It sounds like the title of an 80s dance track, doesn’t it?

And given people are now regularly living into their hundreds, I suppose I am technically somewhere around midlife. Just.

What surprises me isn’t my age.

It’s how different this stage of life feels from the version I imagined when I was younger.

Back then I probably belonged to one of the last generations raised to believe that “till death us do part” was both a romantic aspiration and a likely outcome.

I suspect I may even have promised to “love, honour and obey.”

Different times.

What nobody explained was that life has a habit of rewriting the script.

Throughout most of my marriage I was the consistent breadwinner. There were periods when my husband earned more than I did, but consistency and reliability are different things.

I returned to work ten weeks after my first son was born.

With my second son, who knows? I was working from home, so I may have taken the afternoon off.

Over time that responsibility changed me.

It changed how I viewed my capabilities.

It changed how I viewed risk.

And perhaps most importantly, it changed how I viewed myself.

Some people might call that hyper-independence.

I prefer self-sufficiency.

When I think about my grandmothers at my age, they seemed ancient.

Not physically, necessarily.

But in how they dressed.

How they spoke.

How they saw the future.

Their lives felt largely settled.

Their expectations fixed.

Today feels completely different.

Sixty genuinely feels younger than it once did.

I can’t imagine either of my grandmothers deciding to go zip-lining.

Or booking a solo holiday.

Or reinventing themselves professionally.

But there is another side to that freedom.

I’ve lived independently for almost fourteen years now.

There have been relationships along the way, but I’ve always maintained my own home, my own finances and my own responsibilities.

I’ve built a life that works.

A life I enjoy.

I love spending time with friends.

I love spending time with family.

And I absolutely love spending time doing exactly what I want, when I want, without having to negotiate it with another living soul.

Which brings me to a thought I suspect I’m not supposed to admit out loud.

Have I become too used to it?

Not too old.

Not too independent.

Just… too accustomed to having complete ownership of my own life.

Because sometimes I wonder whether the challenge at this stage isn’t finding someone to share your life with.

It’s deciding whether you’re prepared to share a life you’ve spent years carefully building for yourself.

And perhaps that’s one of the things nobody tells you about midlife.

You don’t necessarily become more certain.

The questions just change.

The things that worried you at thirty aren’t the things that keep you awake at sixty.

The choices become different.

The trade-offs become different.

And sometimes the freedom you’ve worked so hard to create raises questions you never expected to ask.

I’m not sure I know the answer yet.

But then perhaps that’s another thing nobody tells you.

By this age, you expect to have everything figured out.

And somehow, you’re still working some of it out as you go.