Like a well Matured Merlot

The best part about being one of the very youngest among your circle of friends is that you always get to feel nice and “young’ in like” when hanging out with them. The downside can be that when out on your own, getting a reality check on the fact that you are in actuality NOT all that “young’ in like” and in fact part of the +25 age bracket can be a bit of a gob smacking experience!!

It also doesn’t help that I’m hopeless when it comes to hazarding a guess about a person’s age. I tend to judge people against myself, and that’s not a good measuring bar at all as today’s teenagers look older than I do, and I have the mental maturity of a 10 year old – on a good day!

Case in point; Earlier this year when I was traveling in Osaka, I hooked up* with two Aussi dudes and we wandered around the city together discovering the joys of the Dotonbori District. As we traded emails at the end of the night, I realized that the 86 after the one guy’s name could only stand for the year he was born making him a whole 5 YEARS younger than me!!! I had just spent an entire evening with 2 people who were probably still floating in amniotic fluid while I was in Kindergarten learning my ABCs!! Blast, Bother and Damnation!

Back in my college days, I received a gem of advice from a friend’s mom.
She said – Marry/ date someone who is at least 4 years older than you, and every day of that relationship you are guaranteed to feel good about yourself! And the day he turns 50, you will rejoice even more coz you’ll have (at least) 4 more years to go!

Ironically, all of my boyfriends have been 4+ years older than me. Well, there was that one dude I dated who was my age, but he was a rebound relationship and it only lasted 2 months anyway.

I think I generally like the idea of an “older man”. Being someone who tends to bend the scales (a bit), I like the idea of being “smaller” than my partner in some tangible sense! Some of my friends will say that I stretched this concept to the extreme with my first boyfriend who was a whopping 11 years older than I. While there may not appear to be a large gap between 32 and 43, there do tend to be eyebrows raised when it is 16 and 27!

Starting a career young can also have a distinct impact on your perceived age in the workplace. Although I was younger than most of my colleagues at my previous job, most people thought I was much older simply due to the fact that I was one of the most tenured employees in the department. Didn’t do much for my ego AT ALL I tell ya, when I was occasionally treated as being totally over-the-hill by someone who was 3 years older than me!

There are days when I cannot wait to hit my 30s. I think I’m just hoping that most of my life will be “sorted” by then. Or at least the important bits.

And then there are days when I feel that already at 26 I’m an aged fossil, and that my 30s will just be too hard to handle – especially since I’ll have one foot in the grave, and the other on a banana peel!


*Hooked up as in “hung out with” you dirty gutter inhabiting minds!