I was speaking to a friend about long-term relationships. We got onto routine and how it’s supposedly normal for a couple to settle into something that feels comfortable for both of them and it’s fine to just accept this as it is and allow the boredom to creep in.
We all live within the confines of social boundaries and I can’t help thinking that the branding that comes with marriage, child, house, dogs, car, etc. is what drove me to divorce. Did it have less to do with wanting a divorce and more to do with wanting freedom … freedom from this cramped box of conformity that’s wrapped up in the illusion of this family vibe? Lately I’ve been taking a look at families from a different perspective. I see the way people in a couple fold in upon themselves … they buckle to pressures that require them to be something different for their partners and their children and their friends. They give up little pieces of themselves in order to be accepted by the people in their lives who help define them.
Where I disagreed with my friend was in the breaking of the norms. Sure, couples settle into a routine and sure that is a socially acceptable norm and one that brings so much comfort to so many people. But what if you are the type to doggedly resist that by trying to break the seemingly unbreakable mould of social conformity?
In the same way I backpack (wanting to move as soon as I have settled into a new place), I resist settling as soon as things become too normal. Getting married, having babies, buying houses … these are all milestones people use to settle even deeper into normality and routine, benchmarks around which they measure their movement towards successful human lives.
And then you get people like me. I wrote on my recent travels about not wanting to be defined by the place my roots sink into the ground but rather by the sky my branches are reaching towards. I want to climb mountains, sleep under the stars, swim in the Ganges and never use assets and responsibilities as an excuse to have anything less than an extra-ordinary life. I don’t want to be just another ordinary package holiday; I want to be unchartered territory. And I realise more than anything that I don’t have to be ok for everybody; I just have to be ok for me.
