God, this is depressing

This, from the Times on the 'thrisis' phenomenon - where, at 35, you suddenly realise that everything in your life is pointless and depressing:

Another friend, in a reversal of the cliché, threw in the towel on the nice husband she had married at 29 just before her 35th birthday. “It wasn’t him,” she insists. “I just found myself sitting across the breakfast table from him, thinking, ‘Is this it?’ It was getting to the point where we were going to have children, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out.’ I felt stifled, old before my time. I literally couldn’t bear the fact that I would never feel the excitement of a first kiss again. It hadn’t bothered me when we got married, but it bothered me then.”

I think when you start to consider having children at 35 as being 'old before your time' then it's time to have a long hard look at yourself. When I was growing up, there seemed to be a nice delineation between children and adults. What was more, there was a clear progression between the two states. Matthew (probably) says, "When I was a child, I thought as a child, I spoke as a child and I understood as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things." He didn't say, "When I became a man I carried on acting like a child, just a child with later bedtimes and more pocket money."