Britons are now ageing faster than their parents, thanks to diets high in salt, fat and sugar. Diabetes, obesity and heart disease mean that, although the average life expectancy is increasing, so is the rate at which our bodies are becoming old and decrepit (sorry about that).
But it’s not just cupcakes and burgers turning us into old fogies. Because some of us have realised that the real world is self-service checkouts, gas bills and leaving your umbrella open in the bath to dry out. And to deal with life’s mundane realities? We’re self-parenting.
That doesn’t mean becoming your actual mum and dad, by the way – that’ll come along a lot later. Self-parenting is about becoming your own parent, your own responsible adult. Here’s how you know you’re doing it.
1. You’ve started cutting out the bad influences
In your group of friends, there’s a person who lives to entertain everyone else, whether it’s through stories of getting anal off of a Brazilian football agent at 3am on their birthday or nights out when whatever they’d ingested made them think you were a talking skeleton, like in that Chemical Brothers video. Though fun, they’re flakey. And after they dick you around a few too many times, you stop making plans with them. In time, you get more daylight out of your weekends, your bank statement contains fewer 2am withdrawals with £1.85 charges, and then it dawns on you – not that you’ve seen dawn for months – that you’ve done exactly what Mummy and Daddy would have done, and cut out the bad influence in your life.
2. You actually buy toilet roll
As much as it’s convenient to just steal toilet paper from a pub or your office, only savages can live using one-ply sheets. Although you’ve always got make-up wipes on hand, and Boots do that friendly three-for-£3 deal on the cucumber-scented face wipes, that stuff isn’t cheap, and leaves your bum really cold and clammy. And you actually care what people think about you when they come round and haven’t got any hand soap to use. You’re also buying those blue cloths and sponges. Sometimes you’ll even splurge on oven cleaner.
3. The Sunday Fear is the most productive time of the week
Instead of getting that lurching feeling that you’ve got an entire week back at work – another five days to prove ourselves to snarky bosses and deflect irritating co-workers – you make sure you're prepared. You get home from a roast at 4pm, ready to hoover, bleach, fold, tidy and organize your belongings and self. You transfer Facebook-initiated plans into diaries, write to-do lists (including the simplest of tasks, like ‘brush teeth’, just so that you can cross something off) and get into bed by 10pm. You change your sheets even if you haven’t spent the weekend lying in them in sweaty coital bliss, you hoover your floor even if you haven’t trodden mud and eyeliner into it. Knowing full well how much the bin will smell tomorrow, you change it.
4. Everything goes into its right place
In a rented flat, you can almost put anything anywhere. You can put your chest of drawers next to the bed, or a chart of all the people you and your mates have slept with on your wall. But you don’t. Your books go on the shelves, your bike goes in the corridor and all your living room furniture points at a TV. Even though you could go all wacky and turn everything upside down, or even sleep on a mattress on the floor, you realise that it’s simpler, more comfortable, to just do things the normal way. And even though you promise not to fill your home with the sort of clutter you had back at your parents’ place, you have fruit bowls full of council tax notices, credit card receipts, half-finished packs of gum and spare sets of keys.
5. You’ve finally wised up about sex
Maybe you had a bowl full of condoms at uni, partly for blowing up and partly for actual use. But now you’ve got a pile of ageing latex collecting dust in a mini wicker basket under your bed. You get an STI test every six months, even if you’ve not really had that much sex. You go for a wee after sex so you don’t get cystitis – because as fun as it was to spend a hungover morning with a mate and four litres of Ocean Spray, there are only so many times in your life you want to piss fire. Wary, for whatever reason, of your ‘number’ going up, you actually turn down that potential one-night stand, you refuse that drink from a stranger, and you’ll go home with whoever’s getting a cab near yours, instead of riding out the night bus in the hope that guy you’ve had your eye on will bury his face into your neck once it’s done with that kebab…
6. You appreciate food like never before
When you were just a bit younger, you grabbed food on the go. Just-eat.co.uk was a bookmarked website and your five-a-day came in the form of two little plastic bags of pre-cut apple from M&S when you were feigning a health kick. Now, though, you’ve got cookery books lining your shelves, and a food processor that isn’t just there for idle experimentation. You carefully buy ingredients like saffron, turmeric and galangal, and start to get ethical about meat, forgoing Iceland’s bag of reformed chicken breasts and instead splashing £12 on something free-range and yellow from Sainsbury’s fancy label brand.
Checked all six? Then ta-dah! You’re a self-parent. Congrats.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @SophWilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.