The Right Choice Is the Scary One

Special thank you to Hinge for sponsoring this week’s essay. I’m a big a fan of their No Ordinary Love series and was excited to work with them once again for Volume 3. Hope you enjoy this piece. #HingePartner

No carrot at the end of any stick has ever appeared more tantalizing than summer appeared to me in winter 2022. I was halfway through what would be my final year of college. And some college experience it was.

I had lived at home for most of college due to COVID, and had developed obsessive, compulsive study habits to gain some sense of control over my life, reading essays over and over again until my eyes were bloodshot and tear-filled. I had become extremely nervous about meeting new people, retreating home every weekend to spend my Saturday nights with my little sisters on the couch. Having made no new friends and deepened my ever-present hum of anxiety, I felt worse off than I had four years ago, and was on the precipice of peaking in high school.

But, amazingly, one of the good things I did have in my life was love. My boyfriend and I had withstood two years of long-distance, college, and a pandemic. Towards the end of our long-distance tenure, the panic that I had initially felt when we were apart had dulled to a manageable but uncomfortable ache. Neither of us wanted to spend more time apart than we had for the past two years. As summer approached, the promise of change did too. And I was in desperate need of change.

It was unspoken, but certain, between my boyfriend and me, that we would move in together after I graduated. But the question was: where would we go?

At the time, I was living and going to school in our hometown of Seattle. The place where we had met, the place where both our families lived. The city of Seattle was familiar to both of us, and a place we had long fantasized about living together, even browsing apartments we couldn’t afford as teenagers within months of dating.

But my experience living at home during college had given me a kind of cabin fever. I was itching to spread my wings and see what else existed in the world, feeling the proverbial chains tethering me to my high school identity yanking violently. I needed to feel like I was moving forward, and I felt less certain that Seattle was the place where I could feel that, at least in that moment.

My boyfriend had been living and working in Los Angeles as I was wrapping up college, but it wasn’t a place I was too keen on living. While I love living in LA today, as an early twenty-something, I felt put off by its glossy, disingenuous, commercialized qualities, qualities that have since endeared it to me. It didn’t occur to me that there would be any career prospects for me there other than influencing, which was a misguided assumption. Still, my boyfriend was also ready for a change, so we considered the alternatives.

Residing on the West Coast my whole life, New York City had long felt like a magical, distant pipe dream. I had grown up drunk on the fantasy of being a working artist in the city, a writer or a dancer, brushing shoulders with equally hopeful dreamers on the subway. But no one in my immediate family had lived further east than Spokane, WA. I knew nobody in New York and had no idea how a move like that even worked logistically.

But after tossing the idea of moving back and forth for weeks, my boyfriend and I took a spontaneous trip to New York a few days before Christmas. I had also just happened to land a remote job that had an office in the city, so it felt like the early stages of kismet. Enchanted by our three quick days in the city, we put our heads together on the six-hour flight home and realized we could actually do it. Nothing was stopping us; nothing was tying us to one particular coast. We had little responsibility and no assets to our names. If we were ever going to make a bold, potentially poor decision, now was the time.

But as the plane landed, I slowly floated down off my fantastical cloud. A voice in the back of my head grew louder, a voice that was echoing what I knew the mixed sentiments of my friends and family would be. You’re twenty-one years old, and this is the only boy you’ve ever been in a relationship with. Shouldn’t your twenties be for exploring? Do you really want to take this big a leap this early in life? And on the other side of the country, where you have no family or friends to fall back on? You’ve lived in the same house your entire life, how are you going to be able to live over 2,000 miles away from home? You’ll just abandon your little sisters like that?

Anticipating dissent from our loved ones and feeling large-looming, invisible social pressures, my boyfriend and I told our friends and families about our plans, and the response was as mixed as we expected. In the succeeding months, my stomach was twisted in permanent knots. I didn’t feel like what I was doing was an immediate physical risk, but it certainly felt like an emotional one. As murky clouds of doubt began obscuring my view, I wondered if I could even trust my own thoughts and feelings. At twenty-one, could I really believe in what I wanted?

I’m reminded of this feeling as I read Isabella and Rebecca’s love story, written by Tembe Denton-Hurst for the third edition of Hinge’s No Ordinary Love series. Early in dating, Isabella found herself overwhelmed by the pace that her and Rebecca’s relationship was moving at, and asked Rebecca if they could pause and simply be friends instead. Rebecca agreed reluctantly, not wanting Isabella to vanish from her life.

Eager to continue seeing one another, Isabella and Rebecca resumed hanging out as “just friends” a week later to the best of their abilities. But something felt off. Isabella broke through the ice, confessing that she didn’t want to be friends with Rebecca, but something more. She told her:

“I’m sorry for being confusing, but I think I’m finally ready to get out of my own way. Looking back, I realize it had nothing to do with you or how I felt about you and everything to do with me being scared. I needed the week to understand that.”

As I’ve grown older and, I like to think, more self-aware, I’ve made a more deliberate effort to not make decisions when my emotions are especially potent. When I was younger, I would move impulsively; RSVP yes or no in haste, fire off feisty replies to angry texts, try to make up my mind about how I felt about something immediately. I thought that acting with expediency signaled intelligence and maturity, that my gut instinct should be my religion.

I’m getting closer to understanding what a virtue patience really is. With patience, my actions can be guided by lasting thoughts and emotions, and not just fleeting bursts of feeling.

But, on the other hand, I’m also learning that sometimes even time won’t wring out all the antsy feelings of anticipation. Sometimes you have to make decisions while you’re scared, which makes it hard to feel like you’re making the “right” choice.

But what is the “right” choice, anyway, if not the choice that feels best in that moment? I could have tried my best to think fifteen steps ahead, to predetermine what I would do at every potential fork in the road so that this move to New York wouldn’t ruin my relationship, or worse, my life. And if I did that, I may have ended up in Seattle for another year, perhaps heartbroken and sick with regret. And if Isabella ruminated on every potential sticky feeling and conflict she might run into in a relationship with Rebecca, she likely would have wanted to stay friends, never seeing the beautiful, lasting union that sprouted out of taking a chance.

Sometimes the “right” choice is the one that still scares you after you’ve given yourself time to think it over. A cross-country move with the only boyfriend you’ve ever had, committing to a relationship sooner than you think is typical, all of it could have ended in heartbreak. But the alternatives could have ended in heartbreak too, so you might as well just do what you truly want.

In the end, I made the move with my boyfriend, against the wishes of a few people in my life. If this was going to end in disaster, at least it was a disaster I was sanctioning, a catastrophe that was on my own terms. And what started as the scariest thing I’ve ever done ended up becoming the best thing I could have possibly done for my personal and professional growth and relationship. Thrust into an icy bath of unknown, my anxiety surrounding meeting new people dissipated when I was forced to make new friends out of necessity. I began spending far less time on the couch and far more time in the city, making introductions, experiencing art, observing what was happening in the world instead of ruminating on what was happening in my head.

And intertwining my life with my partner’s only made us grow closer. When you love someone so much and for so long, you sometimes think you’ve reached your capacity for loving them, that they’ve taken up as much of your heart as they possibly can. It’s only when you take a leap together and stick the landing that you discover your capacity is actually much more expansive, that your heart is but a bottomless reserve, revealing more of itself to you with each subsequent milestone that passes. If I had fed into my fears, I never would have known that. The emotional reward outweighs the emotional risk. Always.

Thanks for reading, and thank you again to Hinge! Click here to listen to Isabella and Rebecca’s full love story and the rest of No Ordinary Love Vol 3. via audiobook on Spotify. If you see yourself in my story, or Isabella and Rebecca’s, I’d love to hear about it. My comments are open to share a time an emotional risk was worth the reward <3