From Degrees to Diapers
From Degrees to Diapers
The Double Ds of the Twenties
Apologies for the bad pun. I’m working on it.
Dad jokes have started landing, which can only mean one thing - I’m aging into a new tax bracket.. which unfortunately (or conveniently) brings me to the point of this article.
The late twenties are here for us.
The conversations have shifted. They now orbit around engagements, marriages, children, ageing parents, property investments, car purchases, and other things that once felt strictly reserved for people with back pain and strong opinions about interest rates. The list is endless.
On paper, youth is defined as the years before your first job - roughly ages 19 to 24.. which means that even if we don’t feel it, the data has spoken: we are adults now.
Twenty-five didn’t arrive with an announcement. It didn’t knock. It just quietly settled into the corner of the room - like when you walk into a familiar space but the furniture has been moved slightly, and nothing is wrong, yet everything feels different.
The Group Chat as a Modern Ritual
The group chat lit up.
9:25 p.m.
A random Thursday night.
Incoming video call..
We joined in surprise -
one of us in another time zone,
one crying about cramps a minute ago (me),
one fresh out of a work meeting,
one in the kitchen making dinner.
144p video quality even with 5G ??
And there she was.
Blurry left hand held up with intentional precision. Perfectly manicured nails. A shiny stone whose design we couldn’t fully see, but whose meaning was unmistakable.
And then the words landed:
“I’m an engaged woman now.”
It's rightly called as a rite of passage - an entry into a new social role, marked not just by personal change but by collective witnessing. The group chat, in that moment, functioned like a ceremonial circle.
We screamed. We cried. We zoomed in repeatedly on the same pixelated ring.
We had seen it coming.
And yet - it arrived suddenly.
From Hostel Maggi to Adult Timelines
What hit us wasn’t the ring - it was what it represented.
That 25, quietly and without asking permission, is making space for engagements, marriages, long-term relationships, and eventually - motherhood. That the girls we once were in our engineering college hostel getting Maggi at ANC, debating whether it paired better with Minute Maid Pulpy Orange or a banana shake - are now becoming women who must make choices that echo into the future.
From an anthropological lens, friendships like ours act as small kinship units - formed not by blood but by shared time, space, and survival. And as individuals move into new roles, the group stretches to accommodate them. No one is left behind; the structure simply evolves.
We are still the same people - just standing at different thresholds.
A Feminist Pause (With Receipts)
This is where feminism enters.. not dramatically, but deliberately.
Marriage, like motherhood, is no longer a compulsory milestone - it is a choice. A personal, political, and emotional decision shaped by desire, timing, economics, etc.
Simone de Beauvoir argued long ago that womanhood is not destiny but construction.. and that idea still echoes here. Wanting marriage is not regressive. Rejecting it is not radical. What matters is agency.
And then there’s modern dating: the great unsupervised social experiment of our time.
(I'll dive into the idea of 'Liquid Love' by Zygmunt Bauman in another article soon.)
We are the generation of:
- situationships that last longer than actual relationships,
- “let’s see where this goes” that goes absolutely nowhere,
- emotional availability listed as a bonus feature, not a requirement,
- and healing from people who “aren’t ready” but somehow still have opinions.
Against this backdrop, marriage feels both comforting and confrontational. It forces questions:
Is this something I want, or something I’ve been trained to want?
Do I crave partnership, or just stability?
Can love be intentional without being institutional?
Judith Butler might note how even now, gendered expectations quietly script what women are supposed to want. Mary Douglas would observe how society still classifies certain life choices as more “acceptable” than others.
The same questions follow motherhood.
Some of us want children.
Some are unsure.
Some are certain they don’t.
And feminism, at its best, makes room for all of it - without hierarchy.
Degrees to Diapers (Plural, Intentionally)
The title isn’t literal - at least not yet.
The diapers may one day belong to babies we raise, co-parent, babysit, or lovingly hand back to their parents.
And if we’re lucky enough to grow old together, they might belong to us too.
Because this isn’t really about engagements or children.
Clifford Geertz once said humans are suspended in webs of meaning they themselves have spun. This friendship is one such web - woven in hostel corridors, sustained through career shifts, heartbreaks, and growing self-awareness.
It’s a story about time.
About friendships that age with us.
About growing into women without losing the girls who once sat on hostel floors, sharing earphones, bad coffee, and wildly unqualified life advice.
From degrees to diapers -
From corridor conversations to lifelong commitments -
This is girlhood, learning how to grow up without growing apart.
And honestly, as long as the group chat survives,
I think we’ll be okay.