Breakups in Your Thirties

In good news for alt-rock synth-pop music fans everywhere, Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn have broken up after six secretive years’ dating.

I like her music, I like her lyricism, and I like what she has to say about affairs of the heart. But every artist needs new inspiration periodically, and Midnights (2022) has all the hallmarks of a breakup album in disguise, of someone grieving the end of a relationship they’re still in.

She’s written about breakups before, of course, but never a breakup like this.

Taylor Swift is 34, Joe Alwyn is 32. A breakup in your thirties is a unique proposition. You might even say it’s “Bigger Than the Whole Sky”.

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Despite valiant attempts to redefine the timeline, we remain creatures of habit and our thirties are for coupling up and settling down.

I’ve never found myself overly enamoured by this particular aspect of how we choose to live.

It’s quite a claustrophobic expectation, for one thing.

And in a culture which says marry for love or do not marry at all, the imposition of any timeline whatsoever seems to miss the point entirely.

And if it’s the tick tock of the biological clock that’s the worry, well — by your thirties — we’ve already left it kind of late.

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But living in a chokehold is (and perhaps always has been) the fashion of the time, and it makes starting over in your thirties slightly tricky.

For it comes with the weight of an expectation.

It’s not like your twenties when everyone is young, free and single and the future is a long way off on a distant horizon.

It’s a different vibe.

In your thirties, a lot of people are already in committed relationships. They tend to their careers during the week, and they tend to their children at the weekend.

So they have limited remaining bandwidth for their single friends.

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And you might not want to spend too much time with them anyway. They’re living the life you thought you were about to have.

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It happened to me just before I turned thirty.

I was in a relationship, I had a job I loved, I had a good family life, and I had a sense my life was on track.

When that relationship ended (his choice, not mine), I saw my future crumble before my eyes.

You go from thinking you’ve got your life sorted out (the job you love by 25, married by 30, maybe two kids by 35) to seeing it all just vanish.

And you can tell by people’s response that the stakes have changed. No one says things like plenty more fish in the sea. What they say is how sorry they are.

And the way they look at you reinforces what you’re already thinking: he’s gone, and he’s left me high and dry.

…

You put pressure on yourself to start dating. Meeting someone new can take the edge off, some people say.

My advice is don’t bother. It just makes it worse, and people can smell your desperation.

And what’s the point, anyway?

Dating should be fun. It should be about how good he looks in his Nikes and his skinny jeans. It shouldn’t be about timescales and windows of opportunity and worrying you’re running out of time. Yet the mind has a nasty habit of fixating on what it can’t have.

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The stakes are certainly higher. Life matters more somehow, don’t you find, as the years go on.

In your twenties, a breakup can feel momentary, a rite of passage even.

In your thirties, starting over is a more painstaking, painful process.

You may have owned property together. You may have merged your finances. You were likely part of each other’s family. And so unpicking the entanglements of your previous life is not straightforward.

Is it any wonder you might need more time to heal? That you might be more wary of entering into something else?

Rare is the catastrophe that strikes only once.

The risk of history repeating itself is emotionally taxing in a very specific sort of way.

And all the while you can’t shake that nagging feeling there’s a diminishing pool of partners, that most of the people who understand what it takes to be in a relationship are already in one.

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And yet it is increasingly commonplace predicament.

The divorce courts are full of failed starter marriages people entered into with their childhood sweethearts.

At the other end of the scale are all the millennials who wait longer to date seriously in the first place. Hookup culture does rather get in the way of candlelit dinners and romantic getaways; there are only so many hours in the day. For many a millennial, a proper first relationship begins in your late twenties, and it ends as you enter your third decade.

(That also means, incidentally, there’s a lot of high-achieving men out there with the relationship skills of a teenage boy.)

…

It turned out well for me in the end, and I hope it turns out well for Taylor too.

But it was tough, at times impossibly hard. You have to give up on what you thought you had. What you thought was sturdy and real, in fact a precious illusion.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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