Mid-20’s, Mid-30’s, Reimagine Relational Safety

My peer group ranges in age from their mid-twenties to mid-thirties. For many of us, we are now exploring relationships that feel more serious than ever before, contemplating life partnerships and what that means for us today. We are quickly realizing that our priorities and relationships look significantly different from those of our parents’ generation and even that of our older siblings. As a result, we often feel lost without a template for what to prioritize in our relationships.

What happens when you find your person, and they are not who you had imagined? What do you do when they don’t fit your checklist of culture, religion, race, class, or gender, yet they still feel like the right fit for you in this moment? How many opposing voices and expectations do you find yourself sorting through? And how many of those voices belong to you?

Living in diverse cities with social platforms that dissolve geographical distances and barriers, our relationships look vastly different from those of previous generations. Our generation is among the first to prioritize emotional connection above all other forms of connection and security. But what does it mean to choose ourselves in this way, and why can it feel so daunting?

For many of us, we are prioritizing something that has never before been emphasized in our family systems. We often have not had the opportunity to have our internal worlds held, seen, and validated by families that primarily focused on surviving the demands of capitalism and meeting cultural expectations.

By minimizing what we were taught to believe were relational priorities vital to our survival, and by prioritizing emotional connection above them, we activate intergenerational trauma because we challenge what we have been conditioned to believe our survival depends on. I believe this is the source of fear many in my generation feel as they shift their relational priorities—often being the first in their lineages to choose “differently.”

Experiencing anything as a ‘first generation’ comes with its own unique set of challenges. I grapple with this by imagining that accessing relationships in this way creates new opportunities for intergenerational growth and evolution. In many ways, our ancestors could never have envisioned our lives and choices; however, they have laid the foundations for us to reimagine them. We are now redefining what relational safety means.