I’ve had the pleasure of spending the past two years dating my old friend from high school. Not only that— for years before we dated, I had the pleasure of having a friendship with him as we each navigated our teenage years and tried to find our place in the high school social landscape. We spent those years growing up together, but separately. The kids who spent their Saturday afternoons doing school projects and eating snacks made by their mom are now doing it all for themselves: laundry, lunches, life decisions. And on a fine winter day in second year university after nearly a decade of growing up, we decided to try our hand at growing up together.
And two years later, to my delight, we find ourselves still growing up together. He’s my last text before I fall asleep at night, the first person I check in on throughout the day. We became so intertwined with each other’s daily routines, friends, and families, that eventually we asked ourselves a different question of growth: are we growing old together?
The question of growing old together puts me in a place where most twenty-somethings don’t like to be in, and those who do usually aren’t stepping up to announce it. Being in it for the long run when you’re young is often perceived as distasteful by peers and even adults. The paradox is that, while society has us believe that a storybook, perfect-on-the-surface love equates to happiness, society does not romanticize the reality— the mundane experience of going through the motions with a partner— much less tell you to dream of it. I sometimes feel different for finding myself in a place where I’m going to be with my partner for the foreseeable future, but again— long-term relationships aren’t exactly glorified for a young person. Nobody around me openly talks about their relationship with the intention of forever in mind.
After embracing the good, the bad, and the ugly of getting past the first few dates and into something more committed, I find beauty in the mundane. I’m happy and proud to find myself in the relationship I’m in. While I have no idea where the next decade will take me, or my partner, or how we will each change, I’m loving my relationship in its time. I don’t think that the experience of growing together is limited to long-term relationships. I rather think that no matter what relationship stage you find yourself in and the age in which you find it, you inevitably grow up and grow old together. Each are important and each bring their own variations of love to embrace.
Growing up together and growing old together: are they the same? I view growing up and growing old together as conceptually different within my own understanding of love. For me, separating these notions gives value and depth to how I understand love in the turbulent years of my twenties.
When I think of growing up together, I think about how, at any given moment, my partner and I will never be younger. Growing up will undoubtedly look much different when I am thirty, forty, or sixty than it does in my twenties, at a time when I’m learning so much about the world and its endless possibilities. But, I subscribe to the notion that in life you’re never finished learning, which also means you are never finished growing up. To me, growing up together is about embracing the childlikeness of always having more to learn and explore. It is about daring to let your imagination run wild. Growing up together is the hope of the future that makes you feel like anything is possible, especially together.
I believe that growing up together is one of the greatest gifts of dating in your twenties. You get to give and receive advice, make crazy decisions, try new things and fail at them, and have somebody trying and failing at their own things right alongside you. When you’re growing up together, your imaginations run free while designing dream lives, weighing options, and planning adventures both big and small, long-term and short-term. You get to be a constant for one another in a time when barely anything else is steady or predictable. Growing up together is about being irresponsible— whether on purpose or not— and arriving at the other side of it. Of course, growing up together, especially in your twenties, can be a recipe for high turbulence. With no set path, it seems life can take you anywhere. But who cares? Being in a relationship that allows and encourages you to dream big provides the hope for and reassurance of a life where you’re never too old to imagine, dream, and do.
And as for growing old together? It is really just me romanticizing the mundane experience of dating in the real world. As you navigate your own interests, obligations, and other relationships, you make time for someone else and their interests. To me, growing old together is knowing each other’s soul like your own, and watching one another age like fine wine as life carries each person through their own trajectory. Growing old together is knowing too much, yet knowing there is always more to know.
Growing old together is about loving the experience of going through the motions in the same beautiful, annoying, ways, as you get to spend them with the one whose ways harmonize with yours best. With that being said, growing old together is also about negotiating life— becoming too familiar with each other’s habits and sometimes agreeing to disagree for the greater good. It’s about liking your own separate TV shows, having schedules that conflict more than you wish they would, and becoming comfortable with those little differences that are always going to fluctuate. Conceptually, growing old together is about the maintenance of the individual within the pair, loving the two wholes that make a greater whole, and nourishing each part: the self and the other. Growing old together is the level-headed, down-to-earth partner-in-crime of growing up together. It is the reason and reality that helps ground the wild and imaginative.
I love the process of growing up and growing old with my partner. I love sinking into the familiarities of life with one another. I love the way we can let one another dream of what we’ve felt pressure not to dream about— dream jobs, dream houses, dream dogs— the logistically unattainable for the time being. I love learning to work with, rather than against, one another’s quirks— the good and bad. I love dreaming big dreams and getting to put all of my honest belief in someone and have their believe in me too. If you’re always growing up together, you’re forever young. If you’re always growing old together, you’re always getting to know and work with one another at an indefinite project: fostering a partnership while honouring both individual souls.
To get to grow up and grow old intimately with another human is one of my favourite experiences of human connection. We grow up together by talking about all the places we would love to go and all the dream directions we hope to follow, even though we can’t yet tell if we’re moving the same way. While this sometimes feels like a facet of all romantic relationships for young people, I don’t think there is any stage of life that promises total stability. We grow old together by talking about our past memories with and without one another. We’re always adding new knowledge to our mental libraries to better love and understand how the other functions. Growing old together requires a trust and an openness that is most certainly learned, and can always be improved upon.
To be open to knowing someone deeply— to dream your dreams of growing up with one another and to work with the realities of growing old— is an unpredictable, heartbreaking, healing, and moving experience all in one. It is like watching a plant grow while being a plant myself, experiencing changes in direction and environment. I can’t see myself bloom, but find beauty in watching the plant beside me bloom. Encouraging them, and seeing them in bloom- and knowing that I’m blooming too from receiving all the same— is what makes my heart fullest.