When Do We Become Adults, Really?
March 2, 2026 at 03:30PMDividing life into stages is an ancient, unifying urge—an effort to contain something altogether too fluid, like trying to hold water in a cardboard box. Shayla Love gracefully sets this history of life stages, as a concept, within a consideration of her own.
I’m no historian of Europe, but I liked the thought experiment of redefining the beginnings and endings in my life. On a rainy evening last week, my husband and I went to a local bar and talked about when our current stage actually began: when we met? When we started dating? When we got engaged? He quickly complicated the issue by bringing up a day in Toronto, in 2023, when we were both reading and he fell asleep with his head in my lap. “I’d never done that before,” he told me. “There was deep trust.” Later that year, we took a tilemaking class on Catalina Island, in California, and he said that he liked feeling as if he was on a honeymoon. I asked him what makes him feel married now. He thought for a while and said, “My art and your art hanging together on the walls.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/03/02/life-stages-history-established-adulthood/
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