If you’re 23 and live with your partner, or 31 and have an active Grindr profile, someone is going to tell you that you’re wasting something; your youth or your time. They say your early 20s are for Tindering the whole city, your mid-20s for meeting someone, and your late 20s to early 30s are for marriage and procreation.

I met my boyfriend a month after I turned 20; only a year after I had moved out of home. We’ve now been together for three years and have very recently moved in together.

I am still acutely aware of just how young I am; 23 is by no means the end of my youth. We still have a lot to go through together before we can say, “We started dating at 20 and here we still are”, but in our three years, we’ve been to seven countries together, and had a hell of a lot of great experiences.

Stay In Your Damn Lane

People assume that because of my age I’m going to make poor decisions. “How does it feel, to have been with the same person for so long?” is generally one of the first things I’m asked after someone finds out how long we’ve been together.

Firstly, why is everyone acting like being with someone for longer than a year is the equivalent to being married?

Secondly, what a loaded question. It’s in the same category as the horrifically intrusive, “You’ll change your mind” I receive any time I express my desire to keep my uterus forever empty. It’s laced with assumption and fuelled by problematic societal expectations – that there is a ‘correct’ way to exist.

It’s Good To Test the Waters

Getting to know someone well before living together is, of course, really important. It’s 100 per cent possible for people to move too fast, so a trial of fitting your lives together is always useful.

We are all vulnerable to consequence and timing, and I have been fortunate to not have anything derail the course I wanted my relationship to take. We have been able to try living together in short house sitting stints, to travel and to be in each other’s lives while still having our own space. 

Know Yourself

When I was single, I was never focused on just dating. I was brunching, working, exercising; I was doing things I enjoyed whilst exploring my newfound independence. I got to know myself as a single person, which is paramount when you’ve been with someone for a while.

The longer you’re with someone the more predictable things will get, and the more important it is to do things without your partner. You still have to do whatever is right for your relationship, but getting to know yourself is part of it too.

A Relationship Is Not A Check List

I didn’t go into our first date thinking, “All my hopes of love are dead if it doesn’t work out with him.” I didn’t produce a contract outlining the milestones we had to meet. I happened to go on a date with someone when I was 20, and the relationship is still going.

That doesn’t mean I have wasted my youth, just like how people who are in their 30s and single aren’t “running out of time”.

Stop listening to what everyone else is saying and listen to your gut. It doesn’t matter if you’re “still” single, or “wasting your youth” in a long-term relationship, you do you.

(Lead image: How I Met Your Mother/CBS)

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Lara is a recent communications graduate who is passionate about social issues and seasons 1-9 of The Simpsons.