Having no deadlines for love or anything else.

I’ve been thinking about turning thirty- and forty and fifty! -since I was about ten. I’ve always wondered what I’ll feel like at those ages and I spend a lot of time day dreaming about the future.

Hopefully, at thirty, I’ll be like my friend and fiddle player Caitlin. Everyone thinks she’s twenty-three, but she’s thirty two. She’s just this carefree little hippie. Once, I asked her how she felt about getting older, and she said “I’m never going to.” She lives her life like I’m never going to act burdened and bitter and all the things that make people seem older than they are. Caitlin is also the kind of person who doesn’t fall in love often, but when she does, she falls in love love love love. 

I guess I’m already like Caitlin in that way. It’s rare that I have a boyfriend- that only happens if I fall in love. I’ve noticed that people who are never in a relationship just to be in a relationship keep their childlike spark because they don’t end up settling for things that make them unhappy, and they never feel as if they took less than what was out there for them. So for me, being single is what I do, and falling in love is the exception.

Lately I’ve been listening to “You Learn” by Alanis Morissette: “You live, you learn. You love, you learn. You cry, you learn. You lose, you learn.” I think there’s something pretty comforting in knowing that even the biggest mistakes I’m inevitably going to make will turn me into who I’ll be at thirty. 

One thing I’ve learned in my twenties is that if a relationship has to be kept secret, you shouldn’t be in it. Going forward, that’s going to be concrete, 100-percent-of-the-time rule for me. If a guy wants to keep the relationship quiet- whether its some weird privacy thing or he just doesn’t want to show you off- and if you don’t feel the same way, and it makes you feel like he’s not proud of you, then that’s not the relationship you want to be in.

Another rule of thumb is that if it doesn’t feel like love - if you’re sad more than you’re happy - that’s a huge indicator that you need to walk. You need to know when to let go.

For now, I have absolutely no love plans for thirty. No deadlines. Just vague, blurry, pretty, daydreams. You never know what’s going to happen. I do hope that marriage and children are in my future. I think it would be unbelievable someday to be chasing around a couple of crazy little kids who have tangled hair and mismatched clothing because we let them dress themselves. One would be in a princess costume, and the other kid would walk around in a Spider-Man suit because he wanted to, and we wouldn’t bother arguing with him. 

With daydreams like that, it’s almost impossible to fear turning any milestone age.