BuzzFeed News; Joel Barhamand, Dutton
Sally never expected to find herself back in her parents’ house. But at 30 years old, she was living with them, in the bedroom her sisters shared growing up, in Queens, New York, trying to figure out what to do next and why her plan had fallen apart. Sally was born in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the United States with her parents and two younger sisters when she was three. Her parents married in their midtwenties, and Sally thought she would get married around the same age. She’d fallen in love with her college boyfriend, at Stony Brook University on Long Island, and they had gotten engaged. At the time, Sally wanted to live in Paris. She had dreamed of doing so since her first trip there as a teenager, when she’d been immediately entranced by the city. She learned French and had traveled there two more times, once with her fiancé. But her fiancé never wanted to live anywhere other than New York. Sally thought he might change his mind, and in the meantime, they’d have their wedding. “I was like,