Dirty 30
Nigella Lawson celebrated the dawn of the new decade with her 60th birthday.
“Now I feel that anything could happen,” she wrote in The Times Magazine. “I’m happy with my life as it is, happier than I thought I would be… I feel so much more open to anything and everything. And that’s a wonderful way to walk into the future.”
It’s an inspiring, exciting perspective; one that we should all embrace at any age.
Why is aging so much harder when we are younger? It’s ironic that we have to wait until we’re 60 to reach enlightenment.
I speak to so many – usually – women who find their late twenties and early thirties a struggle.
Things aren’t going quite the way they imagined; work isn’t the career it was cracked up to be; potential boyfriends are not as available as maybe they’d like; existing relationships that were blissful at 25 maybe on a road to nowhere. And the biological clock is ticking.
Meanwhile everyone else is moving on apace with happy marriages, perfect babies, City salaries and amazing houses.
It becomes very easy to believe that this is it. Nothing is going to change. This is how it’s always going to be. This is how you’re always going to feel.
Society plays a role in this. There is an expectation that everyone will have set up their life and “sorted themselves out,” – whatever that means. There are older people who still ask – usually women – “when are you going to get married?” only to dish out lashings of unwanted patronizing sympathy when they admit they’re not ready.
This pressure is easy to rationalize but it’s hard not to feel it.
If this resonates with you and you’d like to talk about your situation, do get in touch.