I am in my early 30s, unmarried, and increasingly afraid that I may have missed my chance at the life I’ve always imagined. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted children and a loving partnership that embodies safety, warmth and a shared sense of joy in living. But lately, that future feels more like a fantasy than a possibility.
Many of my closest friends are in similar positions, yet one friend is happily married with her first child and already planning a second. Watching the tenderness and stability in her marriage is both beautiful and painful. Her husband embodies so many of the qualities I long for in a partner, and I find myself wondering whether that kind of love is something I will ever experience, or whether it simply isn’t meant for me.
I worry that it may be too late, that all the “good ones” are already taken. I spent much of my 20s with someone I now realise I never truly loved and whose life no longer aligns with mine. I can’t help but feel I’ve wasted precious time. On top of this, I struggle to keep my heart open. I want to fall in love, but I also feel guarded, uncertain and disconnected from the hope that it could still happen.
How do I make peace with the fear that the life I want may not come to pass? And how can I remain open to love and possibility when I feel so late to begin again?
Eleanor says: One of my favourite philosophers thinks that whether you’re in hope or despair has less to do with how likely you think the outcome is and everything to do with what you focus on. Say you and I both sign up for an experimental drug that’s cured a 10th of the people who’ve taken it so far. One of us focuses on the fact that it might work. The other on the fact that it probably won’t. We could both have exactly the same view about the likelihoods – that it works for 10% of people – but where we put our attention can make the difference between hope or despair.
The most hopeful people I’ve known often don’t try to get precise about likelihoods. They don’t seem to pick that scab like the rest of us: “Will it happen? Is it meant for me? How do I know?” They focus on the fact that it might happen, and then leave the tea leaves alone until it does or it doesn’t.
You said you feel uncertain, disconnected from hope. One response is to say that it’s actually pretty likely you’ll find what you’re looking for. That’s what I’m tee’d up to say, here – that’s what we tee anyone up for when we say, “I’m worried it’ll never happen”. The call-and-response goes, “Don’t be silly, of course it will”.
And there are indeed good reasons to think that. Some of the most stable marriages I know started in midlife or as second marriages. A lot of “good ones” are made that way by years of experience and self-reflection. Life experience can turn people into better candidates for partnership. And though your early 30s might be full of people looking like they’ve found it, your 40s might see a big chunk of them realising they were wrong. Love comes at any time.
These are just some of the reassurances you can show yourself to prove that, most likely, you have not missed your love. After all, you just need one.
But it sounds like those reassurances aren’t always enough. The uncertainty is hungry. So a different strategy might be thinking, “look, never mind trying to answer how likely it is that I’ll find love, I’m just going to focus on the possibility that I might”. In a wave of doubt like “will I experience it or won’t I”, try to stop asking the question, instead of trying to give the reassuring answer. Not prodding at the probabilities underneath hope might help you maintain it.
Neither of us can know what will happen. Maybe you’ll meet someone, maybe you won’t. But whatever happens, you can have a rich and fulfilling life. Family, including having children in your life, takes all kinds of forms. Perhaps one way to regain a sense of control might be to look practically and seriously at ways you might have kids in your life, even if you don’t have the kind of partnership you expected on the timeline you expected.
Sometimes we confuse “this isn’t the life I thought I’d have” with “this isn’t a life I can enjoy”. How can you build a life you can enjoy, even if it doesn’t quite look like your first plan?
Uncertainty about a future dear to you can be incredibly hard to live with. But perhaps the way to deal with that unpleasantness isn’t to ask “how can I know?” but: “Which possibility will I choose to focus on, given that I don’t know?”
