experience. That a hugely-successful show centred female friendship, and had women who, though on the surface were searching for love, were really choosing each other again and again, was and remains remarkable.

I think I chose the right time to watch this show for the first time. I may not be living an it girl lifestyle in New York, but I am a single person in his later thirties who has to navigate the world of societal expectations and 2.4 kids. Many of my generation grew up with this show and Carrie Bradshaw represented an aspirational idea of what being a grown up would look like. For me, I have come to Carrie et al not as an eighteen year old dreaming of my future, but as a millennial struggling through the landscape of ‘is this it?’

So many of the stories that the women of Sex and the City face are all about expectations. Their own expectations of themselves, their friends and the men in their lives. The expectations of the world around them. Not to mention the expectations and pressures of work, gender and love. These are things that have been at the forefront of my mind even before I started watching the show and I felt myself seen and heard in the stories of the women of Manhattan.

As I get older and see the different paths that lives can take around me, it is harder than ever to be content with the particular set of opportunities and challenges I have been dealt. I sometimes feel shut out of the more ‘conventional’ life choices of those with partners, children and a seemingly settled life. Yet I struggle with the idea of settling myself, as I have enjoyed the opportunities afforded me through being single and relatively carefree. It’s a bit like when Carrie has her Manolos stolen at an affluent friend’s baby shower – her friend simply cannot understand Carrie’s life and the value the shoes hold.

So many of the stories in Sex and the City’s 6 seasons are about these four friends grappling with what they want, accepting what they have, and coming back to each other through it all. One of the most moving moments for me is when Miranda, after years of cynicism, gently cares for her mother in law at the show’s end. She has learned to open herself up.

Without a doubt my favourite man in the show is Steve. When he says to Miranda ‘I love having your friends over’, I could shed a tear for a partner eager to accept the other as they are, including recognising that their friends are their family too.

These women, through it all, come back to each other. Sat at that table in the cafe. When Miranda shares her pregnancy while Charlotte is struggling with her fertility. When Samantha shares her cancer diagnosis (even at Miranda’s wedding – they are family, it needs to be discussed right away). When Carrie has yet another Big-related realisation or crisis – no matter what, they chose each other.

I know I have some people, friends and family, in my life who I choose to come back to. It’s hard when we move, things change, paths diverge. But I hope that we can all find those to return to time and again. Even if we don’t have wardrobes to match Carrie, we all need to find community and love like hers.

‘Go get our girl.’

Undecided

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The last few years I’ve felt a familiar push and pull. Sometimes week by week, sometimes day by day, often swifter. A push and a pull urging me forward and holding me back. It takes on forms that have shaped lives over centuries – should I stay or should I go? In this job? City? Relationship? But has also taken unique form, my own inner voice, worming deep into my subsconscious and my contemplations. How are you, Samwise, going to deal with this? What do you, Samwise, want your future to be? How can you get there? Why is it not working out? Why is it so hard?

Small decisions are easy aren’t they? I think they are for me, at least. I don’t find it difficult to decide what to do with an evening, or to just go for it and book those concert tickets. I don’t find it hard to organise my inbox or buy groceries. I think if anything I can rush into these small decisions too quickly. Somewhat impulsively, I decided to try out a new style of underwear recently. Suffice to say, I should have trod more cautiously toward that particular decision. Pants aside, as a teacher, there is much talk about decision fatigue – the idea that after a day of making hundreds of decisions for small people, you find yourself incapable of making any further choices. I can see the truth in this – a recent period of living with my parents has been lovely in part because they often decide what’s for dinner for me! But on the whole, I don’t feel burdened by choice in the day to day.

When it comes to bigger than that, I’ve found my decision-making grinding to a halt. Decisions seem to take on a weight previously absent. Taking that job, making that choice, even going on that date, can seem like choosing a path with no way back if it goes wrong. Year after year, with jobs in particular, it has seemed recently like I am in a constant cycle of applying for jobs, second-guessing those opportunities, and then ending up rejecting interviews or offers out of fear or confusion. Yet the prospect of being job-less is also scary, especially while trying to secure a mortgage (more big decisions for me to spiral about…)

It has all felt like a slow car crash of paralysis. Sometimes I have felt, I do feel, like I’m vividly stuck; unable to move forward or make choices, out of fear that like pruning a limb from a tree, all those other green shoots and hopes will fall if I choose just one direction. Othertimes, I feel more deliberate, practical, considering choices rationally. But then this seam of bright emotion and fear cuts through me – What have I done? Have I missed the boat? What have you done?

It’s almost like I have some kind of fetish for flexibility. Maybe that’s a bit strong. But I certainly aspire after an idealised 2025 life of working from home. The idea of being able to do my washing on a weekday is certainly exciting. Of not having to balance health concerns with fears about upsetting the balance of work. As a teacher, it is a unimaginable dream to have that kind of work life. Often finding time for the loo is difficult enough.

I am increasingly aware that my jealousies and frustrations are focused on the things I envy and desire the most – one of those, at the moment, is the flicker of anger when I see or hear about other’s work schedules. After teaching primary children for almost fifteen years, the fear and desire intertwined in a ‘grass is greener’ way when considering other forms of employment is visceral for me. Not to mention debilitating when it comes to considering a way forward.

I don’t want to be fuelled by frustration or envy, but to find the next positive step myself, even if that feels hard to imagine at the moment. While discussing this with a friend recently, he decided to just ask ChatGPT (something I confess I have never done) and in listing my experience and qualifications to a freakily human computer generated voice, made me feel like this could be possible perhaps. That maybe I am not stuck, but just at a natural transition point. Suffice to say, ChatGPT had many useful suggestions and directions in which I could go. I need to strategise, with or without AI, to make some of those ideas work.

In that echoing place we find ourselves in sometimes, often when we can’t sleep or at the end of a long day, with different voices urging us on and holding us back, it can be so hard to navigate a way forward. But that is what we must, what I must, try and do. The vivid emotions of frustration and stress can burn us out; are reminders that something about the place we find ourselves in is unsustainable. I hope that in this fog of uncertainty, I can navigate a way forward.

The Grey

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I wonder if my dream will come true this side of heaven. I wonder if heaven is there to be honest. I understand more than ever the desire, both inside and outside the church, to bring ‘heaven on earth.’ To make the world a more happy and tolerant and loving place. I see how this desire leads to people idolising marriage or rejecting it as an outdated thing, I see how it leads to people having babies or choosing not to, I see how it leads to people becoming missionaries in far flung and dangerous places or to take to the streets in a pride march in a place where they might face similar danger. We all want to make the world a better place. What would that better world look like in my dream?

I think it might be something like this. So many of my insecurities, both self and other inflicted, come from expectations. Expectations from my own heart, from the church, from the world, from movie, hell, from Instagram. I expected my life to go a particular way until, well, it didn’t.

Perhaps the biggest area this has been hard for me is in relationships (of the romantic kind.) Everyone, myself included, is just obsessed. Everywhere you look, from the most conservative Christian, to the most postmodern atheist, the focus is on just the one thing, or so it seems. My perception, as someone looking in from the outside, is that the one thing everyone values highest is the thing I don’t have. So dramatic, I know.

As much as I appreciate people like Emma Watson saying she is happing ‘self-partnered’ – and we need to value each opportunity to big up those currently single – the answer is somehow bigger. What if we could truly free ourselves from these expectations? How many sons, daughters, friends, would feel less like a person-in-waiting if they were freed from the pressure to find someone? How many people would be willing to take a risk on actually meeting someone if they were freed from the pressure of finding ‘the one’? How many marriages would be improved if we were freed from our insecurities that we married the wrong person?

I dream of a world where we are just, well, people. Each precious. Not a half-person in sight. Not a waiting person, nor one who is too damaged. Too ugly. Not cool enough. Whatever.

I have glimpsed the reasons the world, and the church, is so in love with, well, love. Of course there are so many good things; the companionship, the love, the romance, the fact that someone is there, the family life. I get it. I don’t want to tear down marriage. I want to celebrate when my friends get married. But I want to be freed from the inescapable heartache that comes for so many when that happens. Why should we feel left behind? I wish I could reset my heart and remove this part. My head knows that I am no less a person than my married or coupled friends, but I don’t think my heart realises.

I dream of a place where each one is truly valued equally, yes irrespective of sexuality, race, gender, but also ‘relationship status.’ There are so many who are in pain every day, whether that’s because they jumped at a relationship that was wrong, or were afraid to jump at all.

In so many areas I feel like we need to recognise the grey. The fact that nothing is simple and everything seems blurry sometimes. This area of life is so significant and yet so nebulous for so many. So let’s talk about it, let’s try and be better where we can, let’s speak to our hearts and our friends. Let’s try to be more comfortable with the grey, because grey can be beautiful too.