Anxieties

Walking to work this morning, I ran into an old friend's Mom on the street. As with anyone you have known superficially for many years, we went through the usual formalities of how are you, what are you doing these days. Except that now, with everyone and their mothers (literally!) on Facebook, she knew exactly what I was up to: starting med school soon and all that jazz. So instead, she asked me how my love life was going. Any men around these days? I said not much going on. Maybe she sensed my unease at that point because she seemed to change her mind suddenly about the direction the conversation was headed and instead, began telling me that she knew how hard it was to meet people in this city and besides, look at how successful I am and how I got here all on my own, how she remembers me as a little girl in Hungary and how I moved here and from nothing I have made myself something. Blah blah blah... is it just me or does this sound like she was trying to convince me (or herself perhaps) that it was okay that I wasn't dating anyone, that my other qualities made up for the lack of a husband, a boyfriend? And if so, why do I care? And if not, then why am I reading things into this dialogue?

I am clearly anxious about this. I can try denying it, even to myself, but here it is. Anxiety. Maybe it’s the fact that a lot of my close friends are suddenly getting married. Maybe it’s that I am nearing that decade of life in which being a single woman often has some very negative connotations – there is even a very popular HBO series based on this fact of life, which my life so often resembles. Maybe it’s what I conceive of as social expectations. At a certain point in life, people should get married, buy a house and have children. That’s what people around me are doing. That’s what people in the movies are doing. Sure it doesn’t mean it’s what I must (or should) do, but we all want to fit in – whoever says that’s not true, I don’t believe it – and we don’t want to be judged by others. And I know that people judge, because I do. I don’t want to, but many times I have met older people who had either never married or never had children, and I often thought: are they happy, do they ever wish life turned out differently, was it their choice or circumstances created a less than ideal situation?

I think of my very good friend whose Mom often says about her daughter: her life is on track, she has a great job that she loves and that pays very well, she travels all over the world, she has amazing friends, but there is just one thing missing: a boyfriend. And sadly, I think that’s how she feels as well. And sadly, I sometimes feel like that too. What troubles me the most though is that I am not sure whether that’s because it’s what everyone else around me seems to be doing or whether that’s really how I feel. 

This brings me to the question I have been asking myself (and I suppose everyone does all the time): what is it that I really want? Looking past social conventions, expectations and judgments from others, what would be my ideal choice? The sad thing is that I am not even sure. I am too tangled up in what’s going on around me, I sometimes don’t know what’s going on inside. Here is what I do know: I am an independent and successful woman; the previous statement does not mean that I do not wish to share my life with others; I want intimacy: physically, emotionally and intellectually; I want to love and be loved; and I want to have children at some point.

I guess these last two points are important. When I was younger, I used to think I was in love all the time. How was I supposed to know better? I think as we live more and meet more people and love more and fall out of love more, through this whole process we create our own definitions of love. It’s probably not the same for any two people. For me, it is now clear that love is respecting and caring about a person so much that I would put their happiness over mine. I can see how many times in the past I had been selfish and uncompromising. What I realized over the past few years is that love is not about what I want, and most certainly nothing to do with marriage or about being in a relationship. And yet there is a near obsession in Western and especially American culture with the idea that single people are somehow deficient in something. Then why are so many people in relationships so miserable? Is there too much external pressure? Or internal for that matter? I actually count myself lucky to have experienced something close to what I think love should feel like. But I wonder how many times in one’s life that happens. Regardless, I think that brings me to my point about wanting to have children. Beyond our evolutionary instincts to pass our genes on, I want to feel that kind of selfless love towards another human being. Maybe that desire in itself is selfish. But isn’t it the desire to create life to fulfill one’s own desires what drives our human existence?

But quickly going back to what we want versus the expectations of others. I have been thinking about this a lot because I have been trying to figure it out myself. Perhaps not coincidentally, I am reading a book titled Status Anxiety at the moment. It’s a sort of intellectual self help book: a touch of philosophy, politics, economics and questions like why we care about art. I particularly like the section about how philosophy, over the ages, has dealt with the issue of social anxiety. There is a branch of philosophy championed by Schopenhauer and Chamfort called intelligent misanthropy. One of the ways that approval of others matters to us is psychological: it is very difficult to retain confidence in ourselves if others do not accord us signs of respect. Very basically, what Schopenhauer and Chamfort suggest we should all do is not care about what others think. Of course that’s easier said than done, as most of us have experienced. They also suggest that by doing so, we will end up with few friends. “Once we have resolved only to see those who will treat us morally and virtuously, reasonably and truthfully, without treating conventions, vanities and ceremonials as anything other than props to polite society; when we have taken this resolve (and we have to do so or we will end up foolish, weak or villainous), the result is that we will have to live more or less on our own.”

So what does that all come down to? We are social animals, and even though the human condition is that we are basically on our own in the end, most of us fear loneliness and surround ourselves with people. As a consequence, we are judged by those people and the desire to fit in probably creates most of our anxieties and unhappiness in life. It seems an inescapable trap. As for my own anxieties: some of the things I wish for are somewhat outside of my control. Like meeting a man I would like to spend – if not the rest of my life with – some time with (one who is also available). Sure I can put myself in situations where meeting people would be more likely, but that hasn’t worked out so well for me in the past. And from experience, sometimes it’s better not to even try, because the majority of people out there only think of themselves. I am confident that it is so much better to be a little lonely than to fill the space with just anyone. I do not want to be defined or judged by my success or unsuccess in the world of romantic relationships. Not having a boyfriend, not getting married, not buying a house in the suburbs are not signs of failure. I want to be defined by my actions. I have chosen to pursue a career which is going to involve many more years of schooling, training, long hours, sleepless nights and many tens of thousands of dollars of debt. I have decided to take this on because it is my dream, it is my calling, I am as sure as one can be. How love and children might fit into this plan is rather uncertain. Sure, women these days often have children on their own – we have the luxury to do that even without partners. But when and how that would fit into my life, I have no idea. I sometimes say jokingly that by the time I finish my training and pay back all my student loans, all my eggs will have rotten. It’s actually not funny, but rather scary.

Wow, I can't believe how this chance meeting has put me in such an introspective mood. Perhaps it was an accelerator to get some thoughts that have been bothering me out. After all, the whole point of writing for me is to feel lighter, less anxious, less alone perhaps.

Let me just finish with a quote from Status Anxiety: it says about Flaubert’s Madame Bovary – as a reference to why we love art, read literature, how they can enrich our lives by gaining some understanding of it – that after reading it we feel “a mixture of sadness – at how we are all made to live before we can even begin to know how, at how limited is our understanding of ourselves and others, at how great and catastrophic are the consequences of our actions, and how often pitiless and uncompromising the responses of upstanding members of the community when we err.” I think that about sums up life.