Singlutionary's 30th Birthday Eve

I am writing this in the last 45 minutes of my 20s.

Over the past few years, I've gone through a wide range of emotions about turning 30, especially while single. Some of these feelings surprised me: I didn't know that certain insecurities or desires existed until I felt like the chance for them was drawing to a close.

Two years and some odd months ago, I was in a relationship which seemed like bliss for about two months and then unwound into months of turmoil. During the good times, I remember thinking: "I will be married by the time I'm 30 after all." I was surprised by how relieved and proud I felt. In marrying before 30, I would be accomplishing something that everyone could understand. Through marriage, I would prove to the world and, more importantly, to my family and friends near and far that I was worthy of undivided love, that I was attractive, sexually vital and successful in the most basic human way. I would be a good person, a good woman and by extension, a good friend, niece, daughter, cousin.

I had never realized how alienated I had felt from my friends and from most of my family because of my typically single status. I never realized how much people people worried about me, even pitied me because they felt something essential was missing in my life. I had no idea how much I had internalized this feeling.

When I thought that I would be married within the conventional timeframe, I felt, for the first time ever, that I had some kind of magic ticket to normalcy that I had always yearned for but had never been given.

At that time I was still only 27.

Since then, I have mulled over my fear of turning 30 and have come to face this new decade (now only 31 minutes away) with excitement and relief instead of fear and angst.

My late 20s were not easy. They were full of career failures, financial struggles, personal loss and general confusion. In many ways, it won't be hard to say goodbye to the consternation and frustration and grief of recent years.

And I'm not 20 anymore and I know things about the world. I have experience -- lots of it. And experience is something that can never be taken away from me. I've survived things that I never thought I would have to face.

I had a crisis just a few months ago when I first began to consider setting out on the long road towards a PhD. I realized that by choosing to commit the next 7 years to academic life, the opportunity to have biological children very well might pass me by. At the time I was slightly involved with a man who very much wanted wholesome biological children raised on milk and wheat bread. I mentioned my potential PhD aspirations to him during our last real phone conversation. Two weeks later he flippantly bowed out of our travel arrangements and said something about incompatibility. And that was it.

In the past 10 years I have learned that in choosing one thing, I am also NOT choosing so many others. Spending most of my 30s in school may very well end up being a choice against having a kid that carries my genetics although it doesn't eliminate my chance to be a parent.

And I am OK with that. If being pregnant and giving birth to my own spawn was super important to me, I would have chosen so many different ways to spend my 20s. I've always wanted to adopt older children and I've always known that by doing so, I can buy myself some time against the generation gap: If I am 40 and adopt a 7 year old, the generation gap isn't quite as huge as it would be if I gave birth at 40.

I am no longer afraid of being an old maid. I know that I will have companionship. And I know that it will be unconventional. I've lived my life out of order and upside down and I can't expect to suddenly grow up and start doing everything the typical way. The typical way has never made sense for me. Its not going to start making sense just because my looks and fertility are starting to fade.

I have a rich life and many talents. And I am going to use them. If nothing else, I am going to live life on my own terms. My 20s were about figuring out what I wanted to do. My 30s are going to be about doing it.

To actually realize my dreams instead of just dreaming them is at once exhilarating and intimidating. But that is where I'm headed.

I've got 9 minutes left. And then I'm ringing in the next decade of wonderment.

Singlutionary's Search for a Proper Peer

I have a utopian view of the world in which everyone is their own person and people love each other freely and there is no need for jealousy. In this world, new relationships broaden the worlds, not only of the people in them, but of their entire communities as well. This is a pretty hippie-like version of peace, love and understanding and all the crap that goes along with that -- like hemp pants, compost and organic farming.

And then I wake up. And I live in the real world where being single at almost-30 is frightening. Why? Because I'm alone. I'm not talking about being alone in a not-having-a-partner way. I'm talking about being alone in another way -- in the way where my communities have faded, my friends are tied up with their family or with their marriage and I don't seem to have any peers.

Where have all my peers gone? In my town, I have ONE uncoupled friend of my age.

And lets face it. There is a difference between being uncoupled in your early 20s and being uncoupled in your early 30s.

And I'm not talking about pressure to couple. I am talking about finding peers. It is more common for folks in their early 20s to be single and to be exploring the world and to have friends in the same place.

Of course, it was never common for me. My two best friends were both married by the time I turned 22 and had been coupled long before that. I've always been the sole single girl in my inner circle. But my outer circle has been full of intelligent, smart women in their early-mid 20s.

So why, after 10 years, is it suddenly so much more horrifying to be the only single in my Singlutionary world?

Peers. They're harder to come by. Supposedly there are tons of single women in their 30s on this earth but I never meet them. And just because I meet another single woman in her early 30s doesn't mean that we have anything in common! She might be divorced or have children or she might be a rabid racist chicken hater or an exercise nazi or plenty of other things which are totally acceptable but which I am not.

Or she might be might just want to talk about how she is so sad without a mate.

I get bored with that. I do it enough myself in secret moments of weakness and then am ashamed to have dishonored my Singlutionary costume in such a way (my Singlutionary costume is made of orange spandex).

I have plenty of ways to meet people. I meet people as part of my job. I've found that dog people are often single. So that is a start. I love dogs. I love singles. Single dog people = double rainbow of joyfulness.

Which brings me back to this blog. I've got peers here. Plenty of them: The folks who read this blog, the folks who comment and the folks who write their own wonderful blogs about being a happy single. And I have my one wonderful late 20s real-life single friend.

And I have my dates. Chronically single men vying for a chance to bone me who don't know that I'm really just looking for a peer.

Where do you find your Singlutionary peers -- no matter what your age or place in life? Life is about change -- and more often than not -- our best friend's lives don't change at the same exact moment and in the same exact way that ours do. So, while it is totally possible to maintain relationships with coupled parent friends, it is also good to seek out people who are in a more similar place in life.

Where do you find them? How do you identify them? And how to you form a real life community as strong as this one here online?

Singlutionary Wedding

I've been working a lot of weddings lately as catering staff. This is something I did after college for extra money and something I'm now doing again in order to get my new adventures off the ground.

I generally dislike weddings mainly because I fail to comprehend them --- why would you ask people to come from all over the world and then just talk about how you love one person more than them? But I also secretly dislike them because I've never had one.

A wedding may not be something that every little girl wants but I certainly did. I wanted to get to wear the big wonderful dress and have all my friends together and I wanted to have all the beautiful lights in the trees and tulle dancing in the breeze and the candles and the music and the sense of community and the sheer beauty of it. I've always been interested in creating beautiful spaces and beautiful events and the wedding event is the epitome of these things.

Of course I grew up in an unconventional family and a slightly unconventional community so as a little girl I felt completely free to imagine my wedding pretty much groom-less and I did. In many ways the groom is absent in most little girl's fantasies of their own wedding. It is about the dum-dum-da-dum and the dress and the flowers and the bridal party more than anything else. My fantasy wedding would include a multi-family improv show in lieu of a ceremony and feature a performance by Marilyn Manson at the reception and would take place in the very same location where Jurassic Park was filmed.

The wedding I was working last night was deeply conventional in a Texas twang kind of way. The outdoor ceremony began with the lords prayer and the reception (which was held in a barn) featured country music (most of which included the word "Texas" in the song). The bride and groom ended the night by running a gauntlet of sparklers -- the bride, of course, in cowboy boots. And somewhere during this evening while I oversaw a buffet of sliders was this: I would have gotten married and lived a "conventional" life if that life had been presented to me.

I always think that somehow it is a different breed of person who gets married in her early-mid 20s and has 2.5 children and lives in a single family home with a flawless front lawn. I've always felt like some kind of an outsider to that life -- like a little girl window shopping for her future but never being permitted to enter the store.

What I realized last night is that what I have done in my life and what I haven't done has nothing to do with the kind of human I am. I am not a different breed of person who is immune to a more conventional lifestyle. If given the opportunity to live a more usual life, I would have jumped at it. I would have worn the white dress down the isle with the candles and the flowers and the tulle and I would have rode off into the sunset in whatever kind of footware was appropriate for my location and my upbringing.

In many ways I was taught and I accepted that a wedding is the beginning of adult life. But what happens when you're well into adulthood and there is no wedding in sight?

My life has presented me with singleness just as other people lives present them with a spouse or partner. And being single has made me who I am just as being married has made others who they are. It isn't a singles vs. coupled world that we live in. It is simply a human vs. sacrifices world. Are we going to live our dreams even if they make no sense or are we going to give into the comfort and stability of the daily grind? Which do we want? Most likely a little of both.

Do I still dream of my improv-show/controversial-yet-oddly-eloquent-celebrity-performance/dinosaur-landscaped wedding? Yes. Do I still dream of me going it alone in the beautiful dress on top of some rock outcropping with the sun setting into the ocean and then ride off into the sunset on a tulle clad brontosaurus? Yes. Do I have the energy to ever pull this off? Maybe. But for right now there is a dirty car that needs to be washed and baby chickens that need to be integrated with the big birds and a dog with too-long toe nails and a new business endeavor to start tomorrow.