Do/Did you have a schedule for your life?

Again a thread inspired by a conversation on the radio last week. A woman wrote in to complain about her 27-year old sister who was determined to be married by the time she was 30. This sister didn’t have a boyfriend or anything, no immediate prospects, but marriage was definitely on her mind.

The woman who wrote the original email to the station was worried her sister would choose hurriedly, foolishly just to meet her arbitrary schedule.

A number of people called to say this sister was being foolish by having an arbitrary schedule for marriage but a follow-up question by the DJ’s revealed many of the women calling in had themselves been married before, or in, their 30th year.

So, do you younger dopers have a schedule you’d like your life to follow? To the older ones, did you have a schedule and did you meet it? Do you think you made poor or hurried choices to meet a self-made schedule?

Myself? I don’t think I did. I don’t think I ever gave myself labeled milestones in my life. Maybe I’m type “B” enough that it never occurred to me to make goals and ages to meet them.

In my experience, living life on a schedule just leads to disappointment.

I had the reverse - out of college, I decided I wanted to become a Systems Analyst. When I accomplished that before I was 25, I thought “Wow - what now?” It has been an interesting ride since.

Yes, I had a schedule. No, I didn’t keep it; totally derailed. Probably about as happy as I would have been if I had.

I have never had a schedule for my life in the past. However, within the past couple of years, I decided that I would like to retire at age 55. For the next couple of decades I plan to devote considerable resources to making that deadline. We’ll see what happens.

Probably not. I’m 24, just finished undergraduate school, am apparently going to work as a financial counselor starting within the next six months or so, for up to a year or more… and then would like to spend several months interning public policy/human rights in Ecuador… and then, maybe, I’ll figure out what I want to do for grad school. My general plan is to have a Ph.D. by the time I’m 35, but that’s not set into stone or anything.

So I have some rough ideas of what I want out of life, but I have learned to go with the flow, take it easy, and enjoy where I’m at. I am not going to spend my life chasing rainbows only to find out I’ve spent my life chasing rainbows instead of, you know, enjoying what I’ve got. There are a lot of things to explore/see/do. Who the hell knows where I’ll end up? If you had told me I would ever work a job in business/finance just a year ago, I would have laughed in your face.

So there you go.

Nope. Never did.

Right now my goal is to be debt free (except for mortgage) by 30. When you’re a few months away from 29 that sort of goal envelopes your life.

I won’t have time to think of a new schedule for the next 50 years until I get my financial self straightened up.

I have (or had) one for most of my life. It was to get married in my mid-20’s, have a very nice house by my late twenties and kids soon after. I achieved all of those and I was upper middle class by the time I had my first daughter at 29. That isn’t to say my life is ideal because many terrible things happened along the line but the goals themselves worked. I don’t really have one now although I probably should.

To be opinionated, I think that women in the metropolitan Northeast have some pretty serious goal issues. There are many that are conflicting such as lifestyle, career, and family. I know countless successful females that aren’t doing the hurry-up offense lat in the 4th quarter (mid-30’s) and they often get burned by it. For some reason, the culture here suggests that women can pursue their dreams throughout their 20’s then find a great guy and have a couple of kids in suburbia. It works out for some but the potential for disaster is immense. Spending a few years dating a series of mediocre boyfriends can cause the fertility window to close faster than you can say donated eggs.

The proper, middle-class, American style of the ideal family formation takes at least 5 years from meeting someone, getting married, buying a house, conceiving, and then having the 1st child let alone additional ones. Combine that with the fact that females in their 30’s usually have trouble finding a potential husband and it can be heartbreaking. There is nothing wrong with adoption or extreme fertility treatments but both are terribly expensive and aren’t usually the first choice. I believe the media has done an extreme disservice covering celebrities and others who have children in their late 30’s or even past that.

The probababilty is very high for any given one to be the result of countless fertility treatments and extreme measures like donated eggs. Medical science has been great at enhancing fertility in females while it exists but it has done almost nothing to extend it past its natural expiration date.

My wife’s two best friends at 34 show no signs of pulling off a normal family life even though they want it badly. They simply waited too long for the proper cogs to start turning. My SIL just got engaged at 32 and my MIL is coaching her on the hurry up because she wants two kids and things have to move very rapidly from here and need nearly flawless execution.

When I was 19, I wrote down a letter to my 30 year old self. Now, a month and a half from 30, it’s so offbase as to be absurd. That’s not to say, however, that I haven’t experienced a lot of amazing things. And, even though I sometimes lament that I’ve missed opportunities in my life (a bad habit I am working to rectify), I also know that all that I’ve seen and done has brought me here today. And today is a damn fine day!

Heck yeah. If you’re female and you want to have a career and a family, I really think it’s hard not to think about how close you’re getting to infertile territory and plan accordingly. It bothers me that I’m running slightly behind schedule, but I’m not so far behind that it’s going to be a huge problem.

I don’t think you can set it in stone and refuse to deviate, though. Marrying the wrong person because it’s the right time would probably have worse long-term consequences than getting a bit behind schedule. You can’t plan everything, but you can work toward what you want to have.

I don’t want to die before 2079 (I’ll be 97 or 98 then). Other than that I have no schedule whatsoever. I want to get my college finished as soon as possible but that’s an open ended as soon as possible.

When I was younger, yes, I did have a schedule. And for the parts that I had some control over, for the most part went according to that schedule.

The parts I didn’t have control over…well, you and your husband can’t start to have kids you hit 30 if you haven’t met your husband when you hit 30. No way around that one.

Now, there’s less of a schedule - there are things I’d like to do someday, but I really don’t have a timetable anymore.

When I was younger, my goal was to get my PhD. I decided to get a Master’s degree instead and forego the PhD because my interests changed. I’ve never thought it unreasonable to have a schedule as far as education and careers go, as long as you accept that external factors may affect that schedule and change it.

As for marriage and children, I think those are a little tougher to truly schedule. For one thing, even though a career is a type of commitment, it doesn’t have to be life-long. You can change it, get more education, different education, etc. Marriage - ideally, anyway - is a lifelong commitment, and so are children. So hopefully you (general you) will get married when you’re ready and have kids when you’re financially and emotionally stable enough, whatever that means to you.

Personally, I never, ever regretted getting my Master’s and not a PhD. I married at 30, had a kid at 31 and never, ever regretted the timing on either because I did both when I was ready.

On the other hand, I have a friend who was wifeshopping since high school when he met and married his wife. He even started a college fund when he graduated college, though he hadn’t married or had a kid. His goal in life was to get married and have a family as soon as he graduated. His timeline was: graduate, get married, have a kid at year 1, have another one at year 2. That meant a lot to him and still does, but he now regrets being so focused on those particular ideals that he’s a little dissatisfied. He would never divorce his wife - he’s grown to love her - but their marriage had a very rocky start because of the way it started and it got rockier when their first kid was born because in retrospect he doesn’t think they (particularly his wife) were ready at the time. Still, it all worked out, so maybe that’s not the best illustration of scheduling as a bad idea.

I had a schedule, absolutely. Marriage in mid-20s, after I’d finished school, with kids before 30. I absolutely refuse(d) to have kids after 30.

Well, now I’m 26 and not done with school, no marriage plans, and thus no kids. So I’m totally rethinking it and it has been a bit of a crisis for me, because I feel like a bit of a failure. And I’m wondering about kids, too, something I always thought I wanted, because I realize I like babies, and can deal with older children, but toddlers and young children (say 3-6) annoy the hell out of me. So maybe kids aren’t in the cards. But if I do want kids, then I have to rethink the no kids after 30 rule.

I don’t freaking know.

Not really. Part of what I like about my future is that it is an unknown. I don’t even know what continent I’ll be living on 5 years from now.

I did have a goal, when I was about 30, of becoming full professor by the age of 40. I would have done it, too, but there was the whole getting evacuated from Beirut due to war, suffering crippling depression due to the loss of my job/friends/life I loved/etc. Kind of threw me off track. Now I’ll probably make it in my early 40s, but that’s just a prediction, not a goal.

You shouldn’t feel like a failure at all. I know it’s easy for someone else to say that, but it sounds like from your other threads that you’re getting the important parts of your life hammered out and that you’re focusing on the right things.

And for the record, as my son gets older (he’s 21 months now), I’m finding that I’m not a huge fan of toddlers sometime, either. He’s been waking up with this grating whining every morning for the past three mornings. It’s like nails on a chalkboard. Especially when I know he could tell me what’s wrong but doesn’t (since he’s recently learned to start combining words and tell me what he wants, it’s probably inexperience, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying). Still, there are certain moments of near transcendancy with him that make all the whining worth it. So I wouldn’t totally rule out kids yet. But I’d definitely wait.

Did.

Man plans, God laughs.

I never did.

I remember when my (now) husband and I spoke to my parents about getting married, way back when we were 21 and 22 years old. My father asked what are plans were for 5 years and 10 years in the future. Ummm…be married still? We never did come up with a plan, but we got married anyway.

I don’t know if plans and goals count as a schedule. In my teens I had a schedule – I was going to finish college, during which time I would meet a potential husband, then teach school, then have kids, then go back to teaching until I retired.

Well, that plan went awry almost immediately when I met the man I married. I married, then finished school. I then planned to teach for exactly three years after which I would start having children, two of them, exactly two years apart, then continue as planned.

THAT plan went awry when my fertility was not up to snuff. Took 5 years before I could conceive. Kids were 4 years apart, not 2. Oh, and then there were no more teaching jobs, so I started over and eventually wound up in data processing, in which I planned…

Well, no use continuing. I had also figured to be a grandmother by now, which hasn’t happened.