Allora Dannon didn’t notice when her younger siblings started dating before she did, and she was mostly focused on her academics when her college classmates were rotating through hookups. But, sometime in her mid-20s, she looked up and realized her little sisters were getting married and having kids and she hadn’t even been on a first date.
“My youngest sister — there’s a 16-year age gap between us — she had her first kiss and went through two boyfriends before I even went on a first date,” Dannon, now 35, tells Vox. “I’m really good at celebrating other people. I love sharing other people’s joy. However, I internalized so much, like there just must be something grotesquely wrong about me.”
Dannon had traveled the world and enjoyed a rich social life, and she couldn’t entirely understand why, for some people — most people, it seemed — getting into a relationship was so easy, but not for her.
Dannon is, by all accounts, a late bloomer: someone who hits milestones, like love, homeownership, established career, and parenthood, on a longer timeline than their peers. It’s not so much the shame that often comes with being a late bloomer that makes it hard — though there’s plenty of that, Dannon says; it’s the creeping resentment, and frustration as you watch the people you care about move onto new life stages while you stay in the same place. It’s the feeling that, after years of attending others’ bridal showers and bachelorette parties and housewarmings and weddings and baby showers and kid birthday parties, it might never be your turn.
Being a good friend means celebrating others’ milestones, which many late bloomers say they are genuinely happy about. But it can be difficult not to think about what you want, and what you seemingly lack, every time another invitation comes in the mail. Especially when you’re patiently waiting for your moment to come around.
“Two things can exist at once: Your joy for people experiencing these life events, but also your grief that your life is not unfolding the way you thought it would and you didn’t think it was,” Dannon says.
The modern late bloomer experience
Because so many of life’s major turning points — going to college, graduating, living on your own, landing a dream job, starting a life with your dream partner — typically occur in a person’s 20s, this decade of life and shortly thereafter is when you’re most prone to feeling behind the curve, according to Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a professor of psychology at Clark University and author of Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens Through the Twenties. And this remains true despite the fact that American culture has changed dramatically, and timelines have shifted for everyone. More people are getting married late in their 20s and into their 30s versus their early 20s, as they were in the 1960s. The median age of a first-time homebuyer is 40 years old. The average first-time mother is 27.5 years old. Fewer 21-year-olds have a full-time job now than did in 1980. Today’s economic landscape, where young people are saddled with thousands of dollars of student loan debt, stagnant wages, plus a volatile real estate environment, has hindered their ability to meet these milestones.
“Emerging adults are reaching those milestones of adult life later, and there’s a certain stigma associated with it, even though it’s perfectly understandable, even healthy, to make these transitions later,” Arnett says. “There’s a certain stigma associated with it. … Emerging adults are very aware of that, and it’s not helpful to them.”
Despite the generational shift in attainment, many young people are still measuring themselves with the traditional timeline. And when they diverge, they internalize it; the problem isn’t the game is rigged, it’s that they’re losing, the thinking goes. “If you’re way off the norm, then you ask yourself, well, why is that? Why am I different? There is something wrong with me,” Arnett says.
When her friends were advancing in their careers, Cindy Noir was filing for bankruptcy at 28 years old. She’d moved to Dallas a few years prior to pursue content creation and to start her own business, and even though she was earning money, she quickly accrued debt trying “to show that I’m living the life,” she says: an expensive car, a penthouse apartment. “Things came crashing down very quickly,” she says. She moved home to Atlanta with debt, regret, and the feeling that she’d failed.
At the same time, Noir, now 30, was on Instagram watching her friends travel together, getting promotions, buying cars they seemingly could afford. “When we go out for dinner together, they’re ordering two and three drinks and they’re ordering an appetizer and an entree and looking at the dessert menu, and I’m trying to figure out if I can afford to get a drink outside of water,” she says. She’s genuinely happy for their success and progress in life, but there are times when she wonders when her turn will come.
“One day, I would like to be married, and one day I would like to have kids. One day, I’d like to make a certain amount of money for what I do,” Noir says. “Seeing my friends already doing it did call into question…what have I been doing and why is my life path so different and so seemingly negative compared to theirs? All of that really gets to you when you feel like your peers are on this natural ascension and your life feels so wonky and there’s no rhyme or reason.”
The sting of comparison and envy
One of our most persistent habits as humans is comparing ourselves to others: their appearance, their home, their successes, their weaknesses. In doing so, we believe we can get a more accurate picture of how we’re doing in life and where we can improve. And the sheer number of people we can potentially weigh ourselves against on social media exacerbates the comparisons. From there, envy can arise. As I’ve previously written for Vox, we’re especially prone to feeling envious of the people we see as being the most like us: Same gender, same age, on a similar trajectory.
Larry Lian, a 28-year-old marketing manager, began pivoting his career toward content creation a few months ago but says some of his friends who began doing the same thing even more recently have already seen greater success. “There is an element of envy in there,” Lian says. It isn’t that he wishes his friends weren’t flourishing or that he doesn’t want to celebrate their wins. Lian just wants a sliver of the pie, too. “You want to clap for others,” he says, “in the hope that one day it will be your turn where people clap for you.”
Lian has never told his buddies how he feels. “I think because you do feel insecure talking about it with your friends, there’s an element of shame in there,” he says. He also doesn’t want them to think he’s riding their coattails. Similarly, Noir, the content creator who filed for bankruptcy, has kept her insecurities to herself. “My ego, if I’m being honest, doesn’t want me to admit to defeat in that way,” she says.
Dannon, whose younger siblings found love before her, decided to go the opposite route and open up about it. At age 32, she posted to her few dozen TikTok followers: Hi, I’m Allora. I’m 32. I’ve never been on a date, I’ve never been kissed. “All of a sudden, so many people were like, ‘Oh my gosh, me too. I had never heard anyone talk about this,’” Dannon says.
Giving voice to your late bloomer side can help you mourn the loss of the version of life you thought you’d have. “Let yourself feel that loss instead of pretending it doesn’t matter, or ignoring it. Then redirect that energy toward what’s actually in front of you: building your actual life,” therapist Israa Nasir, author of Toxic Productivity: Reclaim Your Time and Emotional Energy in a World That Always Demands More, tells Vox in an email. Ask yourself whose timelines are you on — your own, society’s, or your family’s? What is it that you value and want out of life?
Three years after posting that video, Dannon bloomed: She recently got married. The attention she received was far beyond the response to anything she’d accomplished when she was single, she says. This wellspring of love and support was validation that she wasn’t imagining things: People are more excited for you when you hit normative milestones. “Having gone through so many weddings and then now my own, and having exist[ed] far longer as a single person than as this person in a relationship, it’s just a stark contrast and almost relieving to be like, I felt like I was on the outside of something that I really wanted, and that was hard. And you know what? I was right,” Dannon says.
It might be cold comfort to hear that what you’re feeling as a late bloomer is real. But life is more than sticking to a prescribed timeline. “There’s always a lot of individual differences around the norm,” Arnett, the psychology professor, says.
So celebrate those differences that come with being a late bloomer: all the maturity you’ve built, the patience you’ve cultivated. These are just as worthy of commemorating as marriage or homeownership. “You didn’t rush into a career you’d outgrow, or you didn’t marry the first person because you wanted to be ‘on time,’” Nasir says. “Late bloomers often have clearer boundaries, more self-knowledge, and less compliance. Reflect on what you have learned about yourself or the world because you took the longer path.”
