My longest and most enduring relationship has been with the city of Los Angeles.
For over thirteen years, LA has been both a landing place and a launching pad. This month, I’m closing the LA chapter.
I’m not ending my relationship with LA because I don’t love her. I still love LA, even after all these years. (Read more on a past post about ending relationships, even when we still love someone.)
I’m ending my relationship with this city because she no longer feels aligned with what I’m hoping to bring into my future. I’m grateful for everything I’ve experienced, but I’m very different than I was when I first moved here. What I want has changed.
My relationship with LA began thirteen summers ago, when I started flirting with the idea of living here. At that time, I was dating my college boyfriend. He was from the Valley and had already moved back home after graduating from Michigan. I still had another year of school.
Between my junior and senior year of college, I got a summer internship at an LA-based PR and Communications agency. It was the perfect segue to trial the city without a long-term commitment. It also let me dive deeper into my romantic relationship, beyond the undergrad bubble.
After three months, I decided that liked LA – but didn’t love it. I left the city, along with the relationship, and headed back to Ann Arbor for my last semester. I assumed I’d find a job in the Midwest or on the East Coast, which is where most Michigan people moved post-grad.
A few months later, I graduated early and accepted a strategy consulting internship that would eventually become a full-time role. It was 2011, and the only job I was offered in the midst of a recession, so I took it. The role happened to be in LA.
It took a bit for me to get used to the city. LA is one of those cities that takes time to understand. There’s far more than the initial preconceived notions of Hollywood glamour, vanity, and excessive wealth (though that can still be a part of the experience).
Eventually, I fell in love with her creative energy, her sunny demeanor, and the way her pastel sunsets folded into the horizon like a painting. I loved her proximity to rugged coastlines and extensive desert terrain.
She brought out my dynamic nature – my most spiritual and health-focused sides and my most light-hearted and superficial. I reinvented myself from work chic to outdoorsy entrepreneur to free-spirited world traveller. Here, I had permission to be multifaceted. I never had to be just one thing.
She also expanded my way of seeing the world. Surrounded among entrepreneurs, investors, and creators, I learned to take creative risks and dream up even bigger dreams. I learned how my dreams could go from merely an idea to a full-fledged business.
Over time, my identity became interconnected with hers. LA wasn’t just where I lived – her cultural preferences coincided with mine. As she shifted, I changed.
At some point, however, I started to feel that I had reached my upper limit of peak experiences with her. Before making any sudden decisions, I decided to spend time away from the city. I thought I’d feel re-invigorated, ready to root myself again.
But I didn’t.
Over the past two years, I’ve been leaving LA for a few months at a time, to travel back and forth to Europe. My family is originally from Poland, where we spent many of our summers. With my dual-citizenship, I’ve always dreamt of living abroad for an extended period of time. I started to prototype the idea a few years ago to see what would be possible.
At first, it was a four-week trip. In 2022, it became a three-month trial in Barcelona. This past year, I spent six months in Europe, most of them in Lisbon. (Side note, I recognize that this is a major privilege of my remote job, being single, free and having the resources to do this, and for that I’m incredibly grateful.)
Like my LA relationship, I didn’t fall in love with Lisbon at first-visit. I initially passed through Lisbon for a work trip in November 2021. I didn’t see the mass appeal.
Something drew me to come back and give her another try this past spring, however. This time, I fell in love.
In psychology, there’s a term called mere exposure effect, or familiarity principle. It’s the phenomenon that people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. It can happen with people, places, objects, names. The more exposure we have to something, the more we tend to like it. There’s a sense of comfort and reduced anxiety, which ultimately creates a more positive experience for us.
I fall in love with places and cities the way most people fall in love with romantic partners. It’s all-encompassing.
Lisbon lured me with her creative energy, romantic alleys, and bountiful nature surrounding the city. She also offered more of the things I’m looking for these days— a community that’s not separated by freeways, warm smiles from strangers, and a simpler, slower day-to-day (although a lack of clothing dryers doesn’t exactly simplify my life).
She also offers newness. There’s a new language to learn, new connections to be make, new restaurants to explore.
Still, there’s grief in leaving behind what’s beautiful and comfortable. There’s also immense sadness in letting go of something I’ve worked so hard to build. My dearest friends live here. I adore my solo weekends walking the beach in Malibu. I love the beautiful, bright, Spanish style apartment that’s been my home for eleven years. I savor Sunday mornings, when I can explore the Hollywood Farmer’s Market harvest.
The decision to leave LA is more heart-focused than logical. Even though I’ve travelled extensively over the past decade, something’s telling me that I need to move beyond the confines of this city. I need to go into a bit of discomfort in order to learn more about myself and the world.
My seven-year-old self would be so excited to hear about this cross-continental move (I first fell in love with traveling at that age, and wanted to go everywhere in the world), and my seventy-year-old self is saying that I’ll regret not going.
My present self is terrified and excited. These two feelings, when felt simultaneously, mean that there’ll likely be discomfort and expansion. (More on experiencing contradictory feelings at the same time, in another post.)
Perhaps I’ll be back, LA. But for now, I honor the memories and appreciate all I’ve been able to experience with you.
Thank you, I love you.