A few weeks ago, I spent the weekend in Boston. I was there seeing a good friend and old roommate, one of those people I’m not very good at keeping in touch with but who, when I see her, I immediately tell her every detail of what’s going on in my life.
We were catching up, as you do with friends in other cities, and she was telling me about her life in Boston. It differs substantially from her former life as a New Yorker: here she was single, had a job, plans most nights of the week, and a handful of men whose presences in her life were best characterized as ambiguous. Now she is in school, has a boyfriend, and rarely goes out.
When describing the ways in which her life now feels different, my friend told me that she missed going out and missed New York. (She had lived here for seven years before relocating.) In pretty much the same sentence, however, she said something else that struck me—that she felt like she had grown up since moving to Boston. That statement got me thinking about other friends of mine who reside there. One moved there to live with her boyfriend. A freelance writer and editor, she is now considering becoming a therapist. Another friend is engaged and owns a condo and a dog with his fiancé; the wedding is in September. Yet another friend lives with his girlfriend and although they aren’t yet engaged, he spoke to me about the possibility of it. “Wow,” I thought, “my friends in Boston are so settled.” That brought me to a seemingly important question: is it possible to grow up in New York?
By “grow up” I of course mean become a settled adult, not be reared. And in many ways, I am hardly qualified to write on the subject, seeing as how I have little interest in it—at least not yet. I am a 25-year-old who likes to talk about poop and make fart jokes, and occasionally I still wear my hair in pigtails. I’m about to go into tens of thousands of dollars of debt to attend journalism school, which, although I don’t regret my decision for a minute (yet), can definitely be viewed as at least a little silly—perhaps even immature for its blatant denial of the shitty state of journalism these days as a practical career path. But when I do finally decide it’s time to grow up—time to think about marriage and stability and, I don’t know, redoing the kitchen—will I move to Boston? (No, definitely not. But replace Boston with another major U.S. city, or Rome, and the question stands.) Will I need to leave New York in order for that maturation to happen?
Though I love it dearly, this city certainly has strikes against it: it can feel, despite the sometime claustrophobia, immeasurably vast, particularly if the person you’re dating lives in another borough or across the island; meeting people is difficult, because everyone has his own thing going on, his own friends, and people aren’t often interested in branching out; there is so much to do—so many events and potential plans and distractions—that it can be hard to concentrate on broader life pursuits; and living here is, of course, soul-crushingly expensive.
More than anything else, New York has this strikingly relentless energy that can make you feel so happy one moment and exhausted the next, so that at the end of the day (or week or month) you might just feel like a crazy person. I would imagine that makes it, well, a bit difficult to grow up.
But there are as many arguments for settling here, if you can afford it—the diversity, the culture, the ability to get around without a car. And let’s be honest, New Yorkers are all in therapy anyway, right? We can handle the problems. So maybe growing up here begins when you start seeing a therapist. Or when you move to an outer borough, or in my case, start liking living in an outer borough. Perhaps growing up in New York is marked by these different, place-specific signs, like when you stop moving apartments every year (or two or three years), and when you finally start living alone. Or maybe, just maybe, growing up here happens when you reach that turning point where you know a decision must be made: stay and embrace the city with all its imperfections, or go and learn to be happy elsewhere.
Jillian- This is amazing.
Hey, thanks.