The Defining Decade. Мэг Джей

      

      The advice herein is not intended to replace the services of trained mental health professionals. You are advised to consult with your health care professional with regard to matters relating to your mental health, and in particular regarding matters that may require diagnosis or medical attention. The author and publisher specifically disclaim any liability that is incurred from the use or application of the contents of this book.

      First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Canongate Books Ltd,

      14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

       www.canongate.tv

      This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © 2012 by Meg Jay

      “The Cohabitation Effect” revised copyright © 2013 by Meg Jay

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      First published in the United States in 2012 by Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group Inc., 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York NY 10104

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78211 492 5

      eISBN 978 1 78211 493 2

       For Jay and Hazel

       AUTHOR’S NOTE

      This book is about my work with twentysomethings, as a clinical psychologist in private practice in Charlottesville, Virginia, and as a clinical professor at the University of Virginia, and previously as a clinician in Berkeley, California, and a lecturer at University of California, Berkeley. Throughout these pages, I do my best to tell the personal, and sometimes poignant, stories of the clients and students who taught me about the twentysomething years. To protect their privacy, I have changed their names and the details of their lives. In many cases, I have created composites from those with similar experiences and with whom I had similar sessions and conversations. I hope every twentysomething who reads this book sees him-or herself in the stories I include, but a resemblance to any particular twentysomething is coincidental.

       CONTENTS

       Foreword

       Preface: The Defining Decade

       Introduction: Real Time

       WORK

       Identity Capital

       Weak Ties

       The Unthought Known

       My Life Should Look Better on Facebook

       The Customized Life

       LOVE

       An Upmarket Conversation

       Picking Your Family

       The Cohabitation Effect

       On Dating Down

       Being in Like

       THE BRAIN AND THE BODY

       Forward Thinking

       Calm Yourself

       Outside In

       Getting Along and Getting Ahead

       Every Body

       Do the Math

       Epilogue: Will Things Work Out for Me?

       Notes

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

      FOREWORD

       Calling Twentysomethings Everywhere

      The Defining Decade is for twentysomethings. Even with a subtitle like, “Why Your Twenties Matter and How to Make the Most of Them Now,” this fact is worth stating. Parents assume the book is for parents. Colleagues presume I’ve written it for other therapists and academics. When twentysomethings ask me about my book, “Who is your audience?,” they seem genuinely, but pleasantly, surprised when I say: “YOU ARE!”

      It seems astonishing to many that, rather than talk about twentysomethings, I prefer to talk to twentysomethings. Enough of the grownups sitting around discussing the under-thirty set! Twentysomethings are adults too and they deserve to be taken seriously. They deserve a seat at the table in a conversation about their own lives.

      Popular culture may lead us to believe that twentysomethings are too cool or too clueless or too lazy or too jaded to engage in such a conversation, but this simply is not true. My private practice and university courses are filled with twentysomethings who desperately want someone to discuss their lives with them in an informed and authentic way. In The Defining Decade, I use research and clinical experience to dispel myths about the twentysomething years: that thirty is the new twenty, that we can’t pick our families, that doing something later is necessarily the same thing as doing something better. But the idea that twentysomethings are not savvy enough to be interested in such information—and the power it has to change their lives—is perhaps the biggest myth of all.

      As evidence of this, since The Defining Decade was first published in the United States in April 2012, the book’s biggest and best audience has been twentysomethings themselves. I have received many moving messages from parents who say things like, “All I have asked for Mother’s Day this year is for my twentysomething to read your book.” Or from thirtysomethings who say, “I wish your book had been available when I was in my twenties.” But the most