At the time,television shows,books,films,and stories told and retold around the table on Christmas Day seemed to support this:by 30,you ought to have your life figured out. If you came of age in the early aughts or before,you learned that you had an expiration date,and the more candles you accumulated on your birthday cake,the staler you became.
Robin Cowcher
For as much as they’re revered and referenced now,theSex and the City girls spent the show’s entire run trying to play catch-up to their better-settled peers. Charlotte began lying about her age at 36,and when Miranda was made a partner at her law firm,it was a consolation prize for being unmarried at 35.Bridget Jones was a cautionary tale. The cast ofCheers looked like their next milestone would be retirement,and in the first season ofSeinfeld,Elaine was — get this — 27.
Let’s look closer.
By my paternal grandmother’s early 30s,she had two sons and at least three languages under her belt,and the life she had before she escaped Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia was a distant memory. By the same age,my mother had three kids,two ex-husbands,a double-fronted terrace house in Paddington,and was on her second or third career. Weddings,careers,divorces,children,crises,all before any of these people reached the true mid-point of their lives.
The big plans I had to follow suit were,in retrospect,adorable. I would meet my soulmate at university,and by age 25,we would have had a chic courthouse wedding and moved to Edinburgh. Two corgis — Susan,a bossy little ginger menace,and Treacle,the biggest idiot ever — would greet me each evening when I returned from work at my small but successful literary agency.
Somewhere in there,I’d fit in a master’s degree. Time would simply pass in a cloud of pastel idyll until … what? Menopause? The screen adaptation of my bestselling memoir? Death? It didn’t matter. That was a problem for future me. Thirty years sounded like a very long time.
Well,I’m turning 33 in just a moment,and one night this week,I watchedChristopher Robin and sobbed into the tiramisu I was having for dinner. My corgi died nine months ago,and I haven’t been on a date in a year. Were we able to meet one another somewhere beyond linear time,what would my 30-something grandmother and I even have to talk about?
It’s not just me who seems to be lagging behind. Only one of my close friends is married. The few people I know with children are those for whom parenthood was always a sacred calling. I have more friends with housemates than friends with mortgages,and no one has a spare bedroom. No matter how well our careers are going,nobody is calling us wunderkinds any more. Everything our grandparents,parents,and older siblings had,it’s still so far away.
We don’t have to look far to find people who see the shifting timeline of millennial milestones as some kind of arrested development. “When I was your age…” precedes a thousand rants we’ve heard before. They may be unoriginal,but they aren’t wrong:life does seem to be moving awfully slowly for my age bracket,even as time passes at an alarming rate.
We could theorise about why this is. The economic uncertainty that makes childcare an unfathomable luxury and home ownership a pure fantasy;the transactional lucky dip of dating apps that has fundamentally frayed our ability to connect and plunged an entire generation into a seemingly-incurable commitment phobia;that our preoccupation with therapy has forced a level of introspection that has turned us neurotic and terrified of real life;that we’re just immature and soft and whiny.
But that’s not really the point. I don’t think we need a study to explain it. I don’t know if there’s anything to feel bad about in the first place.
I’m realising,with all the wisdom and naivety of my 30-something status,that it’s not a race. Thirty years isn’t actually a very long time at all,and although I’m older and wiser than I’ve ever been,there is still so much left to learn and see and do and feel.
By my age,Jesus had died. By that metric,I’m not doing so badly. By that metric,we’re all just getting started.
