Two outta three ain’t bad?
30. It’s a tricky age, isn’t it? For one thing, there’s now no denying you’re a fully-fledged grown-up. When you start your twenties, you’re essentially still a teenager; many of us were students, living Our Best (student) Lives. Nobody’s seriously accusing you of adulthood when you’re breakfasting, hungover, on McVitie’s biscuits and Coke, or “fixing” the holes in your boots with Elastoplast and cardboard. The uneasy sense of having to figure out your path and Do Things Properly increases throughout the next ten years as we transition at varying rates into actual adults, with actual adult lives and actual adult responsibilities. But there remains a degree of deniability, of grace from The Real World, whilst you cling on to your twenties.
Not so at 30.
I suspect most “milestone” birthdays force us to take stock of our lives in a way that can be uncomfortable. They prompt measurement against the yardsticks we’ve created for ourselves and had thrust on us by society, inviting often-unwelcome questions about where we are compared to where we thought we’d be by now. They force us to confront the inescapable fact of our ageing.
There’s arguably no milestone birthday that comes with such a collection of specific measures of success, or more time-sensitive expectations, as the big 3-0. Marriage, children, and first-time home ownership are the major ones, and boy, are they major. There’s also the growing assumption of a degree of professional success, or at least direction — although this one is, happily, more nebulous to define. It doesn’t provide the same tidy tick box as each of The Big Three. The trifecta of successful adulting.
In this day and age, we’re more aware than ever before of who is achieving The Milestones, and how, and when. Social media provides a direct window — one we can continuously peer through from our palms — into the very best bits of the lives of hundreds of our friends and colleagues and acquaintances. The announcements ramp up steadily through our twenties, the trickle turning into a flood, and slowly but surely the engagement/pregnancy/house purchase/marriage/birth/promotion updates completely take over our news feeds. Each of these announcements is wonderful to see; I am never not delighted for the person sharing their happiness. But I think very few of us are impervious to the comparisons they inevitably invite, sooner or later.
Apparently it’s irrelevant that I’m not at all pressed to hit these milestones myself. The fact that I feel no particular desire to get hitched right now hasn’t stopped me from googling statistics about ages for first marriages and relationship lengths pre-marriage. The fact that buying a house is not an imminent priority for me does nothing to soothe the sometimes-sense of failure brought on by the knowledge that I couldn’t afford to anyway. The fact of not knowing if I’ll ever want to be a parent, and knowing very certainly that I don’t want to be one at the moment, only makes me feel like I need some other, equivalent ‘achievement’ to evidence the value I’m bringing to my own life. In short, the fact that I am not currently keen for marriage, home ownership or children does nothing to quell the roaring fear of inadequacy that threatens to drown out more rational perspectives. The panic that I am wasting precious time, precious youth, “the best years of my life”.
I know, objectively, there is SO much value in my life. I have thought and talked and written ad nauseam about my belief that success is not defined by external markers; that the criteria for fulfilment is unique to every individual; that we each have to find our own personal path to happiness. When I’m being sensible about it (which I usually am), my firm opinion is that milestone timelines are completely arbitrary, it makes no sense for everyone to aspire to the same milestones as each other anyway, and doing all the things that society insists you “should” be doing is no guarantee of happiness.
Logically, I know that you can achieve career success at any age, find the love of your life at any time, and, if the window for having children is limited to some extent, you definitely don’t have to be getting started in your twenties. I am well aware that fulfilment and success can come from myriad sources, and they are categorically not limited to wedding bells, babies, or mortgages. These are all wonderful, valid things to derive happiness from. They’re just not the only wonderful, valid things to derive happiness from.
Sometimes it’s hard to be objective and sensible and logical about these things, though. For me, it didn’t help that my 30th birthday arrived at the culmination of a personal maelstrom that felt an awful lot like my entire life crashing down around my ears. Against my will, I started my thirties with something of a blank canvas. But the thing about a blank canvas is you can do anything you want with it. So that’s what I’ve been figuring out lately. What I want my life to look like, as opposed to what society and peer pressure are telling me it should look like. They might turn out to be the same thing. That’s fine. But whatever I do with this next decade, I’m not doing it because I’m supposed to. I’m not going to keep craning over my shoulder to see what everyone else is doing. And I’m sure as hell not going to worry about timelines and milestones. I’ll get to mine when I get to them — whatever I decide they’re going to be.
Adventures of an Anglaise 