The waiting room at my doctor’s office is never crowded. Brown PVC chairs and sofas sit idly by, while the board at the front flashes notices of ‘wellness workshops’ and ‘smoking cessation support advice’. As I wait, I wonder what I’m waiting for.
Today, right now, blood tests are what will give me an idea of my fertility levels.
The more I think about it, I’ve been waiting all my life, impatiently: to finish school, to leave university, to figure out what I’m doing with my life to start it right.
Sitting waiting for my turn to be called, for my blood to be drawn (again), I realize that – my life – has already begun. Actually, it started quite some time ago.
You are never in the waiting room of your life. There is only real life and living it. It’s always the real thing – first chances are just chances. Mistakes can be made over and over, sure. But you’ll never do the same thing twice, because your twenties aren’t the practice test for your thirties. It’s the only twenty you’ll ever have.
If I zoom out, all around me it feels like everyone is waiting — for something to click, for someone to appear in their life, for a mystical sign to come that means everything is aligned.
Your thirties, it seems, are years of waiting.
People who are desperate to become parents are waiting for the ‘perfect partner’. Others who want to become homeowners are so busy finding someone to “do it with” that they rent houses they hate. Those who think they might be in love with someone wait for the “right moment” to tell them.
Waiting is the act of staying where one is, delaying action until a certain moment arrives or an external event occurs. It is a dangerous situation to surrender because; what you wait for may never come.
A day after I left my practice, I received an automated message from them. It was the mental health lab ad: “Is there anything stopping you from living a happy and fulfilled life?” I stopped and read it. No, I understood. Except, perhaps, my own idea of what my life should be like.
As a teenager, I rarely questioned the course my life would take. I don’t think I ever considered that university was something my grandmother didn’t have a choice to do. I waited until my twenties to meet a partner, get married and have children, just like my mom had done.
Around me I feel like everyone is waiting — for something to click, for someone to appear in their life, for a mystical sign to come that means everything is aligned.
After I turned 30, I tried to carve out a similar path. Most people I knew did the same. I threw myself into a relationship that was always so uncertain and unstable and bought a small apartment with my now ex-partner. But the deeper I got into this life, the more I realized it didn’t fit me — like a pair of cheap pants, hanging in all the wrong places and clinging to me in ways that made me feel claustrophobic.
What once seemed inevitable was now uncertain.
There is a quote attributed to the American author Joseph Campbell: “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, in order to have the life that awaits us.”
Now, at 36, my life is unlike anything I imagined. Long-term relationships have ended and great loves have faded, but the world has opened up in ways I didn’t even know were possible.
Trying to put life off until you get the life you want is impossible. What is the meaning of such a life?
Those waiting room years are still full of possibilities. They continue to surprise me, making me wonder if I want the things I thought I would have the way I saw the older women in my family have them.
And it’s no wonder. You won’t believe it because between cat videos, all we ever feed on social media is our period and fertility content. However, the lives of today’s young adult women across the West today are almost completely unrecognizable compared to the lives our mothers and grandmothers lived at the same age just a few decades ago.
The average age at which women have their first child is increasing and is now 27, according to the CDC. This is a record. A growing number of women in the US today are also less likely to be married and more likely to be single spouse or partner.
We are also more likely to be at work than women of previous generationsand for the first time in history she is more likely to get a college degree than men.
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned in order to have the life that awaits us.
Joseph Campbell
It wasn’t until 1963 that equal pay was legislated by Congress, Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in 1969, and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) of 1974 allowed women to get loans without a male co-signer.
We are still fighting for some of these rights, obviously abortion. But, still, taken together, what these statistics mean is that women today have a much longer adulthood before committing to a partner or a child than previous generations.
This has caused panic The Declining American Birth Rate which has reached its lowest level in a century. The women have been blamed by pundits and conservative politicians. we have been called “narcissists” and condemned. This has caused concern when we have to look around and ask what we want to do with our lives, our bodies and our time. We have autonomy of the first and second and, contrary to what we are told, much more of the third than we realize.
Growing up in the 90s and 00s, I had no idea that my generation would become a statistical phenomenon. Who thinks like that?
The right to choose when to marry, whether to go to university and when to have children should never be taken for granted, but as any woman alive today who is regularly asked if she is freezing her eggs or working hard enough to find partner. , these choices force us to ask hard questions about our lives, about what we want and who we want to share it with.
But being able to ask these questions and seek our own answers to them is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Professor Helen Berry is a British historian specializing in the history of gender and sexuality and in particular the changing definitions of marriage over time. He has also written extensively on the queer history of marriage in her book Castrato and his wife.
When I spoke to her about the evolution of the marriage a few years ago, something she said stuck with me:
“The historical implication,” said Helen, “is that, in general, women’s role in marriage was subordinate. Until very recently, it was the main way of creating a family unit socially, providing legitimacy to children and, legally, the way to transfer property.’
Now, a woman does not have to be married to be considered “legitimate.” He doesn’t need to wait for a legal partner to do anything.
Our adult lives are no longer waiting rooms, places where we sit passively waiting to be chosen. They are extended corridors where we open and close doors to jobs, friendships and relationships all the time, revealing different versions of the future and trying out alternative realities.
When given the choice and support that means we can choose, women choose to study, work and delay motherhood.
In what you thought was a waiting room, you can look up and suddenly realize that you are exactly where you are supposed to be, life is happening all around you.
Of course, there are also economic factors. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, the cost of housing—both to buy and to rent—has reached historic highs.
However, the data shows that this is not a phase that will pass: The age at which women begin the traditional milestones that are markers of adulthood is increasing. And the impact of these formative experiences reshapes the way women see the world.
Worldwide, women aged 18-30 they are increasingly liberal in their worldview than young men who are increasingly conservative. In the UK, the gap between conservative young men and their more progressive female counterparts in attitude polls is 25 points and growing.
According to the latest YouGov poll in Britain, young Women are also more likely than young men to say they will vote Labour in the recent general election and less likely to vote Conservative. This is a trend repeated in the US and, indeed, in other Western countries as well.
Will this trend continue? Maybe. More and more young women are identifying as queer, especially bisexual, and if the online dating game is anything to go by, the way straight people relate is changing, too.
You might not like it when it looks like the world is going to hell in a wheelbarrow, the economy is in the toilet and everything seems stagnant because, until recently, the same politicians were in power for 14 years in Britain, but the young women of today don’t they need to wait. You don’t sit and wait to be called. You live and you choose how to do it.
Embracing the changes we’ve experienced means making hard choices all the time — taking on new jobs, being brave and leaving relationships that aren’t working, or, equally, being just as brave and embracing the ones that are — and it’s just the process that Campbell described: a long and continuous exercise in letting your expectations work with each new reality as it presents itself.
Life isn’t always easy. I won’t pretend it is. Freedom is not free. Anyone who has ever tried to extricate themselves from any difficult situation will tell you this. I admit that I’m still often unsure — about whether I’m doing the right thing, whether everything should be easier. I find myself focusing more on the past at the expense of the present.
In a spare 10 minutes two weeks ago, I looked up apartment costs in the part of London where a friend lives in a house she’d like to move out of. I found houses much cheaper than I expected. Houses she could afford on her decent but not huge salary as a teacher with a very small down payment. In the days that followed, he applied for a mortgage, made an offer and had it accepted.
Soon she will have her own house. This is not possible for everyone, it is not what everyone wants, but it is what he wanted, it is what he expected to do once he met a partner.
In what you thought was a waiting room, you can look up and suddenly realize that you are exactly where you are supposed to be, life is happening all around you. You were focusing so hard on how late you were going to be from an hourly date, a bus arrival, a perfect love match that you didn’t realize what was happening right in front of you, right now. So you better get out of yourself and into whatever is thrown at you. Quickly. That’s what you’ve been doing all along. It’s called living.
Like what you see? How about something more R29, here?
My dates are not worth what they cost
Confrontation is the key to long lasting friendships
