“Rejoice O young man, in thy youth.” ~Ecclesiastes

“Youth is wasted on the young.” ~George Bernard Shaw

“It takes a very long time to become young.” ~Pablo Picasso

A close friend of mine recently wrote a very touching piece about breaking up with her significant other. She talked about their romance feeling “lonely” while they remained best friends. In the piece she says, “When I told my good friend Richard about my breakup, he reminded me of how young I am. And I know, intellectually, that 27 is young. Everyone loves to offer that up when your heart is breaking, as if youth itself is supposed to soften the blow.”

I felt like that is probably how it sounded to her, but I’d like to … hm. Finesse? Re-craft? I’d like to reiterate my thinking about youth.

One of the dirty tricks of time is that when your heart is breaking, it seems to take. So. Long.

But when you look back on it, it seems to have flashed past.

Another trick in the yawning chasm of time is that age changes as your age changes. Abby and I were a perfect couple, absolutely, but consider this: on the day she turned 21, I was 7.

Later in the piece, my friend talked about those difficult breakup conversations, saying, “I think part of me will hear that sentence for the rest of my life.”

I have sentences like that, words that cut like a knife. “It never worked.” “On a scale of 10, we were a three.” “Just leave me alone.”

I remember it all, but by now, there is so much of it, good and bad, that those awful moments can, if I let them, blend into the chatter of the past.

Another idea about being unhappy at age 27 is that I was unhappy at 27. There is some kind of urgency at that age telling you that if you don’t hook up, or if you do and doesn’t work out, you’ll be left out – FOMO. It took a lot of thinking and growing up to finally realize that romance and a significant relationship is only one corner piece of the big pizza of life, and that happiness is very possible without it.