Dividing 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.”
More picks about, or from within, life stages
Living in Tracy Chapman’s House
“Fresh out of college, we were a bunch of misfits, in a chaotic, run-down communal home, desperately trying to figure out who we were meant to be.”
The Best Four Years of Your Life?
“My future — the vague, all-consuming ideal we’re taught to live for — felt like a more dominant force in my life than my present.”
Why Gen Z Will Never Leave Home
“Thanks to soaring housing costs, a generation of twentysomethings are still in their childhood bedrooms. A portrait of family life with no empty nest.”
