Taking Life with Chances

Gen X through and through, I grew up on the romance stories of Brenda Walsh and Dylan McKay, Jordan Catalano and Angela Chase. The movies and shows that might feel a little cringe now were the love stories that shaped how many of us imagined connection.

I am a romantic. Not the rose petals on the floor type, but the dancing in the kitchen while cooking dinner, the quiet hand-holding kind. I love love. I fall easily for people, and when I fall, I fall hard. Over time, I’ve started to wonder if that’s less about the people themselves and more about the way I experience connection — intensely, hopefully, sometimes blindly.

At this point in my life, I always imagined I would have a partner. Not necessarily marriage — I think I grew out of that idea after my first boyfriend, or at least I thought I had. And I knew from a young age that I didn’t want children. But I did want a partner. I love being in a relationship — the shared rhythm of everyday life, the feeling of building something alongside someone else.

If I leave out high school romances and the lighter relationships of my early twenties, there have been four serious relationships that shaped me. And looking back now, I’m less interested in telling each story in detail and more curious about what they reveal about the patterns I carry into love.

My first real adult relationship felt like the beginning of everything. We lived together. I thought I would marry him. I had the magazines tucked away in the closet, plans written in journals, a future that felt certain — at least in my mind. Looking back, I held onto that future more tightly than I realized at the time.

After that relationship ended, over time I dated two other people. One felt very similar to the first, almost familiar in ways I didn’t fully recognize at the time. The second was the total opposite — sweet and kind, someone I believe I could still be with today if we had been in different places in our lives. The timing, at least for me, just wasn’t there.

Looking back, I’m starting to notice a pattern — how easily I step into connection, how deeply I invest, and how often I’m searching for something that feels both grounding and expansive at the same time.

And this is where I’m still figuring things out.