I’m Not Fun
Anymore

A woman said this to me a few weeks ago, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. She said: “I’m not fun anymore. Remember when I was fun?”

She laughed when she said it. Everybody laughs when they say it. It gets said in the tone you use for a small, silly complaint, somewhere between the school run and the supermarket, and then everyone moves on to the next thing.

It is not a small complaint. I have heard some version of that sentence from almost every woman I’ve worked with, and I have said it myself, and I think we laugh because saying it seriously would mean admitting how much we miss her.

Nothing happened to her. That’s the whole problem.

When something is taken from you, there’s an event. A date. Somebody to be angry at.

Fun doesn’t go like that. Fun goes the way a bank account goes when nobody’s watching it: a little at a time, for reasons that were completely sensible at the moment you made each decision.

You stopped saying yes to the Thursday thing because Friday mornings got hard. You stopped the class because of the term fees. The friends who were the fun ones moved, or had their second baby, or drifted, and you didn’t replace them because who has the energy to make new friends at forty-three. You got good at your job and being good at it took the part of the week that used to be nothing in particular.

Not one of those was a mistake. Add them up over eleven years and the woman who was fun has nowhere left to stand.

She wasn’t lost. She was scheduled out.

Three things we mistake for fun

This is where most women get stuck, because they think they’ve tried and it didn’t work. Usually they tried one of these instead.

Rest is not fun

Lying down is recovery. It’s necessary and you probably need more of it, but it puts nothing back. You can sleep for a week and still not feel like yourself, and then conclude that something is wrong with you, when all that happened is you treated a fun problem with a rest solution.

Achievement is not fun

The half marathon, the sourdough, the course with the certificate at the end. These are good. They are also work with a nicer name, and they come with the same thing your job comes with: a standard you can fail to meet. Anything you can be bad at in a way that bothers you is not doing the job.

Other people’s fun is not fun

Watching your kids have a wonderful time is love. It is one of the best things there is. It is not the same as having a wonderful time, and the fact that you have to say that out loud is the entire subject of this article.

Fun is not the reward for finishing everything else. It is the evidence that you’re still in there.

What fun actually needs

Three things, and they’re unglamorous.

• Time nobody has claimed. Not a gap between two obligations. An hour that belongs to no one, that nothing depends on, that can be wasted without consequence.
• No outcome. Nothing to show afterwards. No photo, no finished thing, no progress. If you can report on it, be suspicious of it.
• A small risk of looking stupid. This is the one women over forty have trained out of themselves most thoroughly, and it is the one that matters most. Fun lives right next to being a beginner, and being a beginner means being visibly not good at something in front of other people.

Look at that list and you can see exactly why it disappeared. Every single one of those is the opposite of what the last twenty years asked of you.

The test that cuts through it

Forget what you should enjoy. Ask this instead:

What did you do at twenty-two that you’d still want, if you took out the hangover and the money you didn’t have?

Not the whole life. The specific activity. Dancing badly. Arguing about films until two in the morning. Driving somewhere with no plan. Singing. Swimming in something that wasn’t a pool. Being in a room where nobody knew what you did for a living.

Most women can answer that in about four seconds, which tells you she’s still in there and she’s been waiting.

And if nothing comes, that’s an answer too. It usually means you’re running on empty rather than bored, and the honest next step is rest and possibly a doctor, not a new hobby.

Why this is worth taking seriously

Because fun is the first thing to go and the last thing anyone grieves.

Nobody sits you down about it. There’s no conversation where a friend says “I’ve noticed you haven’t enjoyed anything in two years.” You can lose it entirely and every external measure of your life will still say you’re doing well, which is precisely what makes it such a reliable early warning.

In my experience it goes missing about eighteen months before a woman starts saying the bigger sentences. The ones about the job, or the marriage, or whether this is all there is. If you catch it at the fun stage, you are dealing with something much smaller and much cheaper to fix.

One hour, this week

Not a plan. Not a reinvention. One hour that produces nothing.

Put it in the calendar like it’s a dentist appointment, because the only thing that survives in your week is what’s written down, and you know that better than anyone. Tell whoever needs telling that you’re busy then. You are.

Then spend it on the thing you answered in four seconds. Badly, if necessary. Especially badly.

This is the first of the four steps, and it’s the one everyone wants to skip because it looks soft next to the others. It isn’t soft. Before you can work out what needs to change in your life, you have to remember that you are a person who wants things. An hour of pointless fun is the cheapest way I know to remember that.

She’s not gone. She’s just not in the calendar.