One weekday night in a pub in Soho that has long since called its final last orders, 22-year-old me met a just-turned 40-year-old man who I would go on to be involved with for the remainder of my twenties. It was a relationship (although I am under no illusion that he would ever have considered it one) defined by frustration – not least for my closest girlfriends, who were bewildered by my choices. The only thing we could agree on was that 40 was so old.
You, like them, might wonder what a 40-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman (girl!) have in common. I never did. I already knew the answer: nothing. But I didn’t care. There is something wildly intoxicating about being the archetype of someone’s desire. That giddiness was only heightened by the proximity he offered me to what I considered to be official adulthood. I was using him as much as he was using me; to be with a man in his forties with a business and a mortgage and a divorce already behind him, felt impressive, chic and exotic. Men (boys!) my own age seemed pathetic in comparison.
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We are taught that time bestows wisdom and helps to clarify the past, but I have often found the opposite to be true: the edges of many situations seem more blurred and opaque with each passing year. So, sure, aided by a modicum of maturity, post-#MeToo I did eventually interrogate the off-kilter power balance of that relationship, and I can see that he does not come off well. But as I reach the age he was when he met me, I also – surprisingly – feel unexpected empathy towards him.
Now I can see how young 40 really is. Now I understand how clueless and messy and lost you can still be. Now I get that you might have more in common with a 22-year-old than you’d admit or perhaps even know.
Turning 40, I am terrifyingly clueless. Even more so than at 22; back then, I was blanketed by the naive, know-it-all arrogance of youth. And, in the moments that I stop to think about it, that really does terrify me – the feeling that everyone else knows exactly what they are doing while I am still figuring it out; that everyone has found their place but that I might slip through the cracks with one wrong turn.
For a long time, being messy is celebrated. And then – bam! – friends who you’d spend nights with in strangers’ bathrooms, who you lived alongside in mould-riddled house-shares, suddenly have kitchen islands and lively opinions on nurseries. Those ‘pathetic’ boys? Now impressive men. I can’t even roast a chicken or parallel park (I do, however, complain about my bad back, so clearly, I am ageing).
When did my peers learn to behave and live like adults? While I was trying to shortcut my way to adulthood and shake off the discomfort of adolescence prematurely, they were learning to be real grown-ups. To know and be themselves.
Alcohol and drugs are brutally efficient tools for wasting time. I was 30 when I got sober, and older than that when I realised that adulthood – or the version of it you desire – is as much earned as it is arbitrarily given. So, in a decade when many of my peers were reaping the benefits of the building they’d been doing for years, I was having to dig foundations anew.
That might sound dull or depressing. It’s not. My slowburn adulthood feels genuinely earned for the first time. The kindest, most generous lesson my dad ever taught me is that we all go at different paces, and that journeys are rarely linear. I need to go at my own speed. When I think of it like that, it feels less like a crisis I am in, and more of an exhilarating moment of crystallisation.
Besides, perhaps the only difference between a midlife crisis and a coming-of-age awakening is the branding. One is lame and the other is thrilling; one has crap leather jackets and too-young girlfriends, the other is the too-young girlfriend; one is a has-been and the other is can-be. Both are figuring things out.
There really is something to be said for perspective. I recently had dinner with a friend in her mid-forties who had ended a long-term relationship a few months earlier. I have no doubt that going back out into the wild is daunting, but she said sometimes she lies in bed and feels so excited by not knowing where life is going that she can’t sleep, like a child on Christmas Eve. That image stuck with me. At 40, 22, whatever, who says you can’t come of age again – and again?
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