The Yellow Brick Road Gets Shorter as We Age

Love, Regret, and Real Connection

‍ Part 2. ‍Munchkinland, or Youthful Confidence Before the First Bad Relationship

Youth is a dangerous place to give a person confidence.

Not because youth is bad. Youth is wonderful in the way fireworks are wonderful: bright, noisy, full of promise, and best observed from a safe distance by someone who understands insurance.

In the Yellow Brick Road version of our romantic lives, youth is Munchkinland.

Everything is colorful. Everyone is giving directions. Nobody seems qualified. A song breaks out for reasons no one can legally defend. You are new to the world you have landed in, but somehow people are already pointing you toward a road and implying that if you just follow it, everything will make sense.

This is also how most of us are introduced to love.

Follow the road.

Find the person.

Feel the magic.

Ignore the fact that no one has explained maintenance, timing, communication, emotional maturity, family patterns, grief, attraction to chaos, or why your stomach butterflies occasionally have the strategic planning skills of a squirrel on espresso.

When we are young, love feels like proof.

If someone wants us, we must be worth wanting. If someone chooses us, we must have been chosen for a reason. If the kiss is good, the future must be nearby, wearing a linen shirt and holding two coffees.

Youth is where many of us first confuse attention with affection.

It is where we learn that being desired can feel enough like being loved to pass inspection in bad lighting.

It is where we mistake emotional intensity for emotional depth. We believe that if something hurts beautifully, it must mean something. We call longing “chemistry.” We call uncertainty “mystery.” We call inconsistency “complicated,” because “unavailable” sounds less cinematic.

I would like to say I was above this.

I was not.

Part of the problem was that I arrived in Munchkinland carrying a lesson I only half understood.

My parents had spent years telling me to make sure I liked the person I fell in love with. They said it often enough that I should have absorbed it through osmosis.

Instead, I treated chemistry like extra credit.

If I was excited, intrigued, fascinated, slightly nervous, and capable of spending an entire afternoon analyzing a two-sentence text message, I assumed I was on the right track.

Liking the person seemed less urgent.

In my defense, chemistry is louder.

It also has a remarkably successful marketing department.

I had, at various points, the romantic discernment of a golden retriever at a buffet. If someone smiled the right way, liked the right song, or seemed wounded in a manner I found poetically inconvenient, I could build an entire future out of three conversations and one meaningful pause.

This is not love.

This is interior decorating inside a fantasy.

But at the time, it feels profound.

That is the trick of Munchkinland. Everything is smaller than it appears later, but while you are standing there, it feels like the whole world.

Your first crush feels enormous. Your first rejection feels fatal. Your first heartbreak feels like the universe has personally reviewed your application and decided to proceed with other candidates.

You do not yet know that heartbreak is not rare.

You do not yet know that nearly everyone has, at some point, sat in a car, a bedroom, a dorm room, a kitchen, or a parking lot and wondered how someone who once made them feel so seen could now make them feel so disposable.

You do not yet know that love and humiliation often attend the same parties.

So you think it is just you.

That is one of youth’s cruelest little jokes. It gives us universal experiences and makes them feel private.

Munchkinland is full of people giving advice.

Some of it is useful. Most of it is suspicious.

“Just be yourself,” they say, without clarifying which self. The hopeful one? The wounded one? The one who says “I’m fine” while internally preparing a closing argument? The one who pretends not to care because caring has become socially dangerous?

“You’ll know when you know,” they say, which is delightful until you realize you have “known” six times and three of them had commitment issues.

“There are plenty of fish in the sea,” they say, as if the problem is inventory and not the fact that some of us keep bringing home emotionally aquatic warning signs.

Still, we listen.

We listen because we want the road to be simple. We want love to be something we can recognize by feeling. We want our longing to be intelligent. We want desire to be destiny wearing better shoes.

And for a while, that innocence is beautiful.

It is also expensive.

The first bad relationship does not always announce itself as bad. Sometimes it arrives charmingly. Sometimes it has excellent manners. Sometimes it knows exactly what to say because what it says is not anchored to what it can actually give.

Sometimes the first bad relationship is not even with a bad person.

That is where youth gets complicated.

Two unfinished people can hurt each other without either one being the villain. They can want love and still be terrible at it. They can have chemistry and no tools. They can be kind in theory and careless in practice. They can mean well and still leave bruises on the soft parts of someone else’s becoming.

The older I get, the less interested I am in labeling every past person as a villain. Including myself…at least my self when happily living in Munchkinland.

My first love. 14 years old and I was totally unprepared. I received some information from a reliable source (aka my twin sister) that a girl liked me. That “like” would roughly last about 5 months. We exchanged gifts. She gave me a cool poster, and I gave her a ring.

Yes. I know.

Now.

Rings are symbolic of lasting love.

As I entered my freshman year, my eyes popped out of my head. There were all these new freshman girls from neighboring Middle Schools. I'd have to explore new connections with no guilt. So, I knew I would have to tell her that we couldn't "go-together" any longer. I could have told my first love as we walked hand in hand licking ice cream cones. I could have told her on a night it was just her and I sitting in her yard, gabbing about nothing in particular and practicing our kissing. But I lacked the one thing that the Scarecrow lacked…a brain. So, on an impulsive decision, I wrote a break-up note and handed to her before I ran onto the football field. I was certainly a villain this time. My twin sister really got angry with me. As far as dating prospects in High School? Nope. Nada. NOTE: We became friends again in our late twenties.

Karma bites hard.

Even in Munchkinland.

So some are very hard learned lessons.

Some were mirrors.

Some were weather.

Some were warnings I insisted on calling opportunities.

Some were people I met before either of us knew what we were doing.

And some, yes, were walking cautionary tales with nice hair.

But youth rarely knows the difference while it is happening.

That is why Munchkinland matters in this series. It is not merely the bright beginning. It is where we first start believing that the road is supposed to deliver a fantasy if we follow it correctly.

We absorb romantic scripts from songs, movies, gossip, family myths, church basements, locker rooms, magazines, social media, and that one dramatic friend who treats every relationship like a limited series.

We learn what we are supposed to want before we ask whether it would actually make us happy.

A beautiful person. A dramatic story. A soulmate. A rescue. A partner who understands us without explanation, forgives us without accountability, desires us without complication, and somehow heals every old wound while also being fun at dinner.

Reasonable.

No wonder early love often collapses under the weight of its job description.

The truth is, youth does not usually want a person.

Youth wants a feeling.

It wants to feel chosen, exceptional, awakened, desired, safe, seen, and finally released from the ordinary embarrassment of being oneself.

That is a lot to ask of another human being, especially one who may also be trying to figure out rent, identity, sex, parents, ambition, and whether bangs were a mistake.

But this is how we learn.

We learn by mistaking a spark for a hearth.

We learn that the person who makes us feel alive is not always the person who helps us live well.

And if we are fortunate, or stubborn, or sufficiently tired of repeating ourselves, we eventually learn to ask better questions.

Not just, “Do they want me?”

But, “Do I become more honest around them?”

Not just, “Is there chemistry?”

But, “Is there kindness when chemistry is not performing?”

Not just, “Can I imagine a future?”

But, “Can we handle an ordinary Tuesday?”

That last question ruins many fantasies, which is why I recommend it.

Fantasy hates Tuesday.

Tuesday is where real love either learns to make coffee, apologize, pay bills, listen badly and try again, or admit it was only dressed up for Saturday night.

Youth does not know this yet.

Munchkinland is too busy singing.

And perhaps that is as it should be. We cannot begin the road already wise. If we did, we would be insufferable. Also, no one would date us.

There is tenderness in remembering who we were when we first wanted love. The foolishness was real, but so was the hope. The mistakes were real, but so was the bravery. It takes nerve to offer your untested heart to the world and assume it will be handled responsibly.

The world often fails this test.

So do we.

But the road continues.

Eventually the colors settle. The songs quiet down. The advice becomes less useful. We begin to notice that the path ahead is not just about wanting love, but learning how to recognize it.

And that is where we meet the Scarecrow.

Because sooner or later, every romantic traveler has to ask the question youth avoids:

What if the heart is not the only organ involved?

The Cynical Romantic’s Road Note

Youth does not always know what love is, but it knows how loudly to want it.

Question for the Reader

Who were you trying to become when you first tried to be loved?

Next Tuesday

Next week, we meet the Scarecrow and discuss the romantic lessons we ignored because attraction was louder than common sense.