The evils of hope

 For all of my life, hope has been touted as a positive thing. It's peppered all over religious teachings, scriptures, and quotes that are supposed to make you feel good. No matter how bad things are you can hope for something better. 

And hope in the context of my faith, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, has an even stronger connotation. Hope isn't about something that could happen someday, it isn't a "wouldn't it be nice?" kind of concept. Hope is believing in something that will happen, having faith in something to come and truly believing it will come to pass. 

So it may seem strange that in the last year of  my life, hope has felt less and less like something positive and in fact has felt like a strangling and depression concept. 

Those of you reading those know that I'm single, and some of you know that I haven't had much experience with relationships (2 boyfriends IF you squint and tilt your head). In addition to that, some of you know that I have been boy-crazy from a very young age. One of my sister's favorite stories about me is from a party I had when I was still in elementary school and she overheard me say to my friends "Okay, what should we talk about, boys or clothes?" If we're being honest one of my first memories is watching my mom teach piano lessons to some cute boys down the street. I would peek out from my bedroom while she taught them in the front room. 

My level of desire for dating, relationships, boyfriends, and all that comes with that has been a strong presence in my life from as far back as I can remember. I am, and this may come as a surprise to some of you, a huge daydreamer and I am constantly building scenarios of how I would meet, date, marry, and otherwise just be loved by my current crush/crushes (because for most of my life there were usually somewhere between 3-7 boys I was crushing on). So the fact that in all of that wishing and hoping and dreaming I have only really had 1 relationship (like I said, the 2nd one only counts if you squint) seems a bit like a joke on me by the universe. 

In all of that time, not getting kissed until I was 25, not getting asked to dances in high school, being asked on very few dates in college, I still had hope. I still expected (remember, I operate in that level of hope) to definitely get married. Not just because that's the narrative that was fed to me in my cultural landscape but also because I wanted it. I have always genuinely wanted to get married and I still want that. 

However, about a year ago, having that hope felt more and more like a heavy chain around my neck. I could no longer listen to the comments of "Just wait until you find him" or "Oh you'll definitely get married" or "You have plenty of time don't worry!" Especially when they were in response to me saying something benign in which I wasn't actually expressing sadness about not being married. I was just mentioning my singleness matter-of-factly and people who aren't in that situation often don't know how to respond and resort to calming phrases that once again rely on that doctinal hope that surely it will happen. 

But here's the thing - they don't know that it will happen. I can't expect it to happen. It might not and I needed to stop living my life as if it was just around the corner. The expectation made every bad date worse, made every terrible interaction on a dating app more frustrating, made every man that didn't show interest in me more devastating. The hope highlighted the failures. 

Now for the context of this experience I need to make something clear. The argument often used in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that 'single people will be married in the next life' does nothing for me. I'm not worried about being married in the eternities, my loneliness is impacting me NOW. I'm not worried about my eternal life, I'm worried about my current life because that's the one I'm living with right now. 

So I made a choice about a year ago to stop hoping for marriage and to begin to assume that it wouldn't happen for me and I cannot begin to tell you how freeing that was. I no longer felt guilty about the bad dates, or devastated about the men that didn't flirt with me, and I deleted the stupid dating apps. The way I phrased it was that I had "given up hope" but I didn't know how to word that to people without them thinking I was in a deep dark hole of depression. How could I help them understand that giving up hope was actually the most freeing thing I'd done in years? So I largely kep it to myself. 

It wasn't until recently when I started to hear more about the story of Pandora's box that I started to really understand what I had done to the concept of hope. Pandora's box held all the evils of the world and when the box was opened they were released. The one thing left in the box was hope. It wasn't until recently that I started to read about interpretations of hope also being considered an evil - otherwise why else would it be in the box with all the other evils? And perhaps if hope had been released into the world it would be considered an evil, but as long as it remained contained in the box, separate from and away from the world, it wasn't one. Now I'm far from a scholar on Greek mythology and am in no way qualified to interpret this story critically, but finally I had encountered a narrative that acknowledged that hope was not universally good and peaceful and, for lack of a better word, hopeful. 

Hope contains great possibilities, but constantly being faced with possibilities that are not realities can be very difficult. Having hope constantly in front of you can be exhausting and demoralizing. While there have been times in my life where keeping that hope front and center in my life is the only way I could function, there are other times when hope just feels like its mocking me. 

So for now I'm keeping hope in the box, tucked away. I can't carry it anymore, I can't let it be a part of my life or my daily existence because it just isn't serving me.