Dear Fuck Up: Should I Leave the Country After a Break-Up?

I can't tell if this urge is childish.

Hello Fuck Up,

I find myself, miserably, 34 and single and desperate to be a mother. Basically exactly what I grew up being culturally conditioned to think was about as wretched and pathetic a thing as a woman could be.

I am one year on from an absolutely devastating break up with a partner who was emotionally abusive to me due to his own history of trauma, and the last year has provided little in the way of viable new partner options. I have spent it half trying to meet someone, and half trying to let go of a person I loved deeply and thought I was going to have a child with while regaining my sense of self after enduring some pretty appalling behavior (which I mostly forgive him for, but it leaves its mark). 

I have a well-paid job I feel neutral about, workmates who are mostly married with children (after work culture is basically non-existent), wonderful friends who are mostly coupled up, and I live alone in a place I own. Nothing about my life invites the kind of spontaneous connection with someone new that might become a relationship, and dating apps are somehow worse than before and wreck my self-esteem. I am more fragile now, having been through the experience of being emotionally abused by someone I really loved, and I can't hack the rough and tumble callousness of the apps (not that I was ever that great at it lol).

It's increasingly painful celebrating other people's pregnancies when I'm further away from a baby of my own now than I have been in years. I feel so completely unsettled right when it seems like everyone around me is settling more than ever. It is so frustrating to know clearly that you want a committed loving relationship and a child, and that being about the one thing in life you cannot create through force of will. 

I have been thinking about saying fuck it and quitting my job, renting my place out and leaving the country and travelling before settling down overseas (in a place I've lived before and which has old friends and decent jobs going). I can make this work financially but it would mean leaving the place I have made a life in for the last decade. 

My thinking is that since I can't make this important thing happen, I might as well make the rest of my life more fun and adventurous. But is this a childish way for someone in their mid-30s to think about things? Will I just feel the same way in a different place? I'm worried doing this would make me flighty and unserious — but is that fear just a way of avoiding a risk that could really pay off? 

I have also just found out that he is seeing someone new, which naturally makes me want to set myself on fire/ leave the country on the next flight out of here.

What do you reckon?

Love,

Grown-Up Baby?

Dear Baby,

I’ve said this before in other columns but I think it bears repeating: Under certain circumstances, running away from your problems can be remarkably effective. People who mistake platitudes for wisdom will often say things like, “well, you can try it but they’ll always catch up with you.” That’s bullshit. When your problem is that you are constantly surrounded by physical reminders of some recent failure or heartache? You can pick up and leave. You can move to a new apartment or a new city or a new country and while that won’t make everything better it will make things substantially easier. 

There is nothing childish about realizing that when your current circumstances begin to feel truly untenable — when you have reached the point that hearing joyful news brings you anguish — and you have the means to change them, you should go ahead and do that. 

But I don’t think you should pursue this new way of living as a second-best alternative to the life you really desire. There is nothing shameful about the things you want. I want some of them too. I want to be in love — wretchedly and pathetically in love — and I often resent the part that chance plays in my ability to find it. 

While you may feel like you’ve missed your shot I can promise you that isn’t true. One of the many indignities that aging brings is the added weight of a relationship gone bad. It’s not simply that one is heartbroken, but also plagued by the sense that you have now wasted so much time with the wrong person.

It’s normal to feel this way, especially when most of your social circle seems to have found what you, thus far, have not. But the time it took for you to realize you would not subject yourself to emotional abuse was not wasted. The years you have spent clarifying your own vision for the life you want to have were not wasted. 

34 is still quite young, despite how you might feel right now. You will fall in love again. And maybe again after that. You can be a mother, possibly in circumstances you have yet to foresee. It’s hard to foresee much when you are stuck in a place that only reminds you of how things haven’t turned out the way you wanted. I said earlier that I often resent the role chance plays in love. But then a preposterous set of circumstances will bring someone into my orbit and I am left in awe of the part that chance plays in all of this. 

The world is big and filled with so many people. Go try your luck. 

Love, 

A Fuck Up

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