A friend told me recently that she felt like she wasn’t ready to settle down and be ‘boring’ yet. Which, on one hand, I understand. On the other hand, I love being boring.
I’m an introvert, and a homebody. I love being home. And it’s not that being at home is always boring, but some people love going out with friends and partying and staying out late.
We go to bed at 9 p.m. because that’s when our dogs like going to bed, and they run our household. And as much as I love my friends, I don’t always feel the need to go out because Kyle is one of my best friends and we can have fun playing board games at home.
But I still understand her worry about getting older and settling down. With the passage of time comes a changing of identity, and that can be scary and sometimes upsetting. Once you’re married, your identity changes to wife or husband. Once you have a baby, your identity changes to mom or dad. Not everyone is comfortable with that change.
And it can be overwhelming when it feels like everyone around you is moving on and changing their identities when you’re not. Being in your 20s is strange because some friends are married, some have children, some are in their forever-careers, and other friends are still living with parents, are in college, or working a minimum-wage job. It’s a vast spectrum, and none of their stages in life are right or wrong. It’s just life, we all approach it differently and have different plans.
I thought some people might feel the same way my friend does, that home is boring, so I thought I’d mention things we do for fun.
1) We play board games. This might not be for everyone, but Kyle and I love board games. We have a lot of them, including a set of vintage-style games that look like books. They line two shelves in our basement and combine two loves of mine: books and board games. We play games all the time.
2) Video games. We have both kept every video game console we’ve ever had, so we have nine or ten different consoles that we play games on. Sometimes we play games together, other times one of us plays a game on the television while the other plays a game handheld or on a laptop in the same room. Even if we’re doing something different, it’s still fun.
3) I read. I love reading. I think that’s been well established about me by now.
4) Puzzles. I’ve always liked puzzles, so having a puzzle on the table gives us something to do either together or individually.
5) Shopping. In any capacity. Sometimes we go out to the mall or to stores to browse, sometimes we just like to sit there and scroll on Amazon and talk about things we’d like to buy eventually. Even if we don’t buy anything, it’s fun to browse.
6) Home projects. There are a ton of little projects to get done around the house, and it’s more fun with another person. Painting or fixing something doesn’t have to be daunting.
I think being at home doesn’t have to be boring. In fact, I have more fun at home than I do going out most days. And settling down doesn’t have to be boring. I’ve been married for three years, nothing has changed. We didn’t go out and party before, we don’t go out and party now. I have friends with kids who still see their friends and have just as much fun now as they did before having kids.
As long as you’re around people you care about, stages in life don’t matter as much. And I don’t feel bored, or like my life is boring to me, just because I spend time at home.
Settling down doesn’t have to be boring. As long as your life is being lived how you want to live it, that’s all that matters.