1991: A Love Story You Didn’t Live

Everyone under forty is suddenly obsessed with the "90s." 

The slip dresses, the paparazzi flash, the "timeless" minimalism they just saw in some endlessly TikTok'd JFK Jr.–Carolyn Bessette footage, and then decided was the default setting of an entire decade. They talk about it like it was a golden age of human presence and artisanal cool, and I just need to go on record and say: you're describing a time I actually lived through, and it was mostly fine, but it was not that.

Let me tell you what 1991 actually was.

It was calling a movie theater's recorded message to find out what was playing, mishearing the showtime, arriving forty-five minutes late, and just watching whatever was already on.

It was not knowing if you had the right answer to anything, ever, because the monstrous World Book encyclopedias sat on an annoyingly high shelf and were from 1985 — and there was simply no other option. You could be wrong about a fact for years. Decades. You would tell people something with complete confidence and it would just be incorrect, and nobody would ever find out. Which sounds great until you realize it also applied to everyone around you.

It was going out and getting genuinely, completely lost and staying lost. You pulled over. You asked someone for directions. They made hand gestures and cited landmarks that may or may not still exist. "Turn left at the gas station that used to be a diner." You missed the turn anyway and were just…gone. No one knew where you were. I repeat: no one knew where you were.

This is what people mean when they say we were "more present." We were present because we lacked options.  We had no choice. We were stranded.

It was Sun-In. I need everyone to pause and understand what Sun-In was. You sprayed it on your hair and went outside and waited for the sun to turn you blonde. What it actually turned you into was a person with orange hair and the quiet confidence of someone who had made a series of irreversible choices. You couldn't Google "Sun-In disaster" because Google did not exist. There was no hair disaster content.  You just had mad parents and orange hair now. That was your life.

It was waiting a week for your photos to come back from the drugstore and paying for them regardless of how they turned out, which was, duh, badly. Eyes closed. Someone's elbow. Completely blown out by the flash. Deeply unflattering from below. You paid, you kept them, and you put them in a shoebox. This is what we lost when we lost the "magic of not being able to document everything." We lost seventeen photos of the floor.

It was paging through your mom's Glamour from three months ago because it was there. It was watching 120 Minutes at midnight to catch the one Nirvana video, falling asleep, and missing it. It was endless busy signals (look it up). It was calling someone's house and hanging up when their parents answered, then ringing again immediately and hoping a different person picked up.

Ok, so yeeeeees, the flannel was real, the Doc Martens were strong and the music was genuinely great — though let's be honest, it was a lot more Guns N' Roses and a song called "Baby Got Back" than it was the smooth, candlelit sophistication of Sade.

So let's not pretend we were living some curated analog dream, moving through the world in soft focus like we were all a black-and-white photo on someone's vision board.

We were just orange, slightly lost, wrong about a lot of facts, and waiting for a technology we didn't know was coming that would fix most of this.

It did.

You're welcome, everyone born after 1995.