Back stories

On Friday night I went to a vinyl party hosted by a friend from work. There were a whole bunch of people I know from work there, scattered in age from about 31ish (me) to my friend Beccy, who just turned 40.

Age is a really nebulous thing at this point, I'm finding. Where ten years makes a difference between 20 and 30, between 30 and 40, ten years feels like nothing. Sometimes the cultural differences between me and people here make for a bigger gulfs than age ever could. And of course, being work colleagues, all on basically the same level and doing the same job, it's the great leveller.

Anyway, one of the woman there is doing a lot of Internet dating, and she showed us a picture of her latest, who she likes a lot and sounds really nice, and he looks so...much older. Like properly a whole generation older. But she's 36, so ten years from that is 46, heading for 50.

And then as people were chitchatting I realised one guy there had been married for nearly 20 years and has an 18 year old daughter (he got married at 20). And I thought, it's getting to that point now where everybody I meet, or am developing relationships with now, have back stories. And not just went to uni, got a job, emigrated to the UK back stories (like mine), but proper married/divorced/separated/has children from previous relationships back stories.

These are not bad things by any means, these details make people interesting, and layered, and human, and it doesn't really MATTER, when all is said and done. But I guess getting into the deep stuff with new people on this side of 30 is very different from marching alongside the people you met at university or grew through your 20s with.

I don't really have much back story (I could make one up, I guess, it would be much more interesting). And while that doesn't bother me at all, and I think I'm holding my own in this adult world, I worry that I'm being dismissed as naive or innocent by others along the way, or not being taken seriously. And you all know how dearly I like to be taken seriously.

I don't know. This is what happens when you don't follow traditional milestones - you end up being compared against them anyway, because that is the handy yardstick by which we are all measured.