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Quiet Aches That Happen in Your Thirties
Silent, heavy burdens no one admits.
I never thought our friendship would end. We had met in college. Though I lived on the other side of the world, I implicitly thought we’d be friends forever. Then I found out he got married. He had neither told nor invited me.
I’m 35 now, so we had spent roughly half our lives as friends, or so I thought. But in reality, a friendship had ended — not with a fight, but with a slow, quiet drifting apart, which ironically felt more hard-hitting.
Your thirties are weird. You can’t relate to who you were just a few short years ago. Marquee moments of others become a reflection of your own life choices, goals, and dreams. You hold a newborn with a heart swelling with joy and a head full of questions you dare not ask aloud. Do I want kids? Can I have kids? Will I regret having them or not having them? Does anyone know what they’re doing?
You celebrate your friend’s engagement. You’re happy for them, of course, whilst wondering if it will happen to you. You assumed you’d have a loving partner by now. You hope it’s out there waiting for you.
You watch people a decade younger than you build the life you had once dreamed of. Social media does little to help. You’re still searching for your next step. Meanwhile, people are achieving financial independence at an age where you strung together enough beer money to last the night.
You feel the weight of ‘nearly’. The ‘what ifs?’. Timelines that never unfolded the way you thought and hoped. These feelings linger in quiet moments and arrive unannounced. They sit between contentment and quiet desperation.
When we feel behind in life, our mind exaggerates the circumstances. It conveniently slips over the others’ problems, focusing solely on what they have and what we lack. We see the happy smiles. We don’t see the distance, rows, and sexlessness.
We disregard the coin-flip odds that the happy engagement will end in divorce just a few years later. Or the grown families who don’t talk to each other. Or the couple who have kids to paper over the cracks in their marriages, only to find themselves entangled in a deeper web of complications.
