The words we use to describe adult life still assume there’s one path.

I’m 47. I’ve never married and I don’t have children. People describe my life through what hasn’t happened or hasn’t happened yet. “Chloe’s still single”. “She’s childless”. I’ve used those words myself, but since I’ve been working on Kaleidoscope Lives, I’ve noticed how much of the language we use to talk about adulthood focuses on what isn’t there.

Settling down vs still single: the language of the expected path

The language we use when a life follows the expected path is different. You settle down, find the one, start a family and then get onto the property ladder. The language has positive motion implied in it.

For lives that don’t follow the traditional sequence of adulthood, we use words that convey absence or delay. Words that measure a life against where it’s supposed to be.

One word can make all the difference. “I’m living at home” is a fact. “I’m still living at home” tells you that someone thinks they should have left by now. The fact hasn’t changed; an expectation has been added. It happens all the time: only one child, finally settled down and back on the dating apps.

Mihon and bihon: what happens when you remove the “yet”

Some cultures have even built expectations into words. In South Korea, the standard word for unmarried, mihon, means “not yet married”. In recent years, another word has been growing in popularity alongside it: bihon. It means “not married”. The “yet” has been removed, and with it the assumed destination.

Now, more of the familiar adulthood markers are arriving at different times, in different combinations, or not at all. But we still default to language from when those milestones behaved like stepping stones.

Our language keeps trying to turn life into a progress bar.

We’re used to holding a mirror up to one another and expecting to see what a life should look like. But today, fewer of us see our own life reflected back. That’s why I chose a kaleidoscope to describe modern adulthood. When you look into a kaleidoscope, you see the unique pattern that’s there. You see the shapes and colours. You don’t look for the missing pieces, because there’s nothing it’s supposed to resemble.

That’s what I want for adult lives too. A way of seeing that stops difference automatically being read as deficiency.

Many of the categories we use to locate adult life are binary. Are you partnered or single? A parent or childless? We are still lacking ways of talking about our lives without making what has or hasn’t happened the way we tell our story.

Take not having children. There are numerous reasons why someone might not have them, yet we only have two words to choose from: “childfree” and “childless”. For a woman who wanted children and couldn’t have them, childless describes something real. For someone who didn’t want children, that label may feel entirely wrong. Both words force a choice, while some women and men sit somewhere in between.

I’m one of them. For years I wanted children, but the right circumstances never arrived. For me “childfree” sounds like an active choice I never made. While “childless” makes loss sound like the thing that defines me.

A piece can be absent without a whole life being incomplete. And the absent pieces can still matter to the person.

Our language for adult life still assumes one timetable and makes a different life pattern sound like a deficit. Seeing the pattern of a life means letting the life that’s happened, and the life happening, be seen as a whole. That doesn’t mean pretending there aren’t things that people wanted that didn’t happen. Most of us have something we hoped for that we never achieved. But a life is more than what’s missing.

This article is the fifth in a series exploring Kaleidoscope Lives: a framework for thinking about modern adulthood. The Kaleidoscope Lives podcast launches in October.