It’s exciting when I get to take a business trip to Chicago or Las Vegas for a few days. Eating airport salads and lounging in shiny Convention Centers allow me to escape, and insert a sliver of unpredictability into my normal routine here in Los Angeles.
But when my boyfriend said he might take a job as a union organizer and have to travel all around the state of California indefinitely talking to service and agricultural workers, I was not smiling.
Being young and in a serious relationship is like looking into a mirror that faces another mirror. Layer after layer of obsessive self-reflection about where the romance is going, whether it will last, whose parents met in college, and whose parents who met in college are now divorced. We tell ourselves we are too young to think about marriage and yet it’s the only goal our family members hint at that we must accomplish before we get too old because “no one wants to die alone.”
When I prompted my boyfriend about his new job venture, he professed his desire to have an exciting career and get to travel “just like I do.” His new job would involve a month-long training period in Visalia, Colorado, or Boston, or Bakersfield. Then he would be assigned to a California region to wander. But what about little old me sitting at my computer in Los Angeles?
I want to believe that our relationship is strong enough to withstand any measure of distance. There was a time in college when he lived in Japan and I lived in Spain and despite time difference, with emails and calling cards, we managed to pull our relationship through in one piece. But we are in the real world now, with real demands. I can’t pretend that I want to stand still in L.A. while he drives around the central valley in his white Toyota Cressida meeting new people, having new adventures.
In high school English class, The Raisin in the Sun taught my generation that a dream deferred is going to haunt us with regret for the rest of our lives. We get it. We are caught in a tug-of-war between the people we have always dreamt of being, and the reality of the people we are and the limitations of our world. I know that in taking this union job, my boyfriend is trying to give the rope some slack, and release himself over to the side of the person he wants to be.
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