'WHY 30 IS NOT THE NEW 20' By Meg Jay #shorts

When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client.
I was a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Berkeley.
She was a 26-year-old woman named Alex.
Now Alex walked into her first session wearing jeans and a big slouchy top,
and she dropped onto the couch in my office and kicked off her flats and told me she was there to talk about guy problems.
Now when I heard this, I was so relieved.
My classmate got an arsonist for her first client.
And I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys.
This I thought I could handle.
But I didn't handle it.
With the funny stories that Alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road.
"Thirty's the new 20," Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right.
Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later.
Twentysomethings like Alex and I had nothing but time.
But before long, my supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love life.
I pushed back.
I said, "Sure, she's dating down, she's sleeping with a knucklehead, but it's not like she's going to marry the guy."
And then my supervisor said, "Not yet, but she might marry the next one.
Besides, the best time to work on Alex's marriage is before she has one."
That's what psychologists call an "Aha!" moment.
That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20.
Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime.
That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there, blowing it.
That was when I realized that this sort of benign neglect was a real problem, and it had real consequences,
not just for Alex and her love life but for the careers and the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere.