Dinner for Four

Picture it: a group of four friends outside on the patio on a breezy summer evening in July. They share a meal together, a few cigarettes, and a lot of wine. All four in their late twenties, nearing thirty, that ever dreaded aging milestone that forces contemplation and begs for introspection. “What have I done with my life and where am I going next?” All four suddenly single, searching for romance anew or trying to get over it. I know what you’re thinking: perfect setup of a cry-fest/man-bashing session. Actually, that’s not what happened. In fact, it ended up being one of the most constructive discussions I’ve had about love and relationships in a long time.

I had a wonderful mid-week dinner with my best girlfriends last night; and, if nothing else, it gave me comfort to know that I am not alone in my confusion over the current state of romance. There seems to be more of us out there than I thought. Young people starting to get a little older, a little more mature. People that have been through school, or are finishing school, who have been out on their own for a while, gaining financial and emotional independence but lacking in that one ever elusive part of their lives, love and romance.

This is, of course, in stark contrast to those friends and acquaintances of ours that jumped into marriage at a young age, who never knew an independent life and never had to struggle to make it through life without someone else there to struggle with them.

It’s a question of lifestyle, I suppose. Choices we make at certain stages in our lives that determine the paths our lives take thereafter. Some of us find the “love of our lives” at seventeen, get married at twenty, and disappear into the marriage unit never to be heard from again. Some of us get married at twenty, divorced by twenty-five or thirty, and have to start over from there, sometimes with a child, and sometimes without. Some of us go through lengthy relationships, get engaged, sometimes move on to marriage, and sometimes not. And some of us go from person to person looking for that quick sense of euphoria, that sense of being wanted and desired, until it wears off and we move on to the next quick date in search of that euphoria anew.

But what is the right path, and which is wrong? Or is there even a right and wrong?

There isn’t really. Those of us who have found love and stuck with it, worked for it, are no better off than those of us who haven’t. It’s a matter of circumstance, a simple matter of choice and consequence. We choose to get married, we choose to date someone, or not, we choose to have sex, or not, we choose to end relationships. And the consequences follow the choices we make. What was so striking about my friends and I as we sat there together was that we had all had different pasts, different paths to our current state, yet we suddenly all found ourselves in essentially the same situation, asking the same questions about where to go next and if love was possible again for any of us.


Perhaps it is our independence and our experience thus far with love that makes us more aware of what we want, whatever that might be, but also more cautious in trying to find it. Once you’ve been hurt, seen the good and the bad, you know a little better the reality of what love is really like, what it is supposed to be like, and what you want it to be like. But you also know how rare it is to find someone that you are truly compatible with, that you can talk to, have a conversation with, work towards common goals with. At thirty, we concern ourselves more with creating family units for our children or ourselves, establishing lone-term bonds, finding stability. But we’re also smart enough to know that Mr. Right may never appear, so we prepare ourselves for the alternative. Not that we don’t get lonely sometimes, long for affection and desire, but sometimes we’ve got to be realistic in knowing that life, especially love, rarely turns out the way we expect it to.

The lesson for today is to remember that we are not alone in our struggles. I am eternally grateful that I have such good friends to help get me through hard times, people I can really talk to and who understand where I am at in my life. We support each other. And if that’s as it good as it gets, I’ll take it for now. I love them all dearly.