Response: One person’s messiness, another’s complexity – dating in your 20s 

When I first read the article published in this paper arguing to “stay single in your 20s,” my immediate response was to take pen and paper to flesh out my idea a little further. Writing serves as a useful tool for the creative thinking process, the result of writing, produces insights and ideas that may not have emerged simply through thinking alone.   

I’ll add, I appreciate the writing of a subject so difficult to tame, to admire and to simplify. This is in no way to be taken as an attack on someone’s view, but I just merely wanted to offer an alternative perspective- to help, add to the salon of idée fixe and to contribute to the general sense that writing about relationships in your 20s did in fact strike a nerve.  

The truth is, we choose to include people in our lives not because they add to the messiness, or worse, our perception that they may feel burdened by this mess, but because they may help us stray from it. The thing is, as evolution has proved it, we are fundamentally social beings. Our lives are only as good the way we are capable of seeing them, and the people we choose to include in them. The article is right in assessing current social data to objectively conclude that relationships may be a point of social exile, or a proverbial turning-off of our social GPS. And honestly, there is a lot to justify this analysis as it is hardly the case to be a stranger to the words, “plans were canceled and parties were ditched.” However, I’d like to argue the contrary.  

It is essential and maybe even of a certain moral responsibility to include those in the world we choose to build for ourselves. In this sense, we should value people as our greatest resources. Friends, family, girlfriend, boyfriend or whichever term you find appropriate to describe fundamentally similar things – companions. And how do you suppose we find those people? We date, we make friends and we get drunk to chip away at those introverted qualities to make ourselves more acceptable to our future company. Now, I pity this “prepubescent Brian” that was mentioned and do urge the consideration that men, as I’d hoped a background in physiology and neurobiology would’ve taught, age and mature slower than women. But that minor criticism isn’t constructive to the central point of this response; I’d simply like to suggest a more pragmatic view of relationships. All of which are more alike than otherwise. Most of the relationships that I’ve found to be “serious,” in the previous text’s words, are those which promote each other’s individual evolution and respect one another’s interests and curiosities, not inhibit them. This, of course, follows some serious trial-and-error periods of which the previous text spoke of humorously – where you soul-search, your interests begin to broaden and personality begins to approximate a truer average. A little bit about me, I’m an engineering major in my senior year who appreciates the value of a social or intellectual challenge, more than I’d care to openly admit. Much of the work and projects I’m involved with include plenty of testing and experimentation. Needless to say, I’m no stranger to the testing of a hypothesis or the reevaluating of prior beliefs with the introduction of new information. Readiness is a term with which I’m becoming more and more unfamiliar as a result. Just so, I believe “ourselves” aren’t things we should be ready to become.  

So, I’ll end with this: if we ever waited until we were exactly ready to try or explore something we haven’t yet faced, then we’d never really experience anything at all, would we?