Does being single in my 30s make me damaged goods?
Short answer, no!
Hi SJ,
I am almost 30 recently broke up from a 2 year relationship, with a man I thought was The One. How do I motivate myself to pursue dating again and rebuild my life? I am very scared of being unwanted after I hit 30. I feel like damaged goods, although I shouldn’t think this way. Please help!
Anonymous
Dear Anonymous,
I think everyone feels that way at some point in their lives, that we’ve missed a specific life goal we must have achieved by a certain age. Whether it’s marriage at nearly 30, not being a homeowner by 40 or not becoming grandparent by 60. What you’re feeling is completely normal, if very psychologically uncomfortable.
Society demands we subscribe to hitting life affirming goals by certain ages, but none are as damning as, HEAVENS FORBID, being single and childless at 30! Someone alert the church! Sadly this is not a modern concept either, although social media has certainly accelerated things.
As we have become more insular and more individualist as a society, the struggle to become part of a group grows more desperate. On a micro scale we can look at the Stanley cup craze that became the IT product to own. If you owned it, you were in the group, you were part of something, you had an identity. The more rare your cup was deemed, the better your ranking. Hence why you had people frantically hurling themselves into mobs…..to grab a cup. A cup.
The Stanley cup craze merely highlights the societal pressure all women feel to be married off at 30. It’s as if the big 3 0 is a life changing number and thus life must change with it and if it doesn’t, well you lost. You lost the race. In reality this is all nonsense, you’re no different at 29 than you are at 30. Thirty is just the arbitrary number of the times the earth has circled the sun, since you’ve been alive. It takes nothing like experience, background, trauma, finances, sexuality or anything else pertinent into account.
You mentioned you felt like “damaged goods” because you are approaching 30 and now single. That mindset, unfortunately, is the patriarchy speaking. It is their misogynistic whispers creeping around your psyche, undermining your worth and reducing you to a ‘thing’ a ‘good’ rather than a person. It tie women’s worth to the, now proven incorrect, theory that women’s fertility starts declining at 351. They conveniently forget to mention that men’s fertility also starts to decline at 35 as well.
You see, putting time pressure on women to settle down, before the horrors of ageing does unspeakable things to our womanly value, works very well for men. As they intend. It forces us to make panicked choices and choose a mediocre man. The insufferable “nice guy”. He, who has been waiting in the wings for another ripe young woman who has bought into the notion that youth and beauty are her only currency. You are his prey and once ensnared, he does You the supposed favour and marries you. In reality, he gets all the benefits of your labour, with none of the work. You’ll be picking up his smelly socks for a lifetime or until you realise that getting married before 30 wasn’t really it after all and divorce him.
So unless you intend to die at 40, life doesn’t actually stop at 30. You have a good 50 years of life left to live. The rise of STDs in old people’s homes proves the fun doesn’t stop, because we get older2. I find it bizarre that we only covet being in our 20s and it’s all downhill from then. That in our increasingly longer lives, we are only allowed to enjoy a mere 20 years of it? And after that, what? Damaged goods? Men don’t think this way, or at least rarely - so we shouldn’t either.
I want like to reassure you, you are not damaged goods. Think of yourself less like a ‘good’ and more like a seed. You’re slowly going to learn the lessons from this break up and grow into something so beautiful. Far from withering with age, you will bloom.
Finally, how do you motivate yourself to pursue dating again? It don’t know how recent, this recent break up was, but I would caution leaping into dating just yet. If you’re feeling particularly heartbroken, you said you thought he was the one, you have to wait for your heart to heal a bit.
Often we want to spring back into action, to prove we’re attractive and still worthy, to get some snippets of a boost to your now bruised ego. But you have to think of your heart like it is really broken. Just because you can’t see the wound, doesn’t mean it’s not there. You can’t run on a broken leg, and you can’t love on a broken heart either. You’d just be burying the pain and it would lead toxicity or worse hurting someone else you weren’t ready for. Take your time, I promise the men aren’t going anywhere. There are billions of them, do not let the idea that connections are rare or good men are sparse, rush your healing. It is hard and easier said than done, I know.
It is best to think of dating as a marathon, not a sprint. I treated it like full time job job, I used all my likes, I engaged with men’s prompts so they had something to reply with. I never matched anyone who ‘liked’ me first3. I talked to everyone I matched with if the conversation wasn’t good from the off, I unmatched. I didn’t need a queue of boring men collecting dust in my inbox. I went on multiple dates. Some were glamorous evenings in the Mandarin Oriental or the Wolsey, some were hots dogs on a freezing cold park bench, which was equally fun with the right person. Some were amazing, some were terrible and some were just average.4
The more I dated the more I learned; what I liked, what I didn’t like, I could tell quickly if a vibe was there or not and not waste my time. I took breaks from dating, I hooked up, I was ghosted, I ghosted, I was let down and also let down others. Dating can be awful, but it is also some of the most fun you can have. There’s nothing quite like that anticipatory tingle of leaning in for a first kiss, or the ripple of excitement when they brush their hand against your knee.
Personally actually wasted most of my early 30s in a bad relationship and I wish I had been single. Being in your 30s is just like being in your 20s but with a bit more money and better taste. It’s not a death sentence to love, life and children, it’s a reprieve!
https://slate.com/technology/2020/08/fertility-cliff-advanced-maternal-age-outdated.html
https://www.ageuk.org.uk/latest-press/articles/2019/october/as-stis-in-older-people-continue-to-rise-age-uk-calls-to-end-the-stigma-about-sex-and-intimacy-in-later-life/
It’s a personal choice. Much like Pokémon, I prefer to choose, rather than be chosen.
Average dates are arguably harder to deal with than bad dates. You know there’s no spark, but you want to give it another chance in case you missed something. In my experience it never worked out with average.