Melissa invited me over to her house to give me a vintage lamp and some picture frames, various cast-offs from shows she’d be on – a nice perk of being friends with a set decorator. She caught me up on the how THE HUNDRED DAYS OF YES was going, now a couple months in.
She was all smiles this time. She met a great guy… and apparently… she was saying YES.
They hit it off from their first date. He’s a few years older, divorced with two sons, one close in age to her’s, and he’s handsome, successful and crazy about her. On their third date, as he helped her unpack her Jetta after taking both of their kids sailing for the day, he told her he was going to marry her. And she knew it was true.
These are words she never heard from her ex-boyfriend in three years. Words I secretly feared she may have waited too long to ever hear. If my friends and I can’t find a great guy, the pickings must be that much more bare when you add a decade, right?
It just shows, what the hell do I know…
Forty-two is not too late to find your happy ending. Maybe there isn’t an age limit on such a thing. Perhaps this Deadline Thirty is just a conspiracy we all tell each other. Yes, we have to accept certain realities, our reproductive years are dwindling, our bodies peaking, our beauty plateauing. If we want to reel in the best catch possible, we better hurry, hurry, hurry.
But stop. Take that pressure right off your shoulders — It’s not helping and it won’t make anything happen any sooner. If love and success come, then the worry will have been a waste, and if love and success don’t come, the worry will have been a waste.
There really is no other point to life than in figuring out a way to enjoy it.
If we look at the big picture, if we could find just a little bit of perspective, we’d appreciate that there is life after 30, even for those who don’t have it all together. There is hope.
There is time.
Thirty isn’t a death sentence, it’s a rite of passage. Yes, transitional periods are hard, they always are – but those are the times when you make things happen. A spouse or a job or whatever doesn’t make you a grown-up. Being an adult, just like your own happiness, is a state of mind. And that is the only thing that we’re ever entirely in control of.
And that’s my thirty sense.
