Get top marks in school, go to an Oxbridge university, land a great job in the City, meet a perfect man, get married, and have children. All before you’re thirty.
Seemed like an easy enough formula to follow, and one that had been engrained since childhood. But what if you realise that getting into the best university in the world was the easiest part of that list? That you haven’t met anyone with whom there was a mutual desire to spend the rest of your lives together? And that as you watch your friends have children you realise that you can’t think of anything you’d like to do less than have one of your own?
I graduated, got the job, had the boyfriend, talked about marriage and kids, and everything was on track. I could see how things were going to be for the foreseeable future, and then everything came crashing down. I lost my job, my boyfriend cheated on me, and suddenly I was in a studio flat in London that was smaller than my college accommodation, without any idea of what was going to happen next…and I’d never been happier.
In my mid-twenties I got a reset on my adult life. I reconsidered the formula on becoming an Adult™ and realised that everything I considered to be true about being a person was built on a foundation of out-dated beliefs. Looking into the immediate past of generations before mine, the entire “get married before you’re thirty” idea alone fails half of the time, so why are we still idealising a lifestyle that clearly isn’t for everyone?
I ultimately came to the conclusion that sexuality is fluid, gender is a social construct, marriage is stupid and babies are boring. I also realised that I could literally be whatever I wanted. And what I wanted was to be a slut and to do whatever I want. A philosophy that has kept me happily single, child-free, and allowed me to travel the world whilst doing what I loved most – writing and being a hoe.
This is a book about how not to be an Adult™.
Seemed like an easy enough formula to follow, and one that had been engrained since childhood. But what if you realise that getting into the best university in the world was the easiest part of that list? That you haven’t met anyone with whom there was a mutual desire to spend the rest of your lives together? And that as you watch your friends have children you realise that you can’t think of anything you’d like to do less than have one of your own?
I graduated, got the job, had the boyfriend, talked about marriage and kids, and everything was on track. I could see how things were going to be for the foreseeable future, and then everything came crashing down. I lost my job, my boyfriend cheated on me, and suddenly I was in a studio flat in London that was smaller than my college accommodation, without any idea of what was going to happen next…and I’d never been happier.
In my mid-twenties I got a reset on my adult life. I reconsidered the formula on becoming an Adult™ and realised that everything I considered to be true about being a person was built on a foundation of out-dated beliefs. Looking into the immediate past of generations before mine, the entire “get married before you’re thirty” idea alone fails half of the time, so why are we still idealising a lifestyle that clearly isn’t for everyone?
I ultimately came to the conclusion that sexuality is fluid, gender is a social construct, marriage is stupid and babies are boring. I also realised that I could literally be whatever I wanted. And what I wanted was to be a slut and to do whatever I want. A philosophy that has kept me happily single, child-free, and allowed me to travel the world whilst doing what I loved most – writing and being a hoe.
This is a book about how not to be an Adult™.
