Unexpected item in the baggage area

When you meet someone in your 30s, you bring a little more baggage to the party. Unpacking it can be scary

One of my favourite bits of dialogue from the (somewhat underappreciated) Noughties TV show Girls is when Shoshana introduces Hannah to the gameshow ‘Baggage’.

Shoshana: They each have three suitcases... a little one, a medium one, and a big one. And in them they have, like, their secret baggage and they reveal it. And if it's super freaky, he eliminates them. Okay, like this chick...

Hannah: The black one or the blonde one?

Shoshana: The black one. Her littlest baggage is that she spends $1,000 a month on her weave, which host Jerry Springer thinks is ‘unbe-weave-able’. Her medium baggage is that she plans her wedding after the first date, and her biggest baggage is that she pokes holes in cоndоms.

Hannah: Whoa! That’s a crazy thing to do.

Shoshana: I know. What would you put in your baggage?

Hannah: I don't know, I feel like...

Shoshana: So like, for me, I think that my littlest baggage would probably be my IBS. And my medium baggage would be that I truly don't love my grandmother.

Hannah: Like, you don't love her at all?

Shoshana: Mm-mm.

Hannah: So then what would your biggest baggage be?

Shoshana: That I'm a virgin. Obviously.

I miss Shosh

Incidentally, this is from one of the best Girls episodes of all time, ‘All Adventurous Women Do’ — if you only ever watch one episode of the show, make it this one (and thank me when you’re shimmying round your bedroom to Robyn’s Dancing On My Own). We find out that Hannah’s biggest baggage is that she has HPV (Human Papilloma Virus), which she found out earlier that episode.

One of my favourite things about meeting someone in my mid-30s is that we already know who we are — two fully-formed people, not necessarily looking to each other to complete or improve us. It’s more about acceptance at this stage in the game.

One of my least favourite things is that, the baggage people of our age (36 and 40) carry can be somewhat larger and heavier than for those in, say, their early 20s. We’re less bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and optimistic than we were 10 years ago. Life has made us a little more gnarled and cynical. But even in my early 30s, I used to go on dates feeling my baggage trailing behind me, almost physical in its weight — waiting for the moment when I had to reveal its contents.

Here’s what I was sitting on.

My littlest baggage

My littlest baggage, to steal Shoshana’s words, is that I can’t drive. (Or rather, I can now, relatively calmly and avoiding most incidents, but I haven’t passed the driving test.) Having abandoned learning at 17, I have spent the past five months learning as an adult. My test is next week. I am not a natural driver. I get in my head and worry about all the ways each journey could go wrong, often freezing just at the moments when I need to make a quick decision and move. A massive thing I’ve learned from the process is that I have not done anything in years that took me out of my comfort zone. I am reliably good at most things I do for work. My hobbies are all things that come naturally to me. I don’t tend to dabble in extreme sports or adrenaline-spiking activities. It’s been good for me — if arse-clenchingly scary at times — to accelerate out of my comfort zone on a weekly basis.

Despite dreading mentioning it, I didn’t get any flak from my partner for being a non-driver. In fact, I think most of the awkwardness I experienced revealing that fact to people came from myself. Rather than just ‘not having got around to it’, I knew on some level that not driving said something about me — something suspect. That I was risk averse, liked the comfort zone, shirked responsibility, put off doing the big things? I know that’s thinking way too deeply about using a wheely pedal-driven machine to get from A to B, but learning this year has definitely meant confronting some big things about myself. I’ll be pleased to burn that bit of baggage.

If you can believe it, I’m marginally better than Cher

My medium baggage

While “I truly don’t love my grandmother” remains a stone cold classic, mine was “I have never had a relationship that lasted longer than a year”. Prior to this one (now at two years), I’d fallen in love a handful of times, but it was always in seemingly doomed circumstances, and at best pootled along for 11 months or so. Growing up with a raft of friends that had three-, five-, eight- or even 10-year relationships under their belt by their late 20s, I felt like such a freak for this. It seems comical to me now; if you are confident and comfy enough being without a partner, why not stay that way?

But the message behind the maths — no one has stuck around past a year — always made me feel truly unlovable. I can rationally see that I was keeping myself out of commitment every bit as much as men were refusing to commit to me. Every man I sat down opposite at a southwest London pub always had such a relationship CV: their home town sweetheart, their university girlfriend, their first big twenties relationship. Everyone was falling into years-long commitments without a second thought; they blinked and a decade had gone by. Why am I such a man-repeller? I thought, on the regular. Turns out, no one who really likes you sees a spacious relationship CV as a negative — fewer ghosts of partners past to contend with, if anything. But it does often mean I don’t know what the heck I’m doing in relationship scenarios. Hence this Substack…

It’s all the sucky driving, Cher

My biggest baggage

My biggest baggage in several of the key dating years, from 2014 to 2021, was that I was grieving. My sister died, relatively suddenly (she had a chronic illness) in 2014 and I truly believe that made me a worse dater. Not only did I dread bringing it up, and seeing their ashen faces as they felt bad for me, but grieving alone is a heavy old thing — you don’t necessarily project sunshine and candyfloss when you’re mired in that kind of thing. The truth is, I probably wasn’t that much fun. I’d want to talk about it but then I’d lower the mood; or else I wouldn’t be able to talk about it, and I’d question if that guy was for me, if I couldn’t open up about such an important event.

It feels grossly unfair that someone whose family member or friend happens to have died should feel bereavement as extra baggage when going on a date. But it’s a tough subject to navigate and an obstacle when getting close to someone new. On the other hand, if you’re on a date with someone and you’ve both lost someone close to you in recent years, it can be a really bonding experience — I had a few ‘Might he be the one?’ experiences of being drawn to someone purely because they had the same death spidey-sense I did: they felt the same tick of the clock and the same post-grief nihilism. Over time, I became less like Wednesday Addams on dates and felt comfortable chatting about my sister to new guys.

Am I without baggage now? No, the same things still weigh oddly heavily. I don’t earn as much as my partner, which can feel like baggage when the big life expenses rear their head. Are there still mini baggages — vanity cases and washbags, perhaps — that I haven’t even peeked into? Undoubtedly. But on this side of commitment I do feel the acceptance. He’s got his, I’ve got mine, and we try our best not to hit each other as we drag them around behind us.

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Feel free to comment below — what is or was squirrelled away in your L, M and B baggage? If you’re single, do you fear opening it? And if you’re shacked up, how did it affect your relationship?

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