Turning Twenty and What That Means for Sex, Love, and Romance
Last month, I met up with a group of girls from school. To my surprise, in a group that had been predominantly made up of girls in serious relationships, most of them had, very suddenly and within a few weeks of each other, become single. They weren’t the only ones: in all parts of my life, over the past few months, many of the serious, practically-married relationships around me have been falling apart for various reasons. Meanwhile, my flatmate has been noticing the opposite. Many of her friends had always been perpetually single, strong proponents of the noncommittal lifestyle, and yet, recently, a large chunk of them have found themselves deeply in love and in committed relationships. An almost perfect example of “the grass is always greener on the other side”, we felt sure that this had to be more than a coincidence.
The cause? We have all just turned, or are soon turning, twenty. And that’s the thing about turning twenty. It does weird things to people.
Of course, coming out of lockdown and into a post-COVID summer is almost certainly a factor. Most of the world has been in limbo for well over a year, and so it is no surprise that people are looking for a change. But we also cannot ignore what the twenties represent: moving into a new era, a new phase of life. So what does it mean to be in your twenties for love, sex and romance?
The twenties are the real start of adulthood. Eighteen and nineteen are somewhat trial years; we get to play at being adults without actually having to face its reality. Twenty is when it really hits that the teenage years are gone, and the pressure to grow up starts breathing down your neck. Many of us graduate university within the next few years, which means we’re thinking about jobs, careers and long-term plans. We’re considering where we want to live and how we are going to start the rest of our lives. Relationships that were casual suddenly become a lot more serious as our trajectories through life become clearer, and as we start to navigate the difficult world of dating for fun versus dating for marriage, people gradually begin looking, whether consciously or not, for someone who fits into their future. The attitude of “if you’re not going to marry them, then what’s the point” reaches new heights as over time relationships become a lot less high school sweetheart and a lot more everyone around me is getting engaged.
And then there is the other side of the twenties. All we hear from adults is that your twenties are for having fun and warning us not to waste that; the trope of being single and free from commitment in your twenties is so persistent that I know people who have engineered their lives specifically for it. It is expected that your twenties are the most fun you will ever have; out from the watch of parents, earning your own money, but with no restrictions in the form of children or mortgages, twenty-year-olds are free to live in a way that no other age group can. Relationships that seemed singificant in the old version of our lives may not fit into the next, and the fear of wasting the opportunities presented by this particular age by hanging onto the last is pervasive. Those relationships that did once seem like marriage material are suddenly a lot more like naive high school romances that are meant to stay as such when measured up against the picture of what the twenties — the decade of risk and exploration — are apparently supposed to look like.
This dichotomy is clearly evidenced amongst most twenty-year-olds I know. Most people aren’t quite ready to settle down and be serious yet, and want to keep being carefree and having fun; they also want a family, a career, and a house by thirty, and herein lies the awkward juggle between wanting to be “young and free” while also chasing the promise of security and stability. Ultimately, there’s no right answer. There is no perfect way to go about entering your twenties. We’re all guessing, and everyone’s right is someone else’s wrong. I’m scared about the next ten years; my friends are too. But all we can do is muddle our way through, inevitably making mistakes and doing things we’ll regret. Personally, for all my anxieties and fears about what will come, I can’t wait.
by Zara Denham (Staff Love & Relationships Writer)
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