B r a i n C l e a r

Sorting through life one thought at a time

Tag: sweden

  • Does the Bull Fit in the Barn?

    A friend of mine has a daughter heading into her final year of college. This daughter has had exactly one boyfriend the whole time. They got together a few months into freshman year and never really stopped.

    We got to talking about what comes next. The daughter wants a gap year before med school, and she and her boyfriend have floated the idea of getting a place together. He’s staying in school. No gap year for him.

    My friend wasn’t thrilled about the living-together part. Her worry: if her daughter moves in, he’ll have less reason to ever propose.

    I’ve been in the U.S. for years now. Long enough that I don’t expect much to catch me off guard anymore.

    And yet.

    There’s a specific flavor of surprise that only American dating logic can produce in me, and this was one of those moments.

    Come again?

    Because to me, the reasoning runs completely in reverse.

    It reminded me of that phrase people trot out here:

    “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

    I have thoughts.

    Starting with this one: since when is he the customer and she the livestock?

    And why does the saying assume she’s just standing at the fence, waiting to be deemed purchase-worthy?

    Where I’m from, nobody’s buying anybody.

    Both people are choosing.

    If we’re going to keep the barnyard metaphor alive, maybe it should go like this instead:

    Why would a woman commit to a bull before finding out if he even fits in her barn? 😂

    Moving in together was never supposed to be a bargaining chip, something she trades for the promise of a ring down the line.

    It’s just how two people figure out if a life together actually works.

    And honestly, this goes well beyond the roommate question.

    The longer I sat with it, the clearer it got. Sweden and the U.S. aren’t just doing dating differently. They’re starting from different premises entirely.

    To be fair, Sweden isn’t game-free. Some version of “don’t seem too eager” is probably universal. It’s been a while since I was in the dating pool back home, but I’d guess the instinct to play it cool hasn’t gone anywhere.

    Women in particular seem tasked with the same balancing act everywhere: be interested, just not too obviously.

    Sweden included. We’re not exempt.

    But the actual mechanics of dating feel less scripted there.

    Two people meet. They start spending time together. They sleep together.

    Or, honestly, they might sleep together first and the “spending time together” part follows. 😂

    Sequence aside, here’s the real difference: nobody typically has to schedule a sit-down conversation titled “So, are we exclusive?”

    Once you’re seeing someone regularly, exclusivity is the default setting. If that’s not the case if someone else is in the picture too that’s the part you actually have to bring up.

    I’ve got a much younger sister, which means I’ve watched Swedish dating unfold long after I aged out of it myself. What I’ve noticed is that when someone isn’t looking for anything serious, or wants things kept casual, that gets said out loud early, precisely so nobody ends up confused or hurt.

    The American version often runs the opposite direction.

    You can be dating, sleeping together, spending every weekend together, and somehow still need a formal check-in about whether either of you is doing that with anyone else, too.

    My Swedish nervous system finds this baffling.

    Then there’s the friends-and-family piece. In Sweden, meeting someone’s friend group isn’t loaded with meaning. Meeting the parents isn’t a milestone with a flashing sign over it either.

    Sometimes you’re just around, long before anyone would call you the girlfriend or the boyfriend.

    And that same casualness carries all the way through, right up to the question that kicked off this whole train of thought: marriage.

    The old cow saying isn’t really about timing. It’s about the fear of never getting picked at all about being the one left standing at the fence while somebody else decides if you’re worth the commitment.

    I’m sure that fear exists in Sweden too. People are people, and relationships can make all of us insecure. But the idea that a woman shouldn’t move in with a man because it might make him less likely to marry her feels very foreign to Swedish culture.

    Living together before marriage is simply the norm. The idea of proposing to someone you haven’t lived with first would feel almost backwards.

    Marrying someone means formalizing two lives you already know fit together, not making a leap of faith and hoping the daily reality works out.

    Sambo, the word for living together, isn’t a stepping stone toward the “real” thing. For a lot of couples, it basically is the real thing, just without the paperwork. People buy houses, have children, build entire lives together and may never get married at all. Nobody is necessarily waiting for the next step.

    And even engagement looks a little different.

    In Sweden, when you get engaged, both people wear a ring.

    Traditionally, the rings are engraved with your partner’s name and the date you got engaged, signaling the commitment you’ve both made to the relationship.

    When you get married, the woman gets a second ring. The man often keeps the same ring it’s taken off for the wedding ceremony and put back on, with the wedding date added to the engraving.

    Sweden has definitely become more Americanized when it comes to engagements. There are more diamond rings and elaborate proposals now than I remember growing up.

    But the man still gets a ring.

    And usually, even if the proposal itself is a surprise, the idea of getting married isn’t.

    They’ve talked about it along the way. Both people already know this is where the relationship is heading.

    The proposal might be a surprise.

    The answer probably isn’t.

    And maybe that’s why another American question has always sounded a little strange to me:

    “Why hasn’t he married her?”

    Not why haven’t they gotten married?

    Why hasn’t he married her?

    It’s such a tiny difference in language, but there’s an entire relationship script hiding inside it.

    He’s the one deciding.

    She’s the one waiting.

    He’s choosing.

    She’s hoping to be chosen.

    And suddenly we’re back at the cow.

    Of course Swedish women want love and commitment. Of course people wonder where relationships are going. And yes, we can make ourselves completely insane over another human being too.

    We’re Swedish. We’re not some emotionally evolved Nordic species. 😂

    But underneath all of it is an assumption I grew up with that I never really thought about until I lived somewhere else:

    Both people are choosing.

    Maybe that’s the part that gets lost in the cow-and-milk logic.

    A woman isn’t giving a man the benefits of a relationship and hoping he’ll eventually reward her with marriage.

    They’re both trying the relationship on for size.

    They’re both deciding.

    They’re both committing.

    And if they get engaged, they’re both wearing the ring.

    Forget about buying the cow and getting the milk for free.

    I’m still stuck on a more important question:

    Does the bull even fit in the barn? 😂

  • My friend Sussi is a DJ.

    Not in the she likes music and occasionally DJs at a friend’s party kind of way.

    She’s Acid Sussi.

    She’s been playing clubs and events around Stockholm for years. She’s played Boiler Room. She and her longtime partner have a DJ duo called Solid Sliders, and they just put out a track called “Get Ill.” And more than a decade after she started doing it, she’s still out playing on weekends.

    I find this ridiculously cool.

    But here’s the thing.

    I knew her when she just had the records.

    So. Many. Records.

    We met in school, although I don’t remember exactly when we went from knowing each other to really becoming friends. What I do remember is that music was always a huge part of who she was. She loved vinyl and, for as long as I can remember, wanted to DJ.

    And then she actually did it.

    There’s something really wonderful about watching someone you love actually do the thing they talked about doing when they were young.

    Sussi and I have a lot of history long walks that turned into long talks, all-nighters spent talking and dancing in equal measure, raves we found our way to together. There are entire pieces of my younger life that have Sussi in them.

    And after all these years, she’s still one of the people I can talk to about absolutely anything.

    And when I say talk, I mean talk.

    We can take one subject and disappear into it for hours. We don’t just exchange opinions and move on we dig, we question, we turn a thing over until we’ve looked at it from every angle. One thought leads to another and suddenly we’ve spent hours on something most people would have wrapped up in twenty minutes.

    She also knows me well enough not to simply tell me what I want to hear. If I come to her with something difficult, I’ll get the love. I’ll get the understanding. And then, somewhere in there, she’ll ask a question that makes me stop and reconsider the whole thing.

    And now the friend who has always been willing to dig a little deeper has officially become a therapist.

    This year, Sussi graduated from Karolinska Institutet and is beginning an entirely new chapter in her life.

    She’s had quite a few chapters already. She’s been a hairstylist. She studied psychology. She became a UX designer. She became Acid Sussi.

    And now she’s a therapist.

    Who’s still a DJ.

    Of course she is.

    What I love about her story is that she never seems to have discarded an old version of herself to make room for the next one. The psychology student didn’t replace the girl with the records. The UX designer didn’t replace the DJ. And becoming a therapist isn’t going to make Acid Sussi disappear.

    She just kept adding chapters.

    And the more I think about it, the more I suspect neither the DJ nor the therapist is really a new version of her. They were both there all along the girl surrounded by records who wanted to make people dance, and the friend who could spend hours talking about life, people, and why we do the things we do.

    I remember the records.

    I remember the long conversations.

    I remember the dancing.

    And now I get to watch one of my closest friends begin yet another chapter of her life.

    I’m incredibly proud of the therapist she’s becoming.

    I love the friend she’s always been. ❤️

    And I still think it’s pretty damn cool that she became the DJ.

  • The Milk, the Bees, and Time

    My mom had me when she was very young, so I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandparents. They lived in the countryside about 90 minutes from Stockholm, where they grew their own vegetables, and my grandfather was a beekeeper. He loved his bees and believed just about everything could be cured with a bee sting and honey.

    Looking back, everything seemed so green and beautiful.

    Just down the road was a farmer where I would go to help out, mostly because I wanted to be around the animals. That’s also where we bought our milk. If it was cold outside, Grandma would leave the milk on the porch. Otherwise, it went into the refrigerator, where the cream would slowly rise to the top.

    Every morning she would take a spoon, carefully skim off the thick layer of cream, and pour it into a glass. Then she’d look at me with a smile and say, “Now this is real skim milk.”

    The joke, of course, was that I insisted I wanted the skim milk from the grocery store.

    There were only two buses a day from their little village into the nearby town of Avesta. Sometimes we’d take the bus to swim at the indoor public pool or simply wander through the shops. When you’re a child, everything feels enormous. The town felt like a city, and even an ordinary bus ride felt like an adventure.

    My grandfather came to Sweden from Poland after the Second World War. He met my grandmother, fell in love, and stayed. Even on the day he died, he still spoke Swedish with his own unmistakable accent. He was a wonderful grandfather to me, although I later learned there were other sides to him. My mother, aunts, and uncle have shared stories of how hard he could be on the family. It’s funny how we can know the same person so differently.

    Memory has a way of opening one door after another. One thought leads to the next until you’re wandering through places you haven’t visited in years.

    One thing I remember my grandmother saying was, “The older you get, the faster the years go.”

    At the time, I thought, Right…

    Years felt endless. School semesters seemed to last forever, and summer vacations felt like entire lifetimes.

    The funny thing is, I don’t ever remember my grandmother being young. Looking back, I realize she was only 42 when I was born. Forty-two. Younger than many grandparents are today. But in my mind, she has always been wearing her house dress, with her short curly hair, standing in the kitchen, always baking or cooking something.

    She was one of those people who always seemed to be in good spirits. Looking back, I know she had lived through difficult times, yet she never lost her sense of humor. Even in the final years of her life, she was quick with a joke and somehow managed to make the people around her laugh.

    Now, years later, I finally understand what she meant.

    The future has a way of arriving quietly. Things you once thought were impossibly far away are suddenly here, and something that happened a year ago can feel like yesterday.

    Maybe time doesn’t actually speed up.

    Maybe we just get better at noticing how precious it is.

    That’s also why I choose to write the way I do.

    Life has never been free of heartache or worry. Like everyone else, I’ve had moments that changed me, and there are stories I may tell one day. But there is already plenty in this world competing for our attention: headlines, arguments, and reasons to feel overwhelmed.

    This little corner of the internet isn’t meant to ignore those things. It’s meant to make room for something else.

    I want to remember the taste of fresh milk from my grandparents’ farm, my grandmother’s laugh, the adventures that felt enormous when I was little, the dogs sleeping at my feet, and all the ordinary moments that quietly become the memories we treasure.

    Because when I look back on my own life, it’s the ordinary moments that have stayed with me the longest.

    And I’ve noticed something else. Many of the stories that are hilarious today were anything but funny when they happened. At the time I worried, cried, overthought, or wondered how I’d ever get through them. Twenty years later, they’re the stories that make everyone around the dinner table laugh.

    I wouldn’t choose to relive them, but I have learned that time has a remarkable sense of humor.

    That’s why I write about the lighter side of life. Not because difficult things don’t happen, but because eventually, if we’re lucky, some of them become stories instead of burdens.

  • When Efficiency Met the South

    I didn’t just move from Sweden to the United States. I moved from Stockholm to St. Marys, Georgia. Looking back, I’m not sure I could have picked two places that were more different.

    I thought the biggest adjustment would be speaking English every day. It wasn’t. It was discovering that I had landed in a place with a completely different rhythm.

    In Stockholm, the checkout line is all about efficiency. You pack your own groceries, and you’d better be done by the time the cashier has scanned the last item, or the customer behind you might start getting impatient. There isn’t much small talk because everyone has somewhere to be, and the goal is to get through the line as quickly as possible.

    St. Marys was a completely different experience. The cashier knew the customer in front of me, and they chatted about family, church, the weather, someone’s tomato plants, pretty much anything and everything. Meanwhile, another employee packed the groceries while I stood there wondering if we’d ever get to the part where I actually paid. I remember thinking, “Are we still checking out?”

    At the time, it drove me crazy. I wasn’t used to it, and if I’m being honest, I just wanted to grab my groceries and go. But somewhere between Stockholm and St. Marys, my perspective changed.

    Today, I smile when I think about those checkout lines. I’ve realized they were never just about buying groceries. They were about taking a few minutes to acknowledge another person, catch up with a neighbor, or simply make someone’s day a little brighter.

    Somewhere between Stockholm and St. Marys, I learned that not everything has to be efficient. Sometimes, slowing down long enough to connect with another person is the whole point.

    Although I still silently hoped nobody brought up tomato plants when I was buying ice cream.

  • Patriotism as an Expat

    Thinking about patriotism today on Americas birthday.

    Living here has made me think about it in a way I never really did growing up in Sweden.

    If Sweden whispers, “We’re proud to be Swedish,” America says it with a microphone. Sometimes I joke that Americans want to make sure you never forget what country you’re in and all those flags certainly help.

    The funny thing is, I don’t think Swedes are any less proud of their country.

    We just seem to show it differently.

    I’ve often wondered if part of the reason is that loud national pride can feel uncomfortable. There seems to be a quiet awareness that celebrating “us” too loudly can start to sound like excluding “them.”

    You see it when Sweden plays in the World Cup or the Olympics. Suddenly the blue and yellow flags appear, everyone is glued to the TV, and strangers celebrate together.

    One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that many Swedes seem to become even more patriotic after moving abroad.

    When you grow up in Sweden, Midsummer, Lucia, crayfish parties, cinnamon buns, and those long summer nights when the sun barely sets and you’re complaining because you need blackout curtains just to sleep, are simply everyday life.

    You don’t think much about them because they’ve always been there.

    Then you move away.

    Suddenly you’re explaining Lucia to your American friends. You’re driving across town to find Swedish candy. You get excited when you hear someone speaking Swedish in the grocery store. You celebrate Swedish traditions with a handful of other Swedes, trying to recreate a little piece of home.

    Even IKEA becomes more than a furniture store, and H&M becomes more than a clothing store. They become little pieces of home.

    It’s interesting how distance can make you appreciate things you once took for granted.

    Maybe that’s one of the unexpected gifts of living abroad you don’t just discover a new country, you rediscover your own. 🇸🇪

  • Midsummer in Sweden

    This week, I was talking to my mom as she was preparing for Midsummer, one of the biggest celebrations of the year in Sweden, the longest day of the year.🇸🇪

    She told me about her trip to the grocery store and how, this year, she wasn’t rolling her own meatballs. That may not sound like a big deal, but rolling meatballs for a large family gathering can be quite a chore.

    There would be new potatoes with dill, meatballs, pickled herring, strawberries, and of course some kind of dessert.

    There would undoubtedly be alcohol as well. After all, it wouldn’t be a Swedish Midsummer without it.

    As she talked through her plans, I could almost picture it all. The grocery stores crowded with people buying the same ingredients they buy every year, and especially Systembolaget, the only place in Sweden where you can buy alcohol.

    Since my mom and her boyfriend were heading up to their summer house in Dalarna, and my sister would be driving up with her little boy, I reminded my mom that she should take him to one of the larger Midsummer celebrations where children dance around the midsummer pole.

    As I said it, I could vividly picture it: an accordion and fiddles playing in the background, someone standing with a microphone leading the festivities, and children hopping around the pole pretending to be frogs during Små Grodorna(The Little Frogs).

    That conversation made me think about how Midsummer has changed throughout my life while somehow remaining exactly the same.

    As a child, Midsummer was about cousins, lakes, and dancing around the midsummer pole. I spent many summers in Dalarna, where my grandparents lived. My aunt, uncle, and cousins would drive up, and we would spend hours playing, exploring, and enjoying the freedom that comes with long summer days.

    As a teenager, Midsummer became something entirely different. It was about friends, freedom, staying out too late, and, if I’m being honest, usually drinking a little too much. Like many Swedish teenagers, the holiday became less about tradition and more about celebrating the start of summer.

    As an adult, I find myself appreciating the things I once took for granted the family meals, the conversations around the table, and the comfort of traditions that connect one generation to the next.

    Living abroad, holidays like Midsummer have a way of reminding you just how far away you are.

    Not because you cannot celebrate where you are, but because you realize that somewhere else, the people you love are continuing traditions that were once your traditions too.

    Hearing my mom talk about preparing for Midsummer dinner made me realize that some holidays never stop feeling like home, no matter how many years have passed or how many miles separate you from them.

    And somewhere in Dalarna this year, my nephew will be dancing around that same midsummer pole, creating memories of his own. 🌼