The 13 Things All Thirtysomethings Think About

published 31 July 2014

You start to realize who you are by defining what you want for yourself in the future. You don't care that he's an investment banker, owns his own pad, and can't stop talking about being a dad one day. He has a cat. You will never, ever be a cat person (no matter how much your mom begs and pleads).

That you're done wearing that style or trend. You slowly start to realize that every shopping site you've ever loved is really geared to the twentysomething, so getting dressed has become increasingly more difficult. You don't want to be pegged as the woman who who dresses like a tween.

Major manxiety. If you've been dating for 6 months, it is not totally unreasonable to expect a commitment. Will you ever get married and have kids?

Where you are in your career, really. It's a career, not a job. The glass ceiling is a very real thing that starts to piss you off. You thought you'd be making so much more money and be so much further along by now.

OMG…they're getting divorced? That's the third set of friends you've known to split. And, you went to each of their weddings five years earlier. At least you didn't marry the guy you dated when you were 25. But you would have been able to say you were married though.

Your 15-year or 20-year reunion is not a far off event…it's happening. You need to start working out more.

Your doctor told you that your cholesterol is a bit on the high side. He cautions you about eating too much cheese, red meat, and fried foods, and drinking too much alcohol. Whaaa?!

Most of your Facebook feed is now polluted with your friends' photos of their kids. As if their kids eating spaghetti and getting it all over the place is the cutest thing ever. All you can think about is how horrible that mess is going to be to clean up. Your ovaries just cried a little.

Your new dinner date. When you go out to dinner with your married friends and the conversation ultimately goes in two directions: option a) your friends talk about all of their newly single (AKA divorced) guy friends they can set you up with or option b) your friends tell you how lucky you are to be single and want to hear about all of your sexual escapades.

Hangovers take days not hours to get over. Instead of going out to a club, getting wasted, eating pizza at 3 a.m., hooking up with some random, and waking up the next day feeling like sunshine and roses, you now go out to dinner at a fairly expensive restaurant with friends, get wasted, hook up with your friend's friend from work, and wake up the next morning not only feeling like you've been run over by a truck, but appalled you would ever hook up with a man with so much chest hair. You wonder if he wants kids.

You actually care about your financial future. You start to think about paying off your credit card debt and your 401K plan—you should actually start to contribute to it.

Stuff your parents used to say to you actually starts to make sense. Like putting 10% of your paycheck into a savings account. And, actually regretting that Tweedy Bird tattoo on your ankle.

Wanting nicer things. Furniture that doesn't come in a box with an Allen wrench and 12 pages of instructions. You'd actually be very happy if you never saw an Allen wrench ever again. Getting an apartment with a few nice amenities. Realizing that paying $50 to have something delivered is very reasonable.

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