Sorry To Break It To You, But Everything You Love In Your 20s, You’ll Hate In Your 30s

Things happen between your 20s and your 30s. Ten years may not seem like a long time, but a decade can change everything. You almost become a different person. Here’s what happens:

1. Unpredictability starts to scare the living hell out of you. Flying by the seat of your pants is fun in your 20s. You may not have the luxury to do it long or it may be a way of life – who knows? There’s still time, though, and fewer consequences for doing something spontaneous with no forewarning whatsoever. By the time you hit your 30s, you have to plan lunch dates two months in advance and due to an abundance of pets (me) or kids, spontaneous road trips and impromptu vacations are extinct.
2. You don’t worry about the stuff you’re missing. At some point between your 20s and your 30s, FOMO becomes MOFO – Missing Out Feels Okay. I personally felt that way throughout most of my 20s, but I’d genuinely be happy as a hermit, so I’m a bad judge. The point is, as you get older, you stop envying all the fun everyone else is having, especially when you’re “missing out on” activities you don’t really enjoy anyway. You learn how to make your own fun.
3. You’ll stop hating your closet. I know, that sounds shallow and unimportant, but it’s not. Women spend so much of their 20s discovering who they are, and part of that involves defining their sense of style … and that is hard. Jumping from trend to trend is so tempting, and you really can’t learn what looks good on you until you try out different styles and fashions. As you careen toward your 30s, however, you’ll find that you no longer look in your closet and despair of what to wear because it’s filled with flattering, comfortable, complementary clothing.
4. You won’t be such a huge fan of trends anyway. Oh, some of them will appeal to you – mermaid hair, nail art, overalls – but you won’t fall all over yourself to follow them anymore and you know that you only need one pair of overalls, not twelve.
5. Your ideas about an ideal partner will likely undergo a huge transition. Some things are simply more important when you’re young and enmeshed in the dating scene. The traits that seem boring and uninteresting in your 20s become valuable and desirable in your 30s.
6. You’ll stop hating the drama in your love life. At least, that’s the hope – ideally because there won’t be as much drama in your love life. You’ll start looking for stability over flash and sizzle. Love and lust are much more distinguishable from each other, too, which is the real kicker.
7. You won’t hate the drama in your friend groups, either. Again, this is because, hopefully, there won’t be nearly as much drama in your circle of friends. As with your choice of partner, you start pinpointing what matters most in your friendships as you move from your 20s to your 30s. You may even go from having a huge group of friends to a close circle of them.
8. Other women will go from competitors to sisters. Yet again, this is the ideal. Viewing other women as competition is unfortunately all too common. Sometimes, we see other women who have something we want and jealousy becomes cattiness or hatred. As you grow, though, you learn the value of standing with other women, primarily because you realize that even the most enviable woman you meet has problems of her own that you simply can’t see.
9. You’ll fall out of love with uncertainty. There’s an allure to it when you’re young enough to find yourself. As with unpredictability, though, uncertainty gets scarier as you get older. You’re no longer wondering if you have to eat Ramen for a week or skip Starbucks, you’re worried about missing a car payment or not having enough for rent or mortgage.
10. Yourself – you’ll love yourself more than you did in your 20s. Self-confidence comes with age and experience. I never really believed it. Just as an example, there are still parts of my body that I hate and work to improve, but even though I’m not at my peak confidence level, I’m so much more confident than I was in my 20s. I think it’s partly because I now bank my confidence on my talents, my personality, my best features, and my intelligence, not my body.