The waiting room at my GP’s surgery is never full. Brown PVC chairs and sofas sit unoccupied while the board at the front flashes with notices for “wellbeing workshops” and “stop smoking support tips”. While I wait, I wonder what I am waiting for.
Today, right now, it’s blood tests that will give me a clue as to my fertility levels.
The more I think about it, I have been waiting my entire life, impatiently: to finish school, to leave university, to figure out what I’m doing with my life so it can begin properly.
Sitting waiting for my turn to be called, for my blood to be drawn (again), it dawns on me that it — my life — has already begun. Actually, it began quite a while ago.
You’re never in the waiting room of your own life. There is only real life and living it. It’s always the real thing — first chances are only chances. Mistakes can be made over and over again, sure. But you’ll never really make the same one twice because your twenties are not the mock exam for your thirties. They’re the only twenties you’ll ever have.
If I zoom out, all around me it feels like everyone is waiting — for something to click, for someone to show up in their life, for the arrival of a mystical sign that means everything has aligned.
Your thirties, it seems, are waiting room years.
People who desperately want to be parents are waiting for the “perfect partner”. Others who want to be homeowners are so preoccupied with finding someone to “do it with” that they’re renting homes they hate. Those who think they may be in love with someone wait for “the right time” to tell them.
Waiting is the act of staying where one is, of delaying action until a particular time comes around or an external event occurs. It’s a risky state to consign yourself to because, like buying a ticket for a bus in the British countryside, what you’re waiting for may never come.
A day after I left my GP’s surgery, I received a text. “Is something preventing you from living a happy and fulfilled life?” I stopped and read it. No, I realised. Except, perhaps, my own idea of what my life is supposed to be like.
As a teenager, I rarely questioned the trajectory my life would take. I don’t think I ever considered that going to university was something my nan didn’t have the option to do. I expected to meet a partner, marry and have children by my late twenties, just as my mum had done.
All around me it feels like everyone is waiting — for something to click, for someone to show up in their life, for the arrival of a mystical sign that means everything has aligned.
After I turned 30, I tried to forge a similar path. Most people I knew did the same. I threw myself into a relationship that had always been as unsure as it was unstable and bought a small flat with my now ex-partner. But the deeper I went into that life, the more I realised it didn’t fit me — like a cheap pair of trousers, it hung off in all the wrong places and clung to me in ways that made me feel claustrophobic.
What had once seemed inevitable felt uncertain.
There is a quote ascribed to the American writer Joseph Campbell: “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
Now, at 36, my life looks nothing like I imagined. Long relationships have ended and great loves have faded but the world has opened up in ways I didn’t even know would be possible.
Trying to postpone living until you have the life you want is impossible. What’s the point of that sort of life?
These waiting room years are full of possibilities, still. They keep surprising me, making me question whether I want the things I thought I would have in the way I saw older women in my family have them.
And no wonder. You wouldn’t believe it because in between cat videos, all we are ever fed on social media is content about how our time and fertility is running out. Yet the lives of today’s young adult women are almost completely unrecognisable compared with the lives our mothers and grandmothers led at the same age just a few decades ago.
The average age at which women have their first child is now 31. That’s a record high. In the mid-1970s it was 26.4. Women today are also less likely to be married than at any point in history, according to the Office for National Statistics, and those who do marry, marry later. On average, women are now 33 before entering a heterosexual marriage (it’s later for queer partnerships).
We are also more likely to be in work than women at any point in recent history, more likely than men to go to university and more likely to complete our studies with a first or upper-second-class degree than the men who study alongside us.
Those of us in full-time work earn the same as (or more than) men but the gender pay gap is more pronounced for women who work part-time or, predictably, after the age of 40 when the impact of taking time out of the workforce hits those of us who have become mothers.
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell
It wasn’t until the late ’60s that equal pay was enshrined in law, abortion was legalised and it became illegal for banks or building societies to refuse mortgages to unmarried women or require women to have a male guarantor.
Pieced together, what these statistics mean is that women today have much longer adulthoods before yoking their lives to a partner or a child than previous generations did.
This has caused a panic about Britain’s falling birth rate. Women have been blamed by experts and Conservative politicians alike; we have been called “narcissistic” and condemned. This has induced disquiet when we ought to be looking around and asking 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 realise.
Growing up in the ’90s and ’00s, I was not aware that my generation would become a statistical phenomenon. Who thinks like that?
The right to choose when we marry, whether we go to university and when we have children should never be taken for granted but as any woman alive today who is regularly asked whether she’s freezing her eggs or working hard enough to find a partner will tell you, these choices force us to ask difficult 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 historian who specialises in the history of gender and sexuality and particularly in the shifting definitions of marriage over time. She has also written at length about the queer history of marriage in her book The Castrato And His Wife.
When I spoke to her about the evolution of marriage a few years ago, something she said stayed with me:
“The historical consistency,” Helen said, “is that, generally, the role of women in marriage has been subordinate. Until very recently, it was the main way of setting up a family unit socially, of conferring the legitimacy of children and, legally, the way of transferring property.”
Now, a woman doesn’t need to marry to be considered “legitimate”. She doesn’t have to wait for a legal male partner to do anything.
Our adult lives are no longer waiting rooms, places where we sit passively waiting to be chosen. They are expansive corridors where we open and close doors on jobs, friendships and relationships all the time, revealing different versions of the future and trying on alternate realities.
When given the choice and the support that means we can choose, women are choosing to study, to work and to delay motherhood.
In what you thought was a waiting room, you can look up and suddenly realise that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be, life is happening all around you.
There are economic factors, of course. Wages have been largely stagnant since the 2008 global financial crisis and housing costs — both to buy and to rent — have hit historic highs.
Still, the data shows that this is not a phase that will pass: The age at which women embark on the traditional milestones that make up the markers of adulthood is rising. And the impact of these formative experiences is reshaping the way women see the world.
Across the world, women aged 18-30 are increasingly more 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 polling about attitudes is 25 points and growing.
According to the latest polling by YouGov in Britain, young women are also more likely than young men to say they will vote Labour in the forthcoming general election and less likely to vote Conservative.
Will this trend continue too? Perhaps. More and more young women identify as queer, specifically bisexual, and if the merry-go-round of online dating is anything to go by, the way straight people have relationships is changing, too.
It might not feel like it when it seems that the world is going to hell in a handcart, the economy is in the toilet and everything feels stagnant because the same politicians have been in power for 14 years in Britain, but young women today don’t have to wait. You’re not sitting around and waiting to be called upon. You are living and choosing how to do so.
Embracing the changes we have lived through means making difficult choices all the time — to take on new jobs, to be brave and leave relationships that aren’t working or, equally, be just as brave and embrace ones that are — and is exactly the process Campbell described: one long and constant exercise in letting go of your expectations to work with each new reality as it presents itself.
Life isn’t always easy. I won’t pretend that it is. Freedom is not free. Anyone who has ever tried to liberate themselves from any difficult situation will tell you that. I confess that I am still often unsure — of whether I’m doing the right thing, of whether it should all be easier. I catch myself focusing more on the past at the expense of the present.
In a spare 10 minutes two weeks ago, I looked up the cost of flats in the part of London where a friend lives in a houseshare she would like to leave. I found homes far cheaper than she or I expected. Homes she could afford on her decent but not enormous salary as a teacher with a very small deposit. In the days that followed, she applied for a mortgage, put in an offer and had it accepted.
Soon she will own her own home. That’s not possible for everyone, it’s not what everyone wants but it’s what she wanted, it’s what she was waiting to do once she’d met a partner.
In what you thought was a waiting room, you can look up and suddenly realise that you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be, life is happening all around you. You were focusing so hard on how long you’d be delayed by an appointment time, a bus arrival, a perfect love match that you failed to see what was happening right in front of you, right now. So you’d better step out of yourself and into whatever is being thrown at you. Fast. That’s what you’ve been doing all along. It’s called living.
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