Turning 27 and my failed marriage plot

I blame Beyoncé

Today is my 27th birthday, and while it’s unremarkable in comparison to 30 or 25, I have been thinking of this day for the past 19 years. Specifically, I have been thinking of being 27 and Beyoncé. 

I was 8 years old when I read that Beyoncé was marrying Jay-Z in People magazine. I remember this clearly because it was a very serious, very pivotal moment in my life. A moment that I now see has been pulling levers in my head.

The piece of information that stuck out to me in this article was that Beyoncé (who started dating this man at 19) decided to wait until she was at least 25 to get married—she and Jay-Z wed in 2008 when she was 26. The lethal takeaway for me was that it is possible to get married too young, and there is an age when things are just right. 

Naturally, I trusted Beyoncé’s judgment and decided that 27 was my number—I must’ve figured that since I wasn’t Beyoncé I’d give myself two years of a buffer. 

For most of my life, getting married at 27 was just something silly to say and didn’t hold much gravity. Like the lifespan of many jokes, I said it often enough until it crystallized into a real belief.  

Eventually I grew up, and kissed a few boys, got a serious boyfriend and for many years we kept on kissing and didn’t break up. At some point I felt 8 year old me whispering in my ear: “Beyoncé… 27… marriage.” So I did what I have been doing since I was 8 and I made the plan for how my life would fall together:

June 2017 - graduate, move to San Francisco with my own Jay-Z

June 2019 - begin 2 years of long distance 

June 2021 - move in together (again) in NYC 

July 2021 - get engaged 

July 2021- July 2022 - plan wedding

July 2022 - get married

It all sounds very neurotic but there is a part of me that  has some respect for the girl behind that list. She is naive enough to think that she can control her twenties, but has the moxie to try. Anyways, according to the timeline, the summer I turned 27 was the summer I got married. Well today I am 27 and today I am not getting married. 

That boyfriend and I broke up a few months before my 25th birthday and I sometimes imagine this as a fork in the road of my life so far. Down one path is that life I had planned. Down the other is the universe you and I are living in. 

I often feel like my greatest luck comes from not getting the things I want. When I look around at where I am, what I’m doing, who I’m with, I realize that everything I have and everything I love, never existed in the original plan. There was no room for all of this over there on that other road. 

Still, as my 27th birthday has loomed on the horizon, I’ve realized ever since that relationship ended I have slowly been filing away all my experiences, waiting for moments to hold them up to the light in one hand with my expectations in the other. 

Sometimes I hold up the expectation card and think, “Hmm, I guess I would be having a bridal shower right now.” I look around and my boyfriend is making me a cup of coffee on our vacation. Or sometimes it’s “I was supposed to be moving into a one bedroom with his and her sides of the closet right now,” instead I’m holding a cardboard box moving into my own one bedroom.

This habit of looking back at the old plan, seeing what I’m tracking against, it’s all a big misdirection. At first it feels good, gratifying even. I look at my life and pat myself on the back. But this is the problem with any comparison: you are always playing someone else’s game. I am here in this portion of the multiverse living my life still looking over my shoulder to see if the other me, the old me, would approve. 

I know reflection is a healthy, even necessary, practice that but after a while of this I start question if I am really living for myself. There comes a point where you have to say enough is enough to the past. Eventually you have to cut off the 8 year old girl still pulling strings and say goodbye forever to all the comparisons.  

I think what I crave most now is to live unaware of all the plans that existed. Following one has never served me before, in fact the best periods of my life have always happened off-road.

Here’s the most cringeworthy part of my old timeline though: after 27, it all cuts off. I never thought beyond 27, which is to say I never thought beyond getting married. It is fairly humiliating to write that out and blast it to the internet. 

Still, the embarrassment is also a silver lining because life after 27 is a big blank page. There is no more, “Hmm this was supposed to happen.” I think I can finally cut ties with the idea that there is a right or wrong time for life's milestones—something I have known for a long time but have only slowly begun to accept in my heart.

This year, I am looking forward to not having any more expectation cards left. I finally feel like my future belongs to the current me writing this newsletter, not the one writing that timeline, and not the 8 year old reading People.