I recently went to a very pleasant engagement party for a friend of the Mrs. She knows the bride to be from Uni so predictably there were many of her former student colleagues in attendance. Being a few years younger than me, the average age of the attendees was around th 24-25 year bracket. Much drink was taken and much injokery ensued.
Early in proceedings it became clear that some kind of contest was being staged, where 'competitors' were judges on how far thery had progressed socially to decide who was the most grown up. Bizarrely (in a non-offensive way), my Mrs won, simply because she was engaged and was in the process of looking for her second house.
To me, this is odd. At her age I already had a mortgage, car and was forging a fledging career, but it seemed this group (many of whom have glittering careers in the upper echelons of society to look forward to) were simply unprepared for the world at large, and deemed any kind of security as a sign of being grown up.
I think a percentage of that is purely financial. I bought my house just before prices rocketed 5 or 6 years ago, so a mortgage was not the financially-crippling millstone it is now. But engagement? I knew 2 engaged couples at Uni, and I didn't deem them particularly grown up. Naive, certainly; stupid, possibly, but grown up? Not really.
I think the simple fact is that despite the fact I'm only 5 years older than this group, society and its outlook has shifted so far as to almost deem it another generation. Don't get me wrong; I don't consider myself particularly mature (skip to the end for evidence) but I think the steps I took in my early twenties (car, career, mortgage, etc) were just the done thing; nobody considered it grown up per se. It was just what you did once you left Uni.
At the end of the day, I could judge this quasi-next generation til the cows come home, but I recently got tutted at by a middle-aged woman because I flicked the V's at a Manchester United poster in Tescos, so I don't know what to believe...
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