Don't waste a perfectly good decade

The experiences we have in our 20s disproportionately affect the adult lives we lead

“Eighty-percent of life’s most defining moments take place by age 35,” writes Dr. Meg Jay in The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—and How to Make the Most of Them Now.

This is a hard truth to swallow in a culture that grooms its young to view their twenty-something years as a free-for-all, a decade to live exclusively for the Self, tabling life’s most important decisions about marriage and family for some arbitrary date in the future. But it is a truth nonetheless.

There are other hard truths as well.

Like the fact that women in their 30s have a hard time finding a “marriageable” man.

Or the fact that the biological clock is real.

Or the fact that student debt is crippling young people, making women who do marry and who want to stay home with their children feel resentful and stuck.

Or the fact that most women who pursue big careers that leave little room for anything else hit a point at which it will feel as if it’s all been a waste of time since once they become mothers the pursuit of said career will feel far less important or at the very least impossible to keep up with now that they’ve thrown babies into the mix.

All of the above are uncomfortable facts. But they are very, very real for women today.

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For years now, the status quo in America has been that young people should deprioritize their romantic relationships. Love isn’t supposed to get in the way of anyone’s career aspirations, especially women’s.

To wit: It is common for young people in love to be told by their parents “not to worry about” getting serious with anyone, that there’s plenty of time for that later.

The message these sons and daughters receive is simple: Do not prioritize love. Get your career in order, and do not make sacrifices for anyone. Life (i.e. marriage and family) will fall into place later. And if you have to go into debt to achieve this goal, have at it. You can easily pay it off later.

This is spectacularly bad advice.

Every week I work with women for whom this approach to life has bombed. I don’t think the advice is particularly good for men either; it just happens to be less disastrous since men can always marry a younger woman and have a family later in life.

Another uncomfortable truth: Men, as a rule, who prioritize career when they’re young become more eligible, not less, as they get older. The same cannot be said for women.

That’s because men and women don’t look for the same things in a mate. No matter how much society may change, human nature does not. When it comes to settling down, women still look for security; and men still look for fertility.

It has to be this way because women get pregnant, and men do not. And that changes everything.

All of the above are why the decisions we make in our twenties matter. Indeed, the wrong ones can lead us down a path that can be hard to undo later—and this is a crucial lesson to learn early on. Unfortunately, parents aren’t teaching it.

“As American 30-somethings increasingly bypass the traditional milestones of adulthood, economists are warning that what seemed like a lag may in fact be a permanent state of arrested development,” writes Rachel Wolfe in The Wall Street Journal.

“The conventional explanation for what’s freezing young adults in place is that they can’t afford to grow up,” adds Wolfe. “Yet this doesn’t quite explain what’s going on.”

No, it doesn’t.

How we got here

It started out innocently enough. Many parents of the previous generation—Boomers, mainly, but Gen X too—regretted their choice to get married and have children early in life and as a result feel they missed out on living unencumbered by the demands and responsibilities of family life.

These folks assumed that when they married was the reason their marriages didn’t work out and thus decided to groom their children—again, their daughters, in particular—to postpone love and family as a way of making up for what they, as parents, purportedly missed. This was a stark departure from the way previous generations of parents raised their children.

My own parents (now deceased) hailed from the Greatest Generation, so I didn’t receive the message to “worry about marriage and family later.” Among other old-school values—work hard, save your money, embrace the value of delayed gratification—I was raised to put family first. Duty and obligation were repeatedly stressed.

But this is not the way many millennials (or even my fellow Gen Xers) would describe their upbringing. This group was more apt to hear about their rights than about their responsibilities.

They were more likely to have heard that career should come first and, if they’re female, that they should “never depend on a man.” Rather than highlight faith, family and flag, these parents honed in on personal feelings and moral relativity, or the idea that if it feels right it is right.

Boomers are also the generation that ushered in a culture of divorce. Consequently, the idea of pursuing one’s individual happiness—even at the expense of others— became the norm.

Over time, marriage ceased to be viewed as an institution that’s crucial for children’s well-being and became something one chooses as long as one is happy, which was a tectonic shift from the way people viewed marriage in the past because who lives an entire life being happy?

This brand new way of looking at life, with the twenty-something decade as a free-for-all and divorce as essentially innocuous, caused women (and by default, men) to begin mapping out their lives very differently from the way women did in the past.

The twenty-something years became a time to put off life’s responsibilities and to focus exclusively on the Self. Anything that gets in the way of this goal, including love (especially love!)—even with the right person—became viewed as backward at best, foolish at worst.

Indeed, the modern generation has been steeped in the idea that the Self should always come first. Relationships are fragile, they were told, so it’s dumb to put a romantic relationship first. Being products of divorce themselves, this message rung true. Better to focus one’s attention on that which we can control—our professional lives—than on that which we cannot: love.

Of course, it isn’t true that we have no control over how successful we are in love; but the narrative stuck nonetheless. It has been so successful, in fact, that today a majority of Americans say career enjoyment is more important than marriage for leading a fulfilling life.

This is a complete reversal from the way Americans used to view life.

But here’s the thing. If we now choose to value work over family, we will have to deal with the flip side: the fact that young people are failing to grow up.

Americans need to connect the dots. Ever see pictures of twenty-something men and women from the 1940s? Yes, the wardrobe back then made people look older than people of the same age look today. But folks back then didn’t just look grown up; they were grown up.

And that’s because people married in their twenties and either had families or were on their way to having families. They viewed these years as the beginning of life, not the end of an otherwise good life.

Many people point out that it is men, more than women, who aren’t growing up these days—and that is true. But that is largely because what makes most men grow up is…ta da…marriage!

In other words, if women are postponing the mere concept of marriage for an entire decade, men have little incentive to grow up. Some men will be motivated of their own accord; but most will remain stuck, frozen in time.

If, on the other hand, the expectation was that marriage and family was the priority, the goal, people’s raison d'être—men would know what to shoot for from the time they’re young.

Instead all they hear is that women are independent now and don’t “need” men.

Well then, they think to themselves, screw it.

Play the long game

Here’s something you may not know: The average age of marriage may have risen as a result of this new narrative, but the divorce rate holds steady. Writes Jay, “Doing something later is not necessarily the same as doing something better.”

Doing something later is not necessarily the same as doing something better.

As a marriage and relationship coach, I cannot stress how true this is. The vast majority of women who reach out to me are in their thirties and bought into the idea that their twenties were a time for fun—rather than a time to make smart, deliberate choices that would set them up well for the future.

They were under the impression that life would simply “come together” in their 30s, but it has not worked out that way. American women either can’t find a husband, or they did find one and now feel unable to stay home with their children due to the decisions they made early on per the bad advice they were given.

No one told them to prioritize love and family over career.

No one told them student debt will cripple their choices down the line.

No one told them to look for a man who is willing and able to support a family when the time comes.

No one told them to choose a career that’s flexible, one they can move in and out of over time, or do from home, or manage on a part-time basis.

As a result of this oversight, when women hit 30 they experience a light bulb moment, wherein they feel tremendous pressure to get married, to have children, and to figure out how to do life—all at the same time.

This is the worst time to figure this stuff out. The time to do so is early on, long before one is ever married.

The secret is to play the long game. Sadly, this has been lost in our “have to have it now” and “I’ll worry about that later” culture.

When you play the long game, you force yourself to look at your life as a whole and what you envision for everyday life in the future. You pan out and ask yourself, Where do I want to be in five years or even ten?

For example, if you’re a woman, do you envision yourself largely at home, managing that front and all that goes along with it while your husband is the primary breadwinner? Not that you won’t necessarily work at all but that home is your base lodge?

For some, reading that sentence sounds quaint—as if being able to do live this life is a crapshoot that depends solely on the economy.

But it isn’t quaint. It’s the choices we make early on—professionally, relationally, and financially—that determine whether or not this can happen.

Or maybe you envision your days primarily at the office and outsourcing everything else to family or to hired help. Either which way, you have to know where you see your life going in order to make the kind of choices early on that will get you there.

No, not everyone can map out their lives so succinctly and have everything fall into place. I get that. But to purposefully put the life side of the work-life equation on the back burner in your twenties, or to encourage one’s kids to do so, is a mistake.

It is infinitely harder to put a life together later when poor decisions were made early on.

How to avoid calling me when you’re 30

So if you’re reading this and you’re a woman in your twenties, how do you avoid becoming one of the thirty-something women who call me desperate for help with their personal lives?

1. Be open to love when you’re young (but don’t waste time with men who aren’t a match!). Don’t fall for the message that independence and freedom and career can fill you up—because they can’t and they won’t. Very few people are happy later in life if their relationships were sacrificed for a life focused on work or when they spent too much time with the wrong person because they thought they had all the time in the world. This is true for both sexes, but women have a different set of variables to work with when they’re young. Work with the biology you’ve been given.

2. Choose a flexible career. There has never been a better time for women to have both work and family in their lives, as long as you don’t try to do it all at once. Remote work has changed life for women. Take advantage of your options for home-based work or for work that’s more flexible in nature.

3. Assume that you will step out of the workforce, not that you won’t. The average woman today assumes the exact opposite, which is why she winds up stuck later on. All women ever hear is that it takes two incomes to “survive” today, which forms the mindset that you’ll have to work full-time and year-round your entire life. This leaves no room what will, for most women, become the most important thing in their lives: family. When you assume in advance that you will step out of the workforce, not that you won’t, it changes the professional, relational, and financial decisions you make. Don’t choose a career that’s all-consuming. Don’t marry a man who can’t or who won’t provide. Don’t take on a lot of debt or make financial decisions based on two incomes. See where I’m going?

4. Change the way you’ve been taught to think about debt. You might wonder what debt has to do with love, but it has everything to do with it because it produces a domino effect. When you take on debt, especially student loan debt, you limit your choices down the line. The assumption is that you’re always going to be in the workforce to pay it off, but that is not what most people who have children wind up doing. So even though you may not have family on your mind today, play the long game and know that someday soon you will. And the only way to have options in that space is to prepare for one income today. Living on one income will likely be temporary, but you will not want to have no options at all.

Bottom line: Don’t waste a perfectly good decade. Because the experiences you have in your twenties will disproportionately affect the adult life you lead.