In Five Years by Rebecca Serle
I related to the main character of this book so well, that reading this hit me like a cold hard slap in the face. I read this book in one day and I think I was supposed to read it when I did. Which I find funny because initially my instincts said I wouldn’t like it. Within the first couple pages I realized the main character Dannie is very much me. She is the type of person who plans out her life to a fault. Her and I know what we want and you bet we already have a plan to get exactly whatever that is.
“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
“I inhale, and then give him my airtight answer. Not just because I’ve practiced, which I have. But because it’s true. I know. I always have.”
The book begins with Dannie both landing her dream job and being proposed to by her boyfriend, David, all according to plan. On paper her relationship with David seems perfect, they’re both career focused and have the same life plan. On the night of the proposal, Dannie falls asleep and has a very real dream of herself five years in the future. She sees herself living a very different life with a man that isn’t David. Dannie wakes up and chalks the occurrence up to a bad dream. Something about the dream felt extremely real to her.
Flash forward five years from the proposal; Dannie and David are both killing it at their respective jobs but they haven’t found the time to set a wedding date. All these years later the excitement stalled and they’ve been unable to find the right time in their busy schedules. One night Dannie meets her best friend Bella and her new beau. Bella’s new boyfriend is the man from her dream almost five years earlier. What unfolds from that point on in the book wasn’t quite what I was expecting and I always appreciate when an ending develops in a way that isn’t obvious. It’s a good book that’s very much about the perception of relationships. Whether that be the relationships we have with our significant others or our best friends.
Like Dannie I’ve been in a relationship with someone whose goals were so aligned with mine that it started out feeling like as long as we remained together our plans would pan out. The most recent conversation I’ve had with Matt was two days ago and it ended with me asking him if he had told anyone about us. He said he told his parents and that’s all.
“What did you tell them?”
“That we’re on a break. You’re spending the summer in New York and our future is uncertain.”
Now that we’ve come to this point, it feels like this has been building for a while. It’s one of those things where you’re not far enough removed from your own life so you don’t really see what is unfolding as it’s happening to you.
When Matt and I started dating we fell hard and fast. Like Dannie and David, we learned early on that we had an understanding about what we both wanted out of life. We both acknowledged this was going to be the beginning of us building our lives, together. We wanted important jobs, a big family, a house with a yard large enough to throw a football (Matt’s thing), a front porch with a swing (my thing), and to happily grow old with those we love around us. He didn’t have a list, an agenda for life like me, but we knew together we could do it, we could have everything.
“We want so many of the same things, we have the same plans. It fits, you know?”
“I’ve been buried in work. The job is great, and impossible. Not hard, impossible. There is a weeks worth of work in every day. I’m always behind. I see David for five minutes, maybe, every day when one of us wakes up sleepily to greet the other. At least we’re on the same schedule. We’re both working hard toward a life we want, and will have. Thank god we understand each other.”
“David is right for me, and the things I want for my life.”
In the past 2.5 years it never occurred to me that just because Matt was the ideal person I could see having the life I thought I wanted with, that I might being trying to force something that wasn’t right for us. This book helped me see that. Two weeks before our official break, it was hard not to see the writing on the wall. I remember both of us sitting on his bed, and me crying about how our relationship was “supposed to work” and him frustratedly agreeing, “I know”.
For the amount of time I’ve been in Boston, I can’t say I’ve had an abundance of fun. None of that in anyway is a reflection of Matt. I’ve been busy trying very hard and futilely it seems, to build a life here. I’ve stayed late at work, gone in early, joined book clubs, tried taking dance classes, participated in run clubs, played in social and competitive sport leagues, and volunteered my time for kids charities, all while ‘studying’ for the CPA Exam. Matt has been by my side through it all, offering his friends to me as mine.
Unfortunately for him, I’ve been in Boston the same amount of time we’ve been dating. Something had to give. I was burnt out and I’d already tried everything else. I was starting to think that I just wasn’t the sort of person who could move to a city where I didn’t know anyone and end up coming out on top and end up having it all. I was beginning to become convinced and he was too, that Boston wasn’t a place that I could ever be happy.
I’m sending this book to my friend Caleigh. Because like Dannie has Bella, I too have a friend that has always helped me want more for myself. In the book, Bella is Dannie’s best friend. The two couldn’t be more different from each other but they are like family. Bella knows that David isn’t the right person for Dannie long before Dannie does. Their friendship reminds me of looking into a personal mirror that has known you your whole life. You stand in front of it and it envelopes you; seeing you and knowing everything about you, even the ways you’ve managed to grow over time but still be the same. Cale is incredibly insightful. She has a way of observing those around her and seeing their emotions, as if they were naked in front of a mirror with their thoughts bare. Sometimes what seems so obvious to her isn’t to me and much like the effect of reading this book sometimes the insight she gives can be a slap in the face.
When I started this review two weeks ago Matt and I were on a break and a few days after I finished reading we had broken up. When I told Cale that we broke up she had said she was proud of me. Not because she didn’t like Matt but because she knew I wasn’t happy and she’s the kind of friend who always wants more for you. Throughout our friendship she has always been the first to remind me that I don’t HAVE to do anything. When we were roommates in college she always said, “nobody cares if you don’t go to the party Sam, nobody cares”. In other words, it’s your life nobody cares, do what you want. In a conversation leading up to the break up she iterated to me that not every relationship has to end in marriage and that it doesn’t mean I don’t love Matt. The fact that a relationship ends doesn’t define if it was a good or bad relationship. Cale has always been the person to challenge my ideals and push me towards the edge of my comfort zone. Even when I’m not willing. I think she has always wanted to free me from the constraints of my own rules, to accept that there can be more than what my plans for my life lay out and I love her for that. Many things in the book that Bella said to Dannie, I could see her saying similar things to me.
“Nothing. You’re just so… ‘sacrifice to achieve your dreams.’ Who talks like that?”
“Ah. Right. Happiness. The enemy of all suffering.”
“I wish you had more fun.”
Since Matt and I have broken up I’ve made some changes in my life. I’ve told my landlord in Boston I’m moving out this upcoming September. I’ve decided to move into an apartment with some friends in a part of the city I want to be in.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare Dannie and David’s relationship to Matt and mine’s. I’m not sure if their relationship was one of convenience or if at some point they were “in love” with each other. I know we had the kind of love Bella describes she wishes for Dannie to have. We still care about each other but somehow we lost our footing in a way we can’t get back. And that’s okay.
“I think you’re capable of this kind of love, too. And I don’t think you have it.”
“You mistake love. You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn’t. It’s the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn’t require a future.”
My favorite tattoo of Cale’s is the quote “if the accident will”, after she got it I had asked her what it meant and she said ‘exactly what it says’. She explained to me that it’s about accepting that some things are out of our control. Dannie and I are still working on accepting that.
I read this book and wrote this review thinking of Matt the whole time and whether we were making the right move by taking a break, shifting the plan. But now that I’ve finished writing I can’t help but feel like I missed the point of the book. It was really a story about Bella and Dannie and their friendship.
I don’t think Cale needs to read this book to gain the insight I have, I’m sure she already has it. But she’s lost some friends and people close to her recently and I’m hoping she can find some solace in Bella and Dannie’s story.
My favorite quote from the book:
“I go to the window, right by the bed. I look out on that view. The water, the bridge, the lights. Manhattan on the water, shimmering like a promise. I think about how much life the city holds, how much heartbreak, how much love. I think about everything I have lost there, this fading island before me.”