Hailey Nguyen/ The Cougar

Everybody remembers their first love. It’s the feeling of jubilation and tenseness balanced between each other in a wholly new and unfamiliar sensation. The innocence and naivety that surround it make you blush when you look back at your sweetly idiotic self. My first love was typical of any youth who tires of their familiar occurrences and stagnating sights. It was not for an object or a person, but a place named Houston.

The illustrious allusion of a new residence overpasses the fearful newness for most people, me included. Houston’s lively illumination and glass towers blinded me from any doubtful cognitions. Nevertheless, in routine fashion, the novelty of any superficial love eventually fades, and you are left only with the foundation of the attraction that led to that love.

The location a person chooses to love is formed on the basis of what intrigues them about such a place, but what will solidify a true romance from falseness is the combination of both wistful attraction and beneficial traits.

Too familiar

Where do you choose to live? For many people, that is simply where they were born. Almost 60% of adults in the U.S. live within a 10-mile radius of where they were born. When you expand that radius to 100 miles, it accelerates to 80%.

For many people, there is no place like home, and the feelings of comfort and familiarity are advantageous traits. It would be an understatement to say that a support system in family and friends is an essential factor affecting where people settle down. 

That was a deciding factor for me when moving to Houston; I saw it as a chance to break out of the stagnation of my youth while still having a support system in familiar faces nearby. It seemed like a surefire solution to problems of moving to another location, giving me both a freshness to life while still having parts of my old life that provided stability. 

After living there for a while, I felt buyer’s remorse at the whole idea that I had sold to myself. It was all the worst traits wrapped into a package. 

The 30-minute drive didn’t change the rush-hour traffic, the endless hot days of sweat and the inability to explore yourself when you are still surrounded by many of your same family and friends. It is a troubling existence to try to remain respectful to your past self, while simultaneously changing in a chameleon fashion — as your old cohorts overwatch you.

Familiarity can be a strangling, suffocating hug. Every deviation from your former personality feels like a fraudulent attempt to reinvent yourself. Whether that is too self-conscious or not doesn’t change the fact that you would feel much freer in a place not cluttered with your past.

If you’re looking for change, you have to choose between the comfort of habituation or the mystery of unfamiliarity. If you fail to make a distinct choice, you might end up with an unhappy combination that consists of the dullness of uniformity and no level of comfort that you are happy with.

Optimal traits

The traits that make a city a good fit for a specific person are often personal, but the most important aspects are universal. The key moral of that is the availability of good jobs. Without good job opportunities and a robust economy, it’s a race to the bottom for whatever is available. The top priority for adults is the economic health of where they live, for good reason.

Satisfaction is often only possible when you’re making a healthy wage to enjoy the other aspects of your life. 

Besides that, the fundamental aspects of what will affect your love for a city or not are your daily life. The infrastructure, community and your comfort are ultimately the factors in whether a place you live is just a fling or actually true love. How each one affects you on a daily basis will make your heart grow fonder or lead to the blues. 

Houston, in my eyes, for much of my life, was idealized in a way that could only spell disappointment. In rose-colored glasses, the only thing I saw was the mountainous variety of archetypal people, the unique culture that was present and the vastness of a land unexplored.

My ears shocked me back into the real-world. The sound of my loud car tires zooming, to get across the sprawling city where everything is far apart. The wails of protestors or advocates fail to reach even the most affected people. Even the faint rumblings of tumbleweeds of trash rolling across the landscape. Combined altogether to create a sound mimicking an annoying tinnitus that wouldn’t disappear.

Idealizing a place is not a healthy relationship to be had, and you must look upon a location holistically to see if it passes more than a simple eye test, blinded by your own imagination.

Living in the suburb of a major city echoes the yearning of unrequited love; you’re so close yet so far from connecting. Having lived in a suburb since my conception, that sentiment rang deep with each visit to Houston being an extra cupid’s arrow into my heart. Each visit back into the suburb was a tearful goodbye. When the city and I path finally crossed away from simple mutual attraction to shared love, the synthesis of emotions was immediate. I felt the immediate gratification of completing my goal. 

Yet after a while, the longing feelings that turned into fondness started to disappear, and I was faced once again with the dilemma of yearning for someplace else, far from here. In whichever a person chooses to live, you must put aside the idealized view you have of it and face the reality of your attachment to a place.

opinion@thedailycougar.com