We’re all in this together

From as far back as I can remember, I’ve always had friends who were significantly older than me. Sure, my best friends were my age, and when I was fourteen I had other fourteen-year-old girls to share giggly playground secrets with. But I still liked the older kids: the cool 18-year-old who’d just gotten his driver’s licence (and would let me drive one nervous block around my neighbourhood), the 25-year-old who would buy me dinner to celebrate her first real job.

I’m not sure what it was, but we seemed to enjoy each others’ company enough, and for the most part they were still surrounded by plenty of non pre-pubescent friends. 

Things haven’t changed much. I’ve just hit my mid-twenties (damn that dirty word, ‘mid’) and some of my favourite people to be around are thirty-somethings. There’s just something about this age group. These blessed beings straddle that divide between youth and ‘proper’ adulthood, they’ll still order cocktails with terrible names, and they are not yet at the point in their lives where it is appropriate to start a sentence with “When I was your age…”.

Here’s a couple of other reasons to celebrate thirty-somethings:

They’re jaded, but funny
Because they understand life is not always sunny meadows and rainbows, they’re more practical about things. While those in their thirties have had enough misadventures to last them well into the next age bracket, they mostly laugh it off. These people rarely prescribe best-scenario outcomes, but thirty-somethings are some of the most secretly optimistic people I know.

They’ll never whine about pimples
Annoying, habitual drama is unbecoming in your third decade of living, so they know how to tone it down. In our tweeny, twenty-something stages it is still necessary to complain about bad hair and crappy jobs and shite boyfriends and paying too much rent for a tiny room in the city. In your thirties you just get off your ass and get on with things.  

They’re less likely to say ‘I told you so’
Fresh from the scars of a foolish youth, thirty-somethings are still familiar with the social, financial, and personal faux-pax that plague the earlier years. They possess a unique wisdom that is characterised neither by the naivety of those in their twenties nor by the stoic arrogance of world-weary adults. Oh, don’t get me wrong, they’re not Jesus — they still mess up, and will laugh in your face when you trip. But they’ll probably help you right back up.

They’ll pay for drinks 
The injustice that is the underpaid, overworked years of our twenties: they’ve all been there. If there’s a single reason to be around older people, this one is it.
 

To one of my favourite thirty-somethings in the world: Happy Birthday, Julia Gulia. Let 2009 be fabulous.

---