Triple-threat 20's

By Natalie Miller
210 west Content Editor [send email]

Life in your 20s can be tough. Although you are finally out on your own, you are out on your own and there are many decisions to make. And these decisions loom gigantic in the grand scheme of things.

I like to think of it as a triple threat: where, career and love. First of all, I could say geographic location instead of where, but there are many factors. For many people, it’s the decision to stay in their hometown or not. How much they want to stay depends on myriad factors – family, security, job opportunities available through networking, social life, etc. Some people do not want to live where they grew up, and will do most anything to avoid it.

One big factor that throws college graduates to the ends of the earth is their careers – they are increasingly more willing to move for the right job in today’s job market. And you might end up somewhere cool, like San Diego or Atlanta or Portland. But the downside of that is that you have to leave friends and family behind. (In the cases of 210west staffers, mostly behind in Ohio.) And boyfriends, girlfriends, significant others, spouses, etc. might need to be taken into consideration.

The catch here is that at this age, most people are looking for a mate. Staying home might produce the same old types of small-towners, but moving to a big city might yield a population of weirdos. It would be great to be already attached, unless of course the other person has career aspirations that don’t work where you want to live.

So you can either live where you want, have the job you want or have the mate you want – at many times it seems like these are mutually exclusive and I’ve spent many hours discussing solutions to this "triangle of tension" with my friends.

And one killer thing about your 20’s is that you’ve just gotten out of college with a degree, and I’ve found that either people get into their field and are disappointed -- or they can’t get in at all! After getting a job as a reporter a year out of college, I found that my co-workers were not all professional journalist types – in fact, quite a few of them were slobs who only had the stubbornness to hold on to their jobs as a redeeming quality. And I knew I’d never make a million dollars as a journalist, but the hours and the pay and the contempt for my profession were still a shock.

And I happily married my college sweetheart and we settled in my hometown, the large city of Cleveland. Thing was, he despised city life, with all the people "living on top of each other" and the lack of polite driving on the narrow streets. And I felt like I couldn’t really be a success unless I left where I grew up to make it on my own, but I enjoyed tremendously the web of relatives, old schoolmates and new newspaper contacts.

So we moved to ye Old Colonial Williamsburg, and we liked it better as a place to live in a community. But it took me a year to find a job that I like. But here we are, doing better than we were in Cleveland…but my triangle is yet again out of balance because I really miss my friends and family being close and my delight at running into a cousin or grade school friend at every bar. I have to admit, though, that many of my friends from Bowling Green have moved away from the Cleveland area, and even out of Ohio, so that’s no reason to move back. But will I ever fit in here the way I did there? And how long will it take? And by then, will my triangle be shifted yet again?

Can we win this struggle in a modern world? Time was, you stayed in your hometown and got the best job you could and married the best person you could find. Now, it’s a whole new world.