Thinking about Jobs and Love

An Opinion Piece by Laura

There are a lot of things you can say about jobs that could easily apply to romantic relationships.  People always talk about how quitting their job feels like dumping someone, or how job interviews are like dates without the free dinner.  In case you’re curious, I am currently unemployed, so I’ve been thinking a lot about working in general.  When you’re applying for just about anything that sounds remotely plausible (”Well I never thought about factory work before, but it is ten blocks away…”) you start to think about the world in a new and terrifying way.  Anything and anyone is a potential source of income, and the things you imagine yourself doing as you comb through craigslist end up spanning a pretty wide section of society.

I keep a list of all the jobs I’ve ever had.  I include volunteering things and internships, and yes, I include babysitting, but I did it for a long time for good money, so why the hell not.  But as I add to the list, it feels more and more like I’m listing sexual conquests.  And, in a way, they are.  I enter a job, I get to know everyone, I get into a rhythm that matches theirs, and soon the period of infatuation ends and I find myself feeling the three month itch.  It’s eerily like my relationships in college.

Also, I feel like I don’t want my job list to get too much longer (my current number is 22, by the way).  In fact, most people’s ideal number of jobs they’d like to have in their life probably hovers around their ideal number of sex partners.  Therefore, I’m guessing that many people shuffle around one because they’re stagnating in the other, and vice versa.  They’re monogamous, so they act out their fears of commitment in job relationships — never satisfied, always quitting after the honeymoon stage ends.  Or they’re of the school of thought that one should remain loyally in long term, stable jobs, but are banging a different chick/dude every week.  Which is healthier, I wonder?  Both forms of monogamy deprive you of life experience, but both give you enormous perks as well.

Looking over my list of jobs, I feel a sense of immense pride and accomplishment, like I’ll be one of those interesting old people one day with a peg-leg and tattoos of all these dudes’ names, and I’ll be working at a bar in a harbor somewhere.  I’ll have a million stories to tell about my crazy, globe-spanning adventures, and have lived a dozen lifetimes by most people’s standards.  I figure the way people get there is by “going with the flow,” to use a craptacular expression.  But it’s hard to balance that with the basic needs of living at a civilized level, money-wise and everything else-wise.  But I’m monogamous, romantically, and I like it that way.  Does that make me a hypocrite?

What do you think?  (You can post a comment below)