Epistemic status: This seems obviously true to a small degree. Sometimes I get flashes that it’s also true to a large degree? If so, that’s kind of a blackpill and I should be more careful about saying it. I think having this header up constitutes a correct amount of carefulness.
A year into being in America, I felt I had matured a lot. I’d entered my first romantic relationship and it was going reasonably well. I had several friends, with whom I had an openness and chillness I’d never had before with peers. Basically every conversation I’d had for a year had been kind and reasonable.
Then I went home and discovered my ability to avoid furious, hateful fights with my parents was unchanged. It was like the concrete walls of a maze erupted out of the ground in my psyche, pinning my thoughts and actions into old grooves. I realized the person I was in the States wasn’t the next, better version of me, but a parallel version that only existed in the American coastal liberal context.
(In traditional societies, if you don’t get along with your close family, this is your life forever!)
It’s my subjective experience that my most tangible self improvement happened in between friendships or romances, when I get to apply the lessons I learned without the baggage of the relationship I learned those lessons in. I’ve dated around ten people for over a year each, and I felt my quality as a partner go up with every relationship as I got my reps in. (Although, note: I married the second person I dated1, and our relationship has changed a lot in the past ten years.)
I have a similar experience with friendships2, although churning through those is costlier (it’s harder to break up with friends) so I can’t say I endorse it as strongly.
It’s important not to lie. I felt like the person I was playing when sinking into a new friendship was “me but 10% better” or “me but not the sort of person to make the worst mistake I made two years ago”. Except for a few mistakes that were too temporally close or terrible-feeling, I’d talk about those mistakes if it seemed conversationally appropriate. I wasn’t trying to hide them.
The observation that change happens fastest in the interstices has changed my view of what teenagers should do. I used to look down on how much American teens seemed to date and have sex, especially juxtaposed against their low academic performance. Now I think it’s best to navigate romance early and fast, maybe dating one new person a year starting from age fifteen (if compatible people are available in your local pool – a big if for some), so that by the time you’re an adult, you’re ready to act like one within the context of your closest relationships3.
Footnotes
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1. I was haunted by this decision for the first few years after our engagement. Intuitively I felt it was the right call but rationally it seemed dumb to get engaged to your second boyfriend. I was assuaged after years of polyamory – I met plenty of wonderful people but my now-husband kept being the best fit for me, which I couldn’t have become convinced of unless I kept dating more people in parallel.
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2. I churned friends a lot earlier in life because I wanted to build the most compatible friend group the Anglosphere had to offer me and it didn’t seem like I could get there without aggressive exploration. Around age 29, my brain made the decision for me to stop chruning: I felt much less interested in new people and more invested in long-running friendships. I don’t endorse this change and was upset at the time the transition happened.
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3. But maybe I’m just saying that because for me it ended up being more consequential to marry the right person than to go to the right college and get a degree that opened up lucrative career paths?… idk that in itself is a whole blog post of worms.