Saturn Return
In June of 2022, I’m three weeks away from turning 27, and my roommate, Kaley, is five weeks into 27. We’ve just moved into a studio apartment in Brooklyn together—a Hail Mary pass for me to save money and for Kale to buy some time to decide if she wants to move in with her boyfriend. After ten hours of emptying cardboard boxes and rearranging furniture, we walk downstairs and stop at the first restaurant we see: a Thai spot at the end of our block, with a name that soon will not matter.
We talk the way we always do, with conversation that flows so naturally between us that Kale says it “feels like music.” I order a spicy coconut soup and we split a bottle of wine. The topics tonight are typical for us—we discuss the mysterious but intentional hand of the universe (mostly Kale), we make some pithy comments about other people’s relationships (mostly me), and most of all, we dream about all the money we’re going to save by sharing such a small space. At the end of our lease, we agree, Kale will move out—maybe to LA, maybe in with her boyfriend, maybe neither, maybe both; all options seem equally possible at this point—and I’ll keep the lease for the rent-stabilized studio in my name and live there alone.
We’re the only ones at the quiet restaurant, so Kale asks the server and bartender for their names. She does this whenever we meet someone new, and every time, I watch the person light up, basking in the feeling of being noticed by her. I take note of this habit and think I should try to emulate it, but I don’t think it’d have the same effect. When I say that Kaley has a magnetic personality, I am really saying I have never met anyone like her in my entire life. There is no room she can’t charm, no crowd she can’t ignite. She is relentlessly optimistic and always sees the best in people. When Kaley asks you for your name she makes you feel like maybe you are magical, too. But really, she’s the one with all the magic.
We chat with the server and bartender for a while, and they tell us the restaurant is about to close for renovations. They’re planning an entirely new menu, name, and décor and will re-open in the fall. In the coming weeks, I’ll walk past the front window on my way home and see them gradually piecing the place together as their kids hang out in the booths, reading books and playing games.
Kaley has always been more spiritual than I am, but when we became friends I couldn’t help but find her belief in fate to be contagious. I think about “the universe” more in my 27th year than in my entire life before that. Kale teaches me about the beauty that can come from believing not only in the universe, but in other people. On this particular night, she’s explaining to me what a “Saturn return” is.
It starts when you’re 27, so you’re gonna start feeling it soon, she assures me between bites of fried tofu. It’s when a major shift in your life happens. You start questioning all your beliefs, and you come out of it a totally different version of yourself.
Forever a cynic, I take Kaley’s prophecy with a grain of skeptical salt. In this moment, I do not want to question anything. I have a strong conviction that things are going my way for the first time since I graduated from college. I’m about to live with my best friend in an apartment I can actually afford, in a charming neighborhood full of great local spots like this one, and I have a boyfriend I love deeply despite living 618 miles away from him. I imagine a red carpet being rolled out in front of me, leading me down an aisle to the future I’ve always wanted.
***
Two months later, I’m crying in the emergency exit row of a plane to Costa Rica, en route to my sister’s destination wedding. Twenty-four hours earlier I broke up with my on-and-off-again boyfriend of three years. Kaley hasn’t slept at home in a month. With my head pressed against the plastic frame of the plane window, all I can think is: fucking Saturn return.
In Costa Rica, I spend too much time with my parents, who spend too much time with each other. They bicker constantly as I try to dissociate. When wedding guests arrive, they come up to me and say things like you’re next! and one sister down, one to go! I spend the week sulking around the resort. I pay twenty bucks in cash for massages on the beach, keep an eye out for the one bartender who knows what an Arnold Palmer is, and sweat my ass off in the oppressive humidity. I tell anyone who will listen that I’m getting married in January. Outdoors. In Antarctica.
I don’t tell my family that we broke up until the third day of the trip, when it comes up organically. The conversation turns to me for the first time, and I can feel the moment of reveal coming. A brief countdown begins inside of me. In my anticipation, I can see the thought walk into my mom’s head and out through her mouth. I picture it casually strolling by, looking like the little cartoon guy on a pedestrian walk sign. My mom remembers, suddenly, that I’m supposed to have a boyfriend right now.
Hey, how is he? my mom asks and We broke up! I reply, curt, immediate. The words flee from my mouth like I’d been holding them hostage. My family asks what happened and I string together some version of the story: something about living 600 miles apart, something about getting all the costs of a relationship with so few of the benefits. I recite the mantra I’ve been repeating to myself all week: long-distance relationships feel like a constant sacrifice, and for the first time, I feel like my own life is too valuable to sacrifice any part of it.
My dad, usually the strong and silent Boomer prototype, is surprisingly animated—he shoots off an aggressive That’s right! Good for you! then immediately leaves the table and heads for the bar. My mom tries to comfort me: You WILL make sacrifices for someone, she says. When it’s the right person. I try to explain to her that it’s not about that—I love him, I really do, but I don’t want anyone to come in and interfere with what I’m piecing together—but the rehearsal dinner is loud and everyone has been drinking and oh my god it’s still a thousand degrees out.
***
Despite living in New York, perhaps the most progressive city in the world, I felt a shift when I turned 27 that communicated to me that I was officially the appropriate—and expected—age to get married. And I, as the contrarian I have always been, immediately stopped wanting it.
It started with weddings. My last relationship came and went in short spurts over the course of three years. He was my first and remains my only boyfriend. For the vast majority of my life, I’ve been single. I think I will always have imposter syndrome in romantic relationships—I will always feel behind, like I have to make up for lost time, like there are secrets that only people who had boyfriends before the age of 24 know. At the same time, I’m extremely proud of my ability to go out to dinner alone, travel alone, shop alone, sleep alone, walk aimlessly around the city alone, do whatever the fuck I want alone. To me, my singleness is a key part of my identity, for better or for worse.
In Costa Rica, I watch my sister receive more praise and attention than anyone I have ever seen in my life. She got the love of her life, and now she gets a week-long party celebrating her, too. No more dating, no more heartbreaks: she figured it out. As I sulk around the resort, the wedding begins to feel like a celebration of her escaping the fate of being single. She’s escaped my present, my current reality, and she’s being awarded for it in abundance.
***
Speaking of my present, my current reality—this is what Saturdays at 27 look like: Kaley and I meet up with Monica, our friend and neighbor, for dinner. I first met Monica after I read her writing and learned that we’d had oddly similar experiences around being single, and that she is strikingly astute when it comes to love. Because Kaley is so often traveling for work and staying at her boyfriend’s apartment, we have to make formal plans to see each other despite living with—and on top of—each other.
Over dinner, we analyze our relationships and our feminism—how often they seem to contradict each other, how much we crave them both. One of us always starts to gush: I love you both so much! she says. It’s usually Monica. I’m just so, so grateful for our little Cobble Hill community. In these moments, my life feels so rich that if you stuck a needle in it to make it pop, color would burst all around, staining everything in sight.
We inevitably end up at a second location: a room full of folding chairs in Williamsburg for a ridiculous performance art piece, where we drink boxed wine out of plastic cups in the back row and try to stifle our laughter. At a Halloween party in a warehouse in Gowanus where we cannot for the life of us figure out why the alcohol is free. At a restaurant where we find Magic, a very nice 72-year-old man with a beard down to his waist who teaches me how to play pool. At a birthday party for a friend of a friend at a bar called The Whiskey Brooklyn, where we start talking to two strangers on the dance floor and know immediately that we were destined to meet them, even if we’re not yet sure why.
We are constantly asking each other: Is he straight? and Is he single? We are constantly answering each other: No and No. Kaley, forever charming, tries to wingwoman me—she asks a man what his birthday is, starts talking about his astrological sign, then brings him over and tells him that he’d be super compatible with a Gemini like me. She walks away and I ruin what she’s started, say something unhinged. Your birthday’s February 11th? I chime in. Oh, cool! I say. That’s the day Sylvia Plath killed herself!
When we call a car home, we set the destination for a deli two blocks from each of our apartments, the midpoint between us. We text each other when we get inside. On Sunday mornings, we send each other all the unflattering photos we took: all red cheeks and heavy eyelids and sweat along our hairlines. We recap in the group chat, making sense of the events from the night before: Can you believe he didn’t tell me he had a girlfriend? and Who even paid for that last round of drinks? We look at the new numbers in our contacts, deleting most of them, but diving headfirst into the ones we keep. We go back to sleep, we work two jobs all week, we count down the hours until we can do it all over again.
Kaley, Monica, and I have made both spoken and unspoken promises to take care of each other regardless of romantic relationship status. There is nothing too small for us to celebrate: every promotion, birthday, haircut—we are determined to dig our heels into the joy, into building each other up. I keep track of Kaley’s work trips, Monica comforts me whenever my heartbreak sneaks back up, they both jump to help when my dad has a health scare. We talk a lot about how friendships ebb and flow, all of us aware that we probably won’t maintain this level of attention to each other forever, but right now, it’s crucial.
In September, the Thai restaurant on our block reopens with a new name: Act One. We go for dinner immediately, and again we are the only ones there. Scanning the room, confused by their rebrand, we ask each other: Why is there a Hamilton poster on the wall? and What’s with the disco ball at the end of the bar?
Halfway through the meal, our server walks up a single step to a small stage beneath the disco ball and begins to sing. We’re caught off guard, but of course we cheer him on, because he has a beautiful voice and because we are literally the only other people in the room. After he finishes his song, he comes over and encourages us to sing, too. It’s a karaoke Thai restaurant! he says, as if that’s a thing we’ve surely heard of before. We’re coy and polite when he tries to hand us the mic; we insist that none of us can sing as well as he does. He backs off and our conversation continues for a minute or two, until I interrupt, say, Oh, fuck it, and walk up to the stage. I search YouTube for a karaoke version of an Amy Winehouse song to project on their TV screen. My voice bellows across the restaurant to them: What kind of fuckery is this?
Kale and Mon sing next—all of us living out some grown-up-theater-kid fantasy we didn’t know we’d been harboring. I am a terrible singer, and yet I feel as confident and capable and lovable as I ever have. As the months—and the performances—pass, I realize that I feel this way whenever I’m with them.
In October, Taylor Swift releases Midnights, and the three of us go to a themed album release party in Astoria. Kaley bops around the room talking to everyone, like she always does, and calls Midnights “an album about falling in love under patriarchy.” We sit in the back of a cab unpacking the lyrics that support her theory: He wanted a bride, I was making my own name and Your picket fence is sharp as knives and All they keep asking me is if I’m gonna be your bride.
I text Kale the following week: I changed the name of our wifi network, I say. It’s now called “anti-marriage.”
***
Forever a contrarian, forever a cynic. I know I sound bitter. I know I sound like the woman in a romantic comedy who’s cold and brokenhearted right before she meets the love of her life. I know that people change when they fall in love—they start planning weddings they said they never would, they spend astronomical amounts of money on seat covers. I, too, once lay in bed with my ex dreaming up names for our future daughters, telling him that we needed to have not one but two weddings, one to please his family and one to please mine. And if we hadn’t broken up the very first time, I think I would have married him. But when will what I say stop being brushed off as part of my youthful ignorance or dramatic stubbornness or lack of foresight or childlike contrarianism or impulsive reaction to my last breakup? I could change my mind about wanting to get married, yes, but so could a person who’s already married, and we don’t casually say that to people at their weddings.
I won’t impose my cynicism on others, but when I think about the prospect of a wedding or marriage, I have to ask: how could I ever have a celebration of my partnership when I never had a celebration of my singleness? What I hear from progressive people today is that marriage isn’t about romance; it’s about equal partnership, about choosing to build a life with someone, and then choosing that life with them over and over again. But what if I don’t want a partner, and I just want a boyfriend? What if I don’t want to build a life with someone, and I only want someone to add to the life I’ve already built for myself?
***
Three months after my breakup, my therapist theorizes that I’ve been in denial about losing my ex. I’ve only just now told her that I ended it. Classic stages of grief, she says, slowly shaking her head on my laptop screen.
Though my reaction is a bit delayed, when the heartbreak finally arrives, it crushes me. On the nights that Kaley is home, I walk between the brownstones of Cobble Hill on the phone with my therapist, crying from stoop to stoop, always afraid some rich mom is going to come out and kick me off her steps. I told my ex I couldn’t be in a long-distance relationship anymore because I was sick of constantly missing him, but now here I am, missing him, drowning in the irony, suffering the punishment. As the weeks pass, the sun sets a little earlier during each evening therapy session. As the weeks pass, I keep crying and wiping my snot on my sleeves.
The denial makes me feel like the statute of limitations on my heartbreak has expired. People have stopped asking me how I’m doing after I spent three months insisting I was fine, and I’m too embarrassed to bring it up now. Because I was the one who broke up with him, I feel like a hypocrite for being so sad. I know if the situation were reversed, and he were complaining about being single after he dumped me, I’d tell him to grow up and take responsibility for his actions. I’d tell him his sadness is karma for blindsiding the person he loves. I’d tell him he needs to think long and hard about what his life will look like without a partner. I’d tell him all of this, I know, because I’ve done it before, one of the other times we broke up. I know for sure that there will be no getting back together this time, for the first time, and the finality of the loss makes it the hardest one yet.
By the end of November, I feel like the relationship happened to someone else, not me. I literally cannot believe that it was me who he touched, who he kissed. I feel so alone at times that it’s hard to believe I’ve ever been touched or kissed by anyone. I feel like I’ve lost my mind. I want to call him, just to ask: That did really happen, right? and I’m not imagining all of that, am I? But I know I can’t do this, so instead I read through an entire summer’s worth of texts and DMs, searching for something—anything—I don’t remember reading, anything to make him feel alive again. Deep in our WhatsApp thread, I dig up a video of us together from when he visited New York in the spring. I watch the video, savoring it, just to prove to myself that our relationship was real, that I haven’t always been alone, that someone was in love with me once. I watch it again and again and again and again.
I have a dream that he is at my parents’ house for Christmas. My family is glaring at me, asking: Why is he here? and Didn’t you guys break up? I snap at them: Don’t you get it? I’m just happy to have one more moment with him, I say. Don’t ruin this for me. The bargaining stage of grief commences. In the dream he brings wine and dessert for my parents but refuses to kiss me.
This is the first time I’ve felt guilty for breaking someone’s heart, rather than painting myself as the victim. When I think about my giving up on him, I instantly feel a wave of nausea come over me, the same way I do when I remember some mortifying thing I said in school when I was 13. It’s the kind of shame that sticks. Suddenly, all my favorite songs sound different as I realize that oh, fuck, I’m the one who made promises she couldn’t keep. I listen to “Stick Season” by Noah Kahan like I’m paying my penance: As you promised me that I was more than all the miles combined, you must have had yourself a change of heart like halfway through the drive.
On the phone the morning I broke up with him, I cried. He didn’t.
Instead, he laughed and said: I can’t believe this is happening again.
As I plummet further into 27, the pressure to have a traditional relationship becomes more and more suffocating. The social media posts about people my age getting engaged are constant. Every photo of a ring feels like a betrayal, like a loss for my team. Another one bites the dust, I think as I scroll. Yet another woman is leaving me here, in a place I’m choosing to be in, but a place I don’t want to be in alone. I’m only human.
***
Speaking of that place I don’t want to be in alone—this is what Mondays at 27 look like: I take the A from Jay Street-MetroTech to West 4th to meet my friend Megan for dinner. Happy hour at Roey’s ends at 6, and our reservation is always for 5:45—never earlier, never later, and never anywhere other than Roey’s. We are always running late, so each week feels like a gamble—will we make it in time? Will we have to pay full price? The thrill becomes part of the fun.
We order the same thing every week, at exactly 5:55—two small margherita pizzas, one with burrata, one with prosciutto, the warm olives appetizer, one glass of Montepulciano, and one Rosemary’s Spritz. The check comes to $40 total, split down the middle. I tell Megan that we split so many bills we should open up a joint checking account. She rolls her eyes.
Nobody judges couples for it, I argue. So why shouldn’t we?
Just what we need, Megan says, to make ourselves even less available to men.
We bask in the happy hour prices—only $20 each!—then go across the street to American Bar, where we spend another $20 each, but get only one glass of wine for this price. We agonize over the cost—we rushed to Roey’s to save money on dinner, but then we surrender to this overpriced bar just because we “love the vibes.” We are undoing the whole thing, we say, but we are also cementing the whole thing.
Megan and I became friends when we were 19, at a club meeting on our college campus where she noticed my phone background—a photo of me meeting Taylor Swift the weekend before. Most Mondays, we end up discussing Taylor—the surprise songs of the Eras tour, her publicist’s (sometimes questionable) strategies, Meg’s upcoming show in LA and mine in London.
Meg and I were brought together (literally by Taylor Swift, but more generally) by our shared reverence for brilliant songwriting. We were studying lyrics with equally sharp analyses in our respective childhood bedrooms long before we ended up at the same university. There is no lyrical detail too small for us to celebrate, and usually our analyses end with one of us gaping, asking the other: How does she DO that? and What does that MEAN, though?
On more than one Monday, we sit next to a table of two older women who look, superficially, a lot like us. The tables at Roey’s are tiny and close together—my knees are always pressed between the metal legs, and we can easily eavesdrop on the people next to us. We’ll notice the older women at the same time, and I know that we’re thinking the same thing. Can you believe we’re gonna do this forever? one of us will say. I could be 80 years old and I’ll still need my Mondays at Roey’s with you.
I arrive at Monday dinners with my stories from the weekend, and when I tell them to Megan, she can always cut through the gray, clearing out the mess of my mind with her insight. She is intuitive to a degree that scares me sometimes. When I show up with some new revelation, like something I’ve decided I need to look for in my next romantic relationship, she is unsurprised by my announcement, because, of course, she already knew that. Our dinners are the anchor of my week, keeping me grounded, secure, calm. Every once in a while, Meg’s demeanor reminds me a lot of my ex-boyfriend’s. This is probably more than a coincidence.
Megan never texts me when she gets home, so I always send her a passive-aggressive text making sure she’s safe.
You can just check my location on Find My Friends, she insists.
That’s not accurate enough, I text back. What if it says you’re home but really you got murdered in your front lawn?
I live in Queens, she says. I don’t have a front lawn.
***
In the winter I have every cynical thought that any one person can possibly have about relationships. I leave Kaley a voice memo as I’m walking through the East Village just to tell her that people who get married simply decided they were done dating; they don’t actually love their spouse any more than they loved their exes. I say that people are terrified of being alone, and it’s pathetic that they never had to learn the hard way to take care of themselves like I did. I say that people just pick whoever is the third person they date in their 20s to marry. I say that everyone who gets married before 30 has settled for some schmuck. I know I am wrong, but no one is exempt from my judgment. I would roll my eyes at Mother Theresa if she told me she found a boyfriend. Kaley listens to my diatribes patiently, validating my feelings without sacrificing her own optimism. I hate being so angry all the time, but I don’t know how else to move through it.
I decide that I am not a person who cycles naturally—normally—in and out of relationships, and I never will be. Rather than keep trying to become someone I’m not, I try to implement a technique that therapists have mentioned to me over the years, only when I have reached peak levels of desperation: Radical Acceptance.
I am trying to be objective: statistically speaking, reflecting on the total number of men I’ve had feelings for who’ve liked me back—if you’re counting, that’s one (1) person in 27 years—it’s nearly impossible, and therefore completely irrational to believe that I’ll ever be in another happy relationship. I have arguments in my head with an indistinguishable voice who doesn’t see how objective I’m being. Of course you’ll meet someone! the voice says. You’re only 27—you’re being ridiculous. And of course: Everybody feels this way after a breakup. But love isn’t guaranteed, and there are people who never enter a long-term romantic relationship, and to deny this is to deny their existence and my own (lack of) experiences, and who am I really arguing with here, anyway?
When I try to explain this—my radical acceptance—to anyone, I cannot get through my sentences without crying. I look deranged, insisting on my uplifting message about accepting that I’ll never be in love again, with tears actively streaming down my face. Next thing I know I am panicking in the bathroom of a French restaurant, slinking down the back of the door, unable to catch my breath, my face pointed up toward the ceiling, my sister left alone at our table with the escargot.
I still know I did the right thing in ending my relationship; I still believe deep down that my life was worth protecting from sacrifice. But I wonder if I got my one chance to prove that I had what it takes to let love in, and I gave up on it, and now I’ll never get it back again. I act like God is keeping score, taking notes on my behavior and testing me accordingly. All of my cynicism, my questions, my anger, my theories—they feel like a big wet knot in a thick rope that I can’t untangle no matter how hard I try, and then suddenly it’s been six months and oh my god how is it possible that I still miss my ex-boyfriend, and my life is so good right now but also shouldn’t I have moved on by now, and how come I can cry on command when I stare into space and picture him with another girl and this can’t be normal and what is wrong with me I am so deeply fucked up and wasn’t I the one who made this choice in the first place?
***
Kale finds a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan a few months before our lease ends. She gives me a moving day present: a copy of Virginia Woolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” purchased at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, during one of the many trips that kept her away from home in the fall. On the first page, in her effortlessly ethereal cursive letters, she writes:
Jac, what an adventure we’re on together. All to end up writing in rooms of our own. Thanks for making these last seven months magical. Always, Kale.
On her last night in the apartment, we are deep in conversation about our past relationships, sitting on our respective beds, which graze each other at one corner. Then suddenly we’re slaphappy, like we’re 11 years old at our first-ever slumber party, giggling uncontrollably. We decide to prank call every boy we’ve ever had a crush on. We swap phones and dial *67 before their numbers to ensure our anonymity. Not a single one of them picks up. We try to leave clever voicemails, but every time, we end up bent over with laughter, throwing our faces into our pillows to hide the sound. For the first time ever, we can’t get a single word out.
***
In April, Kaley throws herself a housewarming/birthday party and calls it “Spring Soirée,” a phrase that we soon find I personally cannot pronounce without sounding like my tongue is too big for my mouth. In lighthearted moments like these, the pressure around my heart begins to release, as if air is slowly being let out of a balloon. The wet knot inside of me begins to untangle.
The same week that Kale signs her new lease, I get offered a job that pays $30,000 more than my last. I then immediately buy a $700 dresser. Things start to feel lighter. I spend a week in London, then a week in San Diego. Then I see a show at Hammerstein Ballroom, and then another, and then another. Then we celebrate Monica’s 27th birthday at The Beekman, where we finally meet her NYU friends.
I have two jobs, six classes, 150 students, and a graduation speech to edit. I get bangs again and commit to them this time. I sing “Piano Man” on Kaley’s couch at 4 am with a ridiculously hot guy who I don’t yet know is about to reject me. I lean into restorative yoga classes and the Chicago soundtrack. I have faculty meetings and introductory calls with six new therapists.
The waitress at my favorite ramen restaurant hugs me and starts to cry, telling me she lost her mom. My 23-year-old cousin sleeps on my air mattress, cutting through my weekend loneliness. My 92-year-old grandmother texts me about “our” weekend plans, asking if she can live vicariously through me. David Sedaris describes his relationship to an eager crowd at The Town Hall, providing a model. Things feel lighter once again.
I unfollow my ex-boyfriend once and for all, and I keep track of how long it’s been since I read his tweets—counting by days, then weeks, then months. I drive down California highways with Megan, listening to Midnights. I wear a lot of eyeliner on the bottom lid. I go on a date that’s not really a date with a beautiful British psychiatrist. Lighter still.
There’s so much MUNA and Maisie Peters. There’s a crush that comes and goes every few days, making me swing between giddy and full of dread. There are three-month check-ins in the Cobble Hill Girlies email chain and nine glasses in a flight of wine at Amelie and fifteen friendship bracelets left in the studio after the show.
There’s a pair of green pants from Everlane. A French book that I drunkenly stole from a restaurant in the West Village. A Rhode Island high school production of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. And a drastic change in my antidepressant prescription that makes all of this possible.
***
In May, my friend Simrah comes to visit from London, and we spend four hours sitting in the sun in Washington Square Park, swapping stories that wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test. Last summer, when Simrah and I worked at the same company, we messaged each other constantly in the hours that our shifts overlapped. She’d say good morning to me when she got back from lunch, and we’d commiserate about not understanding what it actually means to work in marketing. She is genuine and artistic and funny, and I knew instantly that we’d be friends beyond what she called our “silly little tasks” at work.
The Washington Square Arch frames Simrah’s face as I tell her that I’m afraid I’ll never be able to find a romantic relationship that doesn’t take away from the life that I already have. I’m truly happy for the first time since college, and I don’t want anyone to come in and fuck it up. The first time my ex broke up with me, I told him I didn’t want to be with someone who would always prioritize his own life and goals above his relationships, like he was doing. Now I wonder if he was right to do that. Now I wonder if I’m doing exactly that.
I know that I sound childish and naïve when I say these things to Simrah—there is no such thing as a relationship that doesn’t require sacrifice, or at least compromise. But I am particularly protective because it is glaringly obvious to me that these sacrifices typically fall to women. I am so sick of seeing women prioritize their relationships above all else when I’ve never seen a man do the same. I’m sick of seeing wives follow their husbands to new cities in support of their careers when I’ve never seen a husband do the same. I’m sick of seeing women give up their own and their children’s last names enthusiastically, happy to honor men who would not consider doing the same for them, not even for one fucking second. Women do not have “the one that got away” because they will drop everything to make a good love last. Men will not.
Simrah—who makes vision boards at the start of every year, who once made a PowerPoint with updates on her personal life and presented it to me during a work meeting, who beautifully balances her hope about finding love with her independence and her refusal to settle for less than she deserves—reassures me, saying that nothing I’m asking for is too much or too unorthodox. She says she can think of five men right now who are looking for the kind of relationship I’m describing. (Well, where are they then, Sim?! I say. They’re all in the UK, I’m sorry! she cries.)
Still, I tell her, the odds are not in my favor. Even if I met one of those men, the chances that they’d be straight, single, and interested in me are basically zero.
How could anyone not choose you? Simrah says. I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.
Simrah’s reassurance lingers in my mind for days, floats me through the rest of the month and into the start of summer. I still feel like radical acceptance is the smarter, more realistic, logical, and honest choice, but Simrah’s hope makes me feel like I’m in the early stages of a crush on someone I haven’t met yet. It’s true that marriage, weddings, and heterosexuality in general have historically harmed women. No amount of being in love with your “partner” is progressive enough to erase that past. But at the same time, I can’t keep crying in the bathrooms of French restaurants. I can’t keep judging every woman with an engagement ring. I can’t keep recording unhinged voice memos in the middle of the East Village. I can’t keep viewing the world as split into singles and couples like two opposing teams. I can’t keep living with all this anger. I decide that maintaining a hope that seems stupid but feels good is better than my resignation to a future I am already disappointed in.
Just as Simrah and I are about to leave the park and head to dinner at a nearby vegan restaurant, Kaley walks past us on the grass. She’s been sitting on a towel ten feet away from us for the last hour, but we had no idea.
Obviously the universe wanted us to end up here together, Kale says. Simrah, also a believer, and completely moonstruck by her first trip to New York, agrees with Kale. This city is magical.
I change the name of my Wi-Fi network that night, from anti-marriage to home by now. The name is inspired by a song by the band MUNA that I love for its indecision, its back-and-forth within the gray of a breakup, its ability to build a home on a foundation that is semi-sturdy at best: I don’t know if it’s enough to make it last. You said if I even had to ask, you had your answer. But I still wonder.
***
With three weeks of 27 remaining, I board a flight to Washington State to see Joni Mitchell perform her first headlining show in 20 years. Megan and I planned the trip in the fall, but it didn’t feel real until we sat down in the fourth row of the crowd. I think I just made eye contact with Joni Mitchell, I whisper.
I feel uncharacteristically earnest during the show, as a single thought runs through my mind over and over again: My life is amazing. My cynicism is nowhere to be found, no longer protecting me from the worst that I am always anticipating. I am all open wounds, headfirst, veins facing out. Something tragic must be waiting around the corner for me, I’m convinced, something terrible will happen and it will be punishment for the euphoria I feel in this moment. The universe will keep me humble, I know it, and I am terrified. When I tell my psychiatrist about this fear, she looks me directly in the eyes and says: Jaclyn, you are allowed to be in a good mood. The thoughts keep coming and yet one remains steady, grounded: My life is amazing.
I promise myself that I will continue to build a life that is rich with romance, with or without dating someone. I managed to do this all year, not knowing I was doing so at the time: all the strangers I met on Saturday nights, all the Cabernet and vibes at American Bar, all the tears shed on brownstones, all the songs we performed and dissected. Most romantic of all was flying across the country to see Joni Mitchell. It was a show that I never believed would happen, especially not to me—a ‘90s kid from Long Island who quit playing guitar every time she tried to learn, but fell in love with writing through the words of the women singer-songwriters for whom Joni Mitchell paved the way. I learned most of what I know about romance from them, too.
I’m strolling around a bookstore in Seattle, killing time alone before my flight home, when I’m drawn to a book by its cover. I pick it up and read the title: Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone, by Amy Key. It feels timely, like a story I was destined to discover. I start reading the inside flap and gasp when I realize the book is a memoir inspired by Joni Mitchell’s Blue album. The dedication page reads: This book is for anyone who needs a love story of being alone. It feels like magic.
Arrangements in Blue chronicles the author’s life as a 43-year-old woman who has not been in a committed romantic relationship since she was 22. Informed by the themes of Joni’s music, Key writes, “I grew up expecting romantic love, assuming its glorious, wild presence would be a natural part of life’s journey.” It is the kind of book that I read with a pen in hand, underlining the sentences I relate to, and within days I’ve written on almost every page.
Key validates the argument I’ve been having in my head, about how romantic relationships aren’t guaranteed, and there are people who go decades without committing to anyone long-term, and to deny this is to deny their—and to a lesser degree, my—experiences. But Key seems to have found a way to comfortably sit in her feelings, to accept a slew of contradictions—she is happy with her life, which is full of love and romance, but still, at times, she desperately wants the intimacy of a romantic relationship, but she knows that it isn’t guaranteed, either, so she will be okay if she doesn’t get it, but she also admits that she really, really wants it. “If I look at my life as it is,” she writes, “it’s a good life. But I also want love. And I don’t want to just make do, scrape off the surface of a burned piece of toast.” Across 220 now-underlined pages, Key flits between acceptance and wanting more from her life, as I imagine people in relationships probably do, too.
In the song “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” Joni Mitchell sings about a man who is brokenhearted and bitter, who warns Joni that she’s going to end up just like him: All romantics meet the same fate someday—cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café. Joni refuses to believe that she’ll lose her optimism, saying she’ll always be the last one at the table—I’m gonna blow this damn candle out—even if that means she’ll have to sit there alone. There is a tension between Joni and Richard, their viewpoints seemingly irreconcilable, until Joni concedes that actually, everyone is constantly cycling between love and lack, between romantic and realist.
Joni asks Richard when he’ll cut the crap, let go of his misery and return to the romantic she knows him to be: When you gonna get yourself back on your feet? she asks. Oh, and love can be so sweet, love so sweet.
***
I spent the spring hunting for hope, wrangling and hoarding it, slashing my way through the weeds, stealing optimism from friends like a poacher with a net. But sexism rears perhaps its ugliest head when we talk about romance, and my hope is not an antidote for the hurt this causes. I am not the bitter woman in the romantic comedy who is waiting to be proven wrong, waiting to begin her proselytizing about true love. There is a sexist undertone to this narrative—the silly single girl will certainly say goodbye to her flighty feminism once she meets the right guy who keeps her in line. I have no interest in a romantic relationship that quells my critiques, that encourages me to stay quietly grateful in my own little love bubble.
I am trying to maintain hope about finding love at the same time that I resent the pressure placed on women to give up their identities in pursuit of partnership. I am trying to be more optimistic and less judgmental but I still feel abandoned when a woman who swore she’d never get married posts that archetypal photo with her left hand in front of her face. I still hate that there is an unfair, unrelenting responsibility flung onto single women to prove that they have full, happy lives on their own. I still joke that I want to date a former monk because they are the only people who have been single as much as I have. I still cry when my sister says she’ll give her future children only her husband’s last name. I still don’t know if there’s a way for me to enter a romantic relationship without conceding to all of the elements of partnership that require more sacrifices from women than from men. I still want it to be possible. I am still angry a lot of the time, and I still don't know how to accept and move on from this anger without feeling like I’ve been lobotomized by patriarchy.
***
At the end of June, Kaley, Monica, and I host an event we’ve dubbed “Act 28,” which is, of course, my 28th birthday party, held at Act One. We rent out the front room of the restaurant and I invite two dozen people.
I spend the first half hour of the party drifting from guest to guest, eagerly prying: Are you having fun?! Are you good?? Thank you so much for coming!! The next five hours are a blur of red wine and pop songs. One by one, I watch each of my friends realize the magic of a space that gives you permission to express every complicated feeling, even if you are very, very bad at singing (they are, I am). I eat three bites of food all night, only when I turn around and see my friend Angela standing there with a spring roll in her hand, feeding it to me, saying, You’ll thank me later. Our two favorite servers are working. You guys are like family, they tell us. You were the first people to ever sing here! One of them hands me a bottle of wine and says it’s a birthday present. I give him a huge hug, twist off the cap, and drink it straight out of the bottle.
Making a toast before the first performance of the night, I stand under the disco ball and say how honored I am that people were willing to come out and celebrate my birthday. It feels like an embrace of my life at 27, an acceptance of the year for exactly what it was. It feels like a celebration of my singleness. It feels like a life I do not want to escape.
I lift my glass and gush into the microphone: This is my wedding!
***
In July of 2023, I’m three weeks into 28, and Kaley is three months into 28. I sit outside with Kale during a humid summer sunset in DUMBO, feeling my hair curl and watching lower Manhattan light up. We are still talking, and it still feels like music.
So, do you think your Saturn return is complete now? she asks me. I fucking hope so, I say with a tired laugh. My questioning has gotten exhausting. It’s been a year and I have no more answers, no more clarity than I did last summer. I am happier with my life now, and therefore more protective of my life than ever, and I hope this happiness lasts a long time. But beyond this, my search for conviction is proving to be futile. Kale and I can talk love into the ground, but I know that if and when love ever comes back to me, I’m going to have to stop talking and let myself feel instead. Optimistic as ever, Kaley believes I’ll have no problem letting love back in, but I’m not so sure.
When you gonna get yourself back on your feet? Oh, and love can be so sweet, love so sweet.
People always say your twenties are a time for “figuring it out,” for asking questions like these, for changing your mind without blaming it on astrology. Every time someone tells me I’m too young to have my mind made up about something, it feels like they’re telling me that my life is expository. Like this is a before chapter, this doesn’t really count, this is all just setting me up for when I meet “my person” and rethink all of this again. But my present, my current reality, and all of the ideas that come along with them, do count. This is the only reality that exists for me. All of my opinions, however much they might change, are still valid. I can’t keep treating my life like a linear path to later, to a more stable, more figured out life. It is both then and now at once, both before and after, both young and old. If we’re always the oldest we’ve ever been, how can anyone ever feel young?
I am reminded, then, of Sylvia Plath’s classic fig tree metaphor—a passage I first underlined in The Bell Jar when I was 15. With every choice comes a non-choice: a road not taken, a potentially greener grass, a different life that’s sticky and sweet with the promise of fantasy, not yet tarnished by reality. Maybe there’s no point in planning and protesting because one day you’ll wake up and you’ll only be looking backward at all the things that have already happened, all the parties you went to and the lipstick smudged on your teeth and the houseplants you killed and it will all be done and over with, like leaving an air-conditioned movie theater and walking into a suffocating late summer heat, realizing the story you just felt connected to you were never really a part of anyway, and not knowing what hit you.
I sound like a nihilist, but as I grow gently into 28, my Saturn return is beginning to feel liberating. If there are no answers, and no befores and afters, then there will always be another flight to catch, another crush to catch. There will always be another city to learn, another restaurant to become a regular at. There will always be Christmas movies to look forward to and summer oysters after that, coming cyclically, reliably. There will always be more places to find Magic. And because my life will never be all figured out, there will always be more to write about. More to question. More to talk about. More to romanticize. More to fall in love with. And, of course, more to sing about.