Distributed love: How I found out to be a millennial by reading an article by Laurie Penny
Even though I was born in 1986 — which makes me belong to this generation automatically — I never considered myself as a millennial.
I always thought of millennials as ethereal for-ever-young people who would have uncanonical employments and dress in apparently makeshift clothes. Nomads, travellers, exciting people who would not spend a minute of their time trying to build an uncertain future. I do not fit in any of these (admittedly stereotyped) descriptions. My dark Italian appearance and disability make me look like the opposite of ethereal, I am or have been obsessively career-oriented, I am shamelessly vane, and I am a total planner — both for my trips and other personal programs. In sum, a complete failure as a millennial. Or so I thought.
In this article published on Wired, Laurie Penny shares her personal considerations on what it means for millennials to have a family. As she found herself living the COVID lockdown with three friends, she asks whether her social “capsule” can be considered a family. The answer is undoubtedly yes.
Our generation, she argues, grew up with the idea that adultness, and perhaps even happiness, would coincide with finding a romantic partner and starting a new family. Incomplete and unfulfilled until that time, this was the curse.
Instead, the truth is that, for many people today, family is whomever they love and take care of on an everyday basis. This can include their housemate, partner, or friends.
The most appealing aspect I found in this article was that it frees the idea of happiness from the obligation to find a romantic partner. As a kid and even a young woman, I sincerely thought that my life was destined to “end like a Disney movie, with wedding bells ringing and the credits rolling on the perfect couple behind their picket fence, happily ever after”. I tried with multiple partners to make this vision happen, struggling to fit my complicated personality and need for independence in romantic relationships that then failed. Some of these relationships were burning, absolute loves that did to me what they were supposed to do: they burned me.
I got to my thirties so exhausted that I decided that true love was not for me. I had it already, and — thanks, but no thanks. And then I met my current partner. At first, I did not think we were meant to be together. Sometimes, I still think it as we fight and argue trying to make our lifestyles and stubborn heads coexist. Yet, we are together for a bit more than two years, live together for about a year, and are facing the COVID lockdown as peacefully as I think is humanly possible. And despite all the personal differences and arguments, I feel in an unspoken and sometimes even resigned way that a life without him is simply not possible. He fits me. He fits my life, personality, habits, goals. But why?
Well, for many reasons, I suppose. But one of these reasons struck me suddenly as I was reading Laurie Penny’s article. I love him, but I do not love only him. Contrasting with any Disney-type model, my romantic relationship is not the only relationship that matters to me. I distribute my love and energies across other people and relationships that are essential to me: my brother, my mother, her partner, my old friends in Europe, my new friends in Canada, […].
These relationships require time and thoughts, and none of them is necessarily more important than another. I chose to plan and organize my daily life and my future with my romantic partner, true. He is my elected partner, after all. But I found myself calling my single friends almost every day at the beginning of the lockdown, organizing WhatsApp gym sessions with my mother, and reacting immediately to the surges of my drained friends with young kids. And I did so while reorganizing my life with my partner and his kids. These actions were not incompatible. On the contrary, they were all expressions of the same thing: my love for the people I consider like family.
In sum, it has never been as clear to me as during the COVID lockdown, but it has always been true. One absolute love would not fit my need to look after all the people I care about. Despite my teen dreams, marriage and romance do not define my happiness, after all. A good partner for me is someone who leaves me free to love as much as I can all the people I want — certainly including him, but not limited to him.
So, here is how I found out to be a millennial. I might not fit the millennial stereotype perfectly, but I do feel that family is something more than finding a romantic partner and having kids. My love is distributed. I am a distributed person.
Written in July 2020.
