Inhaling a New Vision for Romance

When we imagine our lives in the long-term, we envision a certain layout of how things should gradually take shape. You go to college, you date, you start your career, and when all aspects of your life seem to fall into place, you get married. But what happens when the order of these life events shifts? What happens when you meet "the one" prematurely?

I embarked on a spontaneous excursion to a hookah bar a few days ago with some friends, looking for nothing more than a good time and an evening of relaxation. What we ended up experiencing was something much deeper.

The owner of the lounge, an expressive Lebanese man in his mid-forties, immediately caught our attention as he took our order. After a few huffs and puffs from our waterpipe, we decided to spark conversation.

What we quickly learned, was that the man was a former engineer for corporate America who had cut all ties to the corporate world in favor of a more laissez faire lifestyle that catered to his needs as well as the needs of others. He had given up a six-figure salary in favor of smoking hookah in a restaurant until two (and sometimes four) o'clock in the morning every day and night.

But he claimed that what made it all worth it was not just the relaxed nature of his new business venture, but the simple ability to be with his family and stop living the life he had felt expected to live. (It's worth mentioning that his daughter was our other server.) His culture and religion, he said, put emphasis not on money or extravagant lifestyles, but experiencing life with family - no matter what your social status. The traditional "American dream," as many like to refer to it, does not exist in his culture.

As it turns out, his romantic life is very much out of order by the standards of today's youth. He and his wife met in college when they were only 19, and were married at the same age.

"I saw my wife, and I thought ... why not?" he said.

The example served as something strikingly significant, not just because of the fact that they were married at such a young age, but because they were married at that particular age without any extenuating circumstances. I've witnessed people getting married at an early age, but always for various reasons. They lacked the stability to stand on their own feet, they found themselves "knocked up," or they married their high school sweethearts because they didn't think they had the energy to keep looking. None of these things appeared to be the case here.

To make things more interesting, he made a surprisingly strong case for why marriages in America seem to ... well, flounder. According to him, what makes marriages fail in our culture is our uncanny ability to plan everything that we do. We get married after we've experienced our "single selves" and move into a marriage thinking we can settle down but still live our lives as if we're single. In other words, we lack boundaries.

Now, as I look back on the conversation, I can't help but wonder how much we may or may not miss out on in the process of developing a "plan" for our lives. Do we miss out on the true loves of our lives, just because they don't fit into the blueprint we've constructed for our ideal selves? Have our own standards killed our chances of experiencing marriage in its most glorious form?

Rather than awaiting a life that we've dreamed for ourselves, it seems appropriate that we should stop waiting for our dream lives to come to fruition, and start embracing living the lives we've been given. If you happen to stumble upon someone you truly love at an unexpected point in your life, it might just be better to stop asking questions and start experiencing. And if at this point you still find yourself asking an overwhelming number of questions, ask yourself only one more:

"Why not?"

Introducing the 'Your Life, Your Love, Your Story Campaign'

Got relationships?

"Sex and the City of Brotherly Love" is ready to hear your side of the story. When it comes to relationships, it's always important to remember that there is an exception to every rule, a story to counteract every common belief. This is where you come in.

It's one thing to write about dating and relationships from an outside perspective, and another to witness it first hand. "Brotherly Love" wants to hear all of the gory intricacies of your relationship; every gleeful reminiscence, every near-break-up moment, every scandalous detail to what makes you and your significant other "tick." And most importantly, what role the City of Philadelphia has had on the dynamics of your dyad.

But this campaign is not for the faint of heart, nor the extreme optimist, nor the extreme cynic. This is a campaign for the realists in the world - in Philadelphia. This campaign is not about spreading love, it is about spreading truth.

If you and your partner would like to be profiled as an example of a "real" Philadelphian relationship, simply send an email my way at brandon.baker@temple.edu. The process will be quite simple: we meet for coffee (or tea, if that's your thing), I grill you with the tough questions, and you check back to brotherlylover.blogspot.com soon after to see the result. If you have further questions or hesitations about what to expect or what the campaign represents, do not think twice about inquiring.

Let's make this city a better place for relationships to sprout and blossom, one story at a time.

A Hop, Skip and a Check Away from True Love

Realizing that you love someone stands as the biggest “aha!” moment of a person’s life. There is no greater realization, no better feeling to be had for the human soul. Despite the trouble and anxiety that is very likely to ensue in the future, you truly have no concept of your euphoria deepening after experiencing such life-altering feelings. To the stronghold of your emotions, you’ve reached the top of the mountain.

Still, the aftermath of this realization has an unfortunate tendency to throw an innumerable amount of questions and problems our way, producing that curve ball we just can't seem to hit out of the park. Once you finally find love, what do you do with it?

I fondly recall a time where sorting through your emotions was as simple as passing along a note and asking a person to “check yes or no.” It was easy, it was to-the-point, and it was effective. You had the answer to your question just as quickly as it surfaced. For this reason, I can’t help but wonder ... what changed?

It appears that somewhere along the line we find ourselves battered and bruised to the point of no return. Writing that very straightforward question on a piece of paper is no longer representative of a hopeful future, but the possibility of an oncoming doomsday based on a dreary past.

Which brings me to my point: At what cost do we “protect ourselves” in the long journey of finding and keeping love?

Our modern lifestyles particularly enjoy glorifying the one-night stand that serves to make our romantic comedies interesting and keep our gossipy friends entertained. Yet really, does a one-night stand serve as anything more than a scapegoat for insecurity?

That’s not to say I view one-night stands as a sign of loneliness and desperation. Sometimes it’s best to recognize that a good f*** is just that: a good f***. However, our lifestyles are, more often than not, a striking reflection of the state of our emotions. It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that if someone is going to the club every night – “single and fabulous” or not – they’re going in search of something more than a vodka martini. Even the most seemingly stable and blissfully promiscuous deal with their own love-struck dilemmas, and struggle just as much as your average write-in to “Ask Ann.”

I’ve spent quite the chunk of time in my life trying to understand why people feel the need to constantly keep themselves at arm’s length, and it becomes clearer and clearer to me with each passing day. Yet what comes with this understanding, to my own surprise, is not so much an acceptance of this idea of “protecting yourself,” but a motivation to break apart those emotional barriers.

It seems awfully counterproductive to spend your life shooing away love and fending off its affects, when the unconscious (quite literally) craves its attention. To say that our minds are not dependent on relationships, would be like saying that our bodies are not dependent on food. Pushing away these bare necessities are unhealthy and detrimental to the same “self” you aim to preserve.

I’ve been a consistent advocate of avoiding dwelling in my blog entries, and I maintain that moving forward means not looking back. All the while, it is more important to note that moving forward in your life requires conscious effort – just because you’re not looking back, doesn’t mean you’re moving forward.

Finding love and moving forward with it means putting yourself out there, whether that be with a high school-style note or an awkward face-to-face conversation with whom you believe to be your one true love. Turn back the clock on your commitment-phobic self and embrace the idea that maybe, just maybe, love isn’t another aspect of your life that you can control. You may face a few added risks by embracing this idea, but you just might find that it’s worth it when that radiant love note finally gets passed over to your desk.

'Giving and Taking' for a Better Tomorrow

In your greatest times of desperation, you find yourself sitting alone somewhere, thinking about just how low you’ll go to get even a slice of what you really want. We seek out that distraction that we deem necessary to brighten our lonely nights and, ultimately, our lonely lives. But what if what we really need in life isn’t at all what we’ve always believed it to be, and our hopes, dreams and expectations serve as nothing more than a mere mirage in the desert of the mind?

In many respects, life is one grand game of give-and-take. You give yourself to someone in hopes that what they have to offer in exchange is worth more than what you’re giving up. But what happens when, like passing along trading cards on the playground, you find yourself giving away a Charizard in exchange for a Goldeen?

In my own travels, I’ve stumbled upon all kinds of relationships with varying degrees of this give-and-take dynamic. I’ve witnessed those who cherish their partner enough to “settle down” when they’ve never thought themselves as “the marrying kind;” and I’ve met others who have tragically and (on the surface) delusionally given all of themselves for a relationship based on poor foundation.

But the one thing I’ve found in common with these relationships, despite my own cynicism and the apparent lack of inconsistency, is a smile. They give, they take, they fight, they complain, but they always end with a smile. In a dating world that demands that others find a balance of the game of give-and-take, how is one to interpret a relationship that thrives despite a lack of this so-called ideal dynamic.

In the time we spend analyzing our dating lives and determining what is “proper,” it seems likely that we miss out on what we truly want, and what we truly need. We become so obsessed with this idea of balance and appropriateness, that our definition of what makes a relationship successful becomes … jaded.

The moment you find yourself content in a relationship is most likely to occur the moment you realize that a relationship is never going to be a real-life reflection of your own fantasies.

Regardless of what logic might have you believe, a successful, balanced relationship finds its success not in the count of months that it endures, but the count of smiles that are constantly plastered onto your face. Even when or if the relationship meets its end, who is to say that that makes the relationship unsuccessful? Why spend days, weeks and months mourning our “failed” relationships, when we could celebrate the wonderful times that preceded the unfortunate end of an era?

Life, as entangled as it is in the game of give-and-take, is measured better by your own relative stance on success. Finding love and losing it isn’t something to be sour or bitter about, it’s something to celebrate. You celebrate not just the fact that it happened, but the fact that it was able to happen, and that it will happen again.

So, no matter where you are in life, no matter how lonely or desperate you may feel, raise a glass to the comforting thought that you can feel at all. Because in the end, even if you find yourself as an elderly “cat lady,” you can rejoice in knowing that you were able to share your love, and give it away to someone (cat or otherwise) you gave worth to.