Those leaving Boston, or who have left Boston. Do You Have any Regrets? Where did you move? (Arlington: home, luxury)

[Lcstyle]

Originally Posted by adambos

I wanted to clarify some points that were brought up in regards to my "suburban interdenpendancy" comment and why this phenonmenon didnt agree with me.

First of all, when I lived in Boston I lived in the back bay, didnt own a car, worked in the financial district and took the T to get around. I utilized zipcar when I needed to leave the city which for me occured about once a month, sometimes twice.

ps. very boston comment to see sophistication and translate "phony/condescending." Not at all. Not at all.

Didn't feel like it was necessary to quote your entire post: Thank you for this post. This is by far one of the most well thought out and clearly written posts on this thread.

I think you nailed it my friend.

Truly enjoyed reading it.

In reference to your comment about there being :

"a tremendous amount of pressure to settle down . You don't live my lifestyle at 30. You move to Newton, maybe Natick or Framingham, buy a house and call it a day."

This statement absolutely blew me away, as someone who just recently moved up here (to Boston)(as I'm sure your well aware).

My whole life in Miami was misspent on meaningless, superficial relationships. I suppose one does get addicted to a sort of commitment free lifestyle.

The fact that there is pressure here to do just that "settle down" I don't think is such a bad thing, at least not for myself anyways, not at this point in life.

Then again, there are those of us who are single who find ourselves feeling the inescapable feeling that time is tick, tick, ticking; and somehow feel that if we don't get married/reproduce etc., that we'd then be in some ephemeral way left behind.

Erased forever I suppose as the equivalent of genetic blanks in what is the litany of human biological and genetic evolution.

I suppose the pressure you describe is that same pressure. Can you elaborate on why you feel there was so much pressure to settle down? Was it a sort of self applied pressure or an external pressure, and why?

I would otherwise surmise that EVERYONE feels this pressure, as, biologically, isn't our natural drive to reproduce a 100% human drive (i.e. doesn't everyone feel this way?)

Also, I've noticed that those who do get married and then end up divorced with children share the same opinion universally: their interminable drudgery always inevitably leads to the same advice :

"Don't get married", "Don't get married', and "Don't get married'.

I imagine that long after the end of human civilization their words will still echo in desolate cities and what is left of the high rise condo buildings.

Didn't mean to hijack the thread and I'm sorry if I went off on a tangent, but even though I have digressed and touched on tangents:
I think we can draw a clear line between the "feeling" of a city such as Boston versus Miami versus NY (where you currently reside) with the description of pressures and lifestyle's you have given us in your most recent and eloquent post.

[clevedark]

I hear that if you make it through your thirties having escaped marriage, your 40s and afterwards are much easier to accept single. The embarrassment and humiliation of lack of a "permanent" partner kind of ebb and you start to enjoy your own company again.

This spoken by someone who got married by the unspoken expiration date of 30 of a young woman in Manhattan (15 years ago). The other unspoken rule was that you married someone who made 100K or more. No joke. Shameful but true, but somehow fair that there were absolute numbers each sex had to adhere to.... Not sure what things are like today.

[holden125]

Originally Posted by clevedark

This spoken by someone who got married by the unspoken expiration date of 30 of a young woman in Manhattan (15 years ago). The other unspoken rule was that you married someone who made 100K or more. No joke. Shameful but true, but somehow fair that there were absolute numbers each sex had to adhere to.... Not sure what things are like today.

I would like to think that we've gotten past both strictures, but I'd venture that both numbers have simply been inched upward in today's Manhattan.

I remember that back in 1999 some young women I'd gone to college with were talking about someone's boyfriend and saying that he was "nice enough" but only made "about 85" and "that's not good." This guy was all of 24, mind you. He had some room for the income to go up. At the time I was working for a nonprofit and making under 30K. I basically did not exist to them.

In a roundabout way I got my revenge. Ten years later, I've got a good income and they are 34 and still single, which kind of serves them right for eliminating 95% of the population from their sights when they were neither high-earning nor all that interesting, attractive, or kind.

[clevedark]

I heard an old friend of mine finally got married at the ripe old age of 45 and moved out of Manhattan to CT! I am in shock. I truly believed it would never happen.

Yes, women do indeed measure a man's income--a smart woman, though, does it with an eye to the future, which the dumb beyotches you describe hadn't figured out yet. Eh, good for you that you didn't wind up with one of them.

[CaseyB]

I'm afraid that this thread has gotten seriously off topic when we are discussing the dating habits of
Manhattenites, No?

[adambos]

What I meant by my comments on Boston's pressure to "settle down" was more aimed at describing the area's desire to push you into a suburb track. In 6 years, all of my friends eventually moved to the suburbs, siting various reasons. I was left clinging to an urban lifestlye alone. It is unusual a married man over 30 choses to live an urban lifestlye in Boston. It's possible, but you will find yourself the minority. I am married, for the record, and my wife and I got sick of the "you know you could have a huge house and car in Natick for what you pay in the back bay for your one bed" routine. I believe it's a lifestlye choice. Moving to the burbs isn't a part of growing up, or maturing necessarily. I spent several years waiting for this to happen, only to realize that for some, it just might not ever materialize. So, I left. On to a city that embraces....anyone.

[clevedark]

Boston loves and is very proud of its suburbs. Stores and restaurants have locations in Boston as well as suburbs, for example, which was a shocking concept to me when I moved here. NYC despises its suburbs. If a NYC restaurant opened a location in the suburbs, the city location would never recover from the stigma and would close quickly.

Once you move out of NYC into the burbs you are persona non grata, while in Boston you still count as a human being.

So, you just can't win is what I'm saying.

[Jblue385]

Originally Posted by bostonian08

that's the big difference between miami(ans) and boston(ians). People in miami love freely openly passionately uncautiously and wrecklessly. With bostonians it's a long long courtship before bostonians open up. Boston will love you back and take way better care of you than miami ever would, but not on the first date and not on the second. Boston doesn't want a passle of hot lovers, boston want you to marry her in one of her big cathedrals.

Boston is more proper, safer, stately, staid and boring.
Miami is more passionate, wreckless, escandalous, and fun.

Once you've mastered driving in bos, you can drive anywhere.

i love that analogy

[kawaw]

I think Baltimore is terribly unsafe city...I would NEVER live there. There is only the Harbor area and that is about it. The city has the toughest time getting a police force together!

[UrbanQuest]

I do agree with the sentiment about Boston being much more integrated with it's suburbs than NYC.

Boston is much like Seattle, Philadelphia, Portland OR, Minneapolis and even Chicago. New York City is so huge with it's 8+ million people that the suburbs really aren't really as important or well regarded. I live in the suburbs in Central New Jersey and we feel like New York doesn't belong to us. It feels like New York belongs to the world and that the world is it's suburbs (or at least the entire Northeast corridor). I love being part of the New York Metro but I am having a hard time feeling connected to the rest of it.

If people ask me where I'm from, I say "Central New Jersey". So that's it, they usually have zero idea this a a huge suburban area for New York City. New York needs to come up with a label for the entire metro area to link us together. Chicagoland or Bay Area come to mind as examples. Probably being a multiple state metropolitan area makes this kind of difficult to do. Here's some examples I've thought about;

The Empire
The Empire Region
Metropolis

Trips into the city feel it's like traveling to some kine of urban fortress.

Hopefully the trans-hudson tunnel helps things...