A Fake Review of The Five Year Engagement That is Really Just About My Life

Last night Matt and I went to see The Five Year Engagement, the new movie written by and starring Jason Segel. This was a pretty important movie for us to see, not only because we’ve seen every single thing Jason Segel has starred in since the tragically short series Freaks and Geeks (We still sometimes have a moment of silence for Undeclared, one of the best shows of all time despite the fact that it only made it halfway through its first season before being cancelled), but because as we’ve long suspected, Jason Segel is apparently following our lives just as closely as we are following his. Here’s what I mean: The Five Year Engagement is about a couple living in San Francisco, Segel’s character (Tom) is a successful chef and his girlfriend Violet (Emily Blunt) is a psychology student, applying for post docs. Segel proposes in the first scene and they begin to plan their wedding, but not long after that Violet receives the news that she’s been accepted to a post doc program…in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Obviously this doesn’t mirror our life exactly, but it comes pretty close. Next year Matt will be moving to Ann Arbor to pursue a doctoral degree in Chemistry and after I finish my creative writing graduate degree in Wilmington, I’ll be following him. I’m not a super successful chef (or a super successful anything), and we aren’t engaged, but the sentiment of the movie hit pretty close to home. The fear of living the Midwest, a place where you have to actually own cold weather clothing, where there are no beaches (everyone I tell this fear to keeps assuring me that there are beaches at Lake Michigan and I keep dramatically rolling my eyes), and where people use the word “pop” instead of “soda”, and the even greater fear of following someone you love somewhere you aren’t sure you want to be with absolutely no plans on what you might be doing once you get there.

And it’s not just us. In our age group, the mid twenty somethings, serious relationships are really hard to maintain. Our lives are essentially just beginning, or at least the parts of our lives where we get to make real decisions about our future. Decisions like what we are going to do, or where we are going to live. The time in our lives when we finally start feeling guilty about spending significant portions of our day watching Love it or List in on HGTV and eating burritos in bed because it’s not really that helpful to our future. But our futures are taking us in all different directions. Matt wants to go to Michigan to be a chemist, and I want to…well, be a writer preferably somewhere that isn’t Michigan. But who is to say whose dream is more important when you’re part of a couple? We come from the nurturing you-can-be-anything encouragement of our parents and the age of both sexes being told to work towards their dreams, no matter the cost. We are brought up our whole lives to think we can be anyone, do anything, and there should be nothing that can slow us down and that’s great. I’m glad that I am the kind of woman who thinks about my career and aspirations before I think about being a wife and a mother, but where does that leave us when it comes time to really decide what we want to do with our lives? What happens when you’re in love with your partner as much as your aspirations, but the two aren’t necessarily in the same place? Which one are you supposed to choose and can you have both?

In the movie, Tom moves with Violet to Michigan and gives up his lucrative and impressive career as a chef in the Bay Area and unable to find work in the Ann Arbor restaurant scene, he ends up putting sandwiches together at the famous Zingerman’s deli. (Side note: The shots of the sandwiches in Zingerman’s were enough to convince me that moving with Matt is probably the right decision). But he doesn’t find the job fulfilling and after a few years, as Violet becomes more successful and his career stays stagnant, he starts to fall apart. The movie is, of course, slightly dramatic. I highly doubt that if I move with Matt to Michigan I will take up hunting and grow a pair of unruly mutton chops, but the sentiment is there. At one point in the movie, when Tom is eating a box of stale donuts and wearing a bunny suit instead of getting dressed, Matt grabbed my hand and didn’t let go. I know we both were thinking the same thing, Dear God don’t let this be what happens to us.

And maybe it will be. When Matt decided to go to Michigan for five years, he made a conscious decision to choose his career over our relationship. Matt never consulted me on whether or not I’d be happy living in Michigan for four years because he already knew this was a dream of his he had to pursue, and that it was up to me to make the decision of whether or not I wanted to come with him. If it came down to it and it was between Matt’s career and our relationship, I have no doubt that he would choose the former.  But I don’t think that is necessarily bad. The truth is, if Matt was the kind of man who waited around for me while I graduated and didn’t have his own agenda in life, I don’t think I’d like him. I like his drive, his ambition. And if I was the kind of woman who followed him blindly into the wind blown frozen tundra of the Midwest without any doubts, I don’t think he’d like me very much either. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still think we are the best couple in the world, the way we dance silently to my roommate’s alarm clock every morning, how we meticulously plan the ingredients to our Sunday morning frittatas together, or the way he holds my hand over the gear shift when he drives.

When Violet tells Tom she has been accepted to Michigan and wants to go, but she’s scared he will resent her for making him move there, he says “Well if I made us stay here, you’d resent me. And I’d rather be resentful than resented.” But I don’t want to be either. I want Matt to be happy in what he does and I want me to be happy in what I do more than I want to be in our relationship. Because despite what I have been taught by romantic comedies my entire life, happiness in your own success has to come before love. This is, at its heart, the message we get from The Five Year Engagement. It’s just unfortunate that Matt and I happened to fall in love before either of us had the chance to really be successful, but it’s not necessarily a catastrophe. We don’t know how our lives will turn out. In the movie, after breaking up for a year, Tom and Violet eventually get do get married after Tom has started his own food truck, which can easily drive to and run in Michigan. It’s not that easy for the rest of us, but we make compromises. We create our own metaphorical food trucks and suck it up, live in metaphorical (or actual) Michigan and find a way to bring ourselves and our aspirations with us. At least, I hope. In the meantime, I can’t wait to eat at Zingerman’s.