By: Anonymous
Art by: Ellie Applegreen '28
My grandma was nineteen when she got engaged. Or maybe eighteen — she doesn’t remember for sure. What she does remember is that it happened at ALDI, where she spent all her precious high school afternoons working as a cashier. After dating for four years, my grandfather finally made the big move: he got in line, loaded his groceries onto the conveyor belt, and, at the very end, placed an engagement ring. He didn’t say anything. She, on the other hand, said yes.
They got married at eighteen and had their first kid, my aunt Heather, at nineteen. She followed him to college. They had three under three. When I ask her about this time in her life, she tells me, I was a kid raising kids.
I spent a lot of this summer thinking about my grandparents’ love story. Mostly because I was handed my own on a silver platter, and I gave it up.
He was a good, Southern, Catholic boy. I, on the other hand, am an aspirationally-good, culturally un-Southern, and definitively not-Catholic girl. He picked flowers and gave them to me in empty Gatorade bottles. He planned dates and wrote me a love letter scented with his cologne. He complained about his Master’s program and how it meant another year before he could settle down in Charlotte and start a family. He never stopped talking about his future wife.
I knew he was wrong for me in every way, but I loved him. He was romantic and thoughtful and sweet. He had the most earnest pair of eyes I’d ever seen and a sheepish grin that made my cynical heart stutter. It was the kind of love I can’t justify rationally. Maybe it was the loneliness of being back home for the summer or the technical, inevitable collision of opposites attracting. If you’re a romantic, you could call it love at (near) first sight. As for the pessimists, you’re welcome to believe it was animal desire. All I know is that if you had felt it, you would have called it love too.
Sitting in the car, after he asked me to be his girlfriend, I told him that I had dated women before. I asked him what he thought about that.
I don’t blame you for having desires, he told me.
But do you blame me for acting on them?
I wouldn’t let him answer. I didn’t want to hate him.
He was making me dinner when he told me that divorce was wrong. So I told him the story of my parents. He listened as I explained that my parents’ divorce was the best thing that could have happened to me. When I was through, he stared down at the stove and decided that my parents were the exception. Not the rule.
I told my grandma about him. She was thrilled. I had found a good, twenty-something Catholic boy just like she had. When I told her that he planned to move to Charlotte after graduation, she had to hide her excitement. I’ll finally have you close to home, she said. We both knew that was never going to happen, and yet I let her imagine it. I let myself imagine it, too. Even as I fell in love, I knew it had an expiration date. I loved him, but being with him forever would have meant giving up my career, my independence, my childhood. I didn’t want to be a kid raising kids. Hell, I didn’t even know if I wanted to be an adult raising kids. I wanted New York and a shitty job I loved. I wanted my twenties for myself. But some secret part of me wished for security instead. He would have taken care of me. He would have loved me. And though I know it wouldn’t have been enough, I think about how easily I could have had it. For an instant, I saw an echo of my grandmother’s life — the version where I follow him to school, marry him, have three kids on a lake in North Carolina — and I said no.
He called me the other day to tell me he was seeing someone new. On their second date, they went to Mass together, and on their third, they debated what color eyes their children would have. At first, I was angry. He was getting exactly what he wanted. And then I realized: so am I. I’m here, at Dartmouth, working my ass off on projects I’m passionate about, going to parties with my friends in outfits he would have hated, and applying for every internship and grant I can get my hands on. A million different futures diverge in front of me, and I realize that’s what security could never give me: possibility. I hope he and his new girlfriend enjoy their security — and I mean it. I hope they have a love as pure and long-lasting as my grandparents’. Because even though it’s not the life for me, I know it’s a life full of joy and fulfillment. I wouldn’t give up the world for it, but my grandma wouldn’t give it up for the world.
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