Why Millennials Choose To Wander Instead Of Settle

 

These days someone was humming “one love, one heart”, and I felt a protest inside. We have been indeed raised on the clash of generations, having witnessed people who believed in and lived with their soul mates the entire life; yet, we haven’t belonged there.

We went heartbroken instead. And that first pain turned us into travelers:  we took our belongings and went to see what’s there, behind the fence. We loved again, and failed again; we healed, we rediscovered new loves, new hearts. We even counted up to a certain number: first love, second, third.

But we lived in an era where love was no longer a main dish, but rather a few types of spices. Spices added to your ordinary, daily food. We met over dinners, we stepped in relationships, we ran into people as we would normally go to a tavern; we interacted, sipped from people we called soul mates, and then we dispensed these relationships as a used napkin. We were terribly sorry, and we felt terribly right. We moved out from relationships as much as we moved out from houses, houses that never felt like homes.

We ran the love marathons every few months. It became so easy. We’d skip numbers, and give up on the names. We would still go through those precocious moments of meeting someone so terribly right… and go the other way, feeling so terribly wrong, because it didn’t feel foreverish at that point.

We learnt how to thank people who wouldn’t stay. We learnt to be patient and kind towards people we hurt and left behind. We knew they were burning like hell, but we just moved on: head bended, ipod on, watching the twilight fall at our feet.

There always is a day, a day when we want to settle down. We are tired, lonely, or one world away from home, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s the genetic impulse of survival that pulls those strings. And it’s that inexplicable way of choosing the very neutral person out of all the encountered soul-mates. I have seen people marry out of boredom and have 3 kids and a house mortgage and kindergartens and a life, the life, people said, our generation wouldn’t have anymore, because we’re an unsettled case. And I have seen people marry out of love, and go to pieces, and none of them was happier than the others.

And when we feel that life kind of finally belongs to us again, now that our children go to college or decided to take another year off to travel to other countries, now we just stay quiet on the porch of our house, watching the amazing twilight and we have plenty of time, so much plenty of time that we don’t need anymore.

During my time alone now, at this balcony, I often think how many soul mates I had to give up only to find peace with myself. It’s not about how similar or individual we are, or how generation gap broadens the differences and alters the values of humanity. It’s all those stories that make us who we are during times when we no longer feel being the same as our parents, but still turning into them at that crucial point when we choose our own kind of settling. And all that happens when we finally meet someone right.

Because as different as we may seem from other generations, one thing remains the same: It’s the right person in the right time, after all.