Hi love,

This love story is one that genuinely gave me full body goosebumps when I first heard it.

It’s from Katie, who met her husband at 39 after spending most of her 30s single, doing deep inner work, and learning to accept that her timeline looked different from everyone else’s. And the way things unfolded after they met?

Let’s just say when you’re ready and you meet the right person, life can move FAST.

Reminder for you: your coupon to get a $50 discount off the Turning Community quarterly option runs out once this Love After 35 email series is finished and there are only two more stories to go! Details of how to join the community are below, after Katie's story.

So here’s Katie’s story:

Age and where she met her partner

39, online

How did you feel about being single before you met your partner?

Most of my thirties I was single. Yes, I went on dates and I met people, but I wasn’t in very long-term relationships. I definitely struggled being single in my thirties because, like most of us, I saw my friends get married and move in with their partners and start families. So yes, it was very much at the forefront of my mind.

But there was always a “but” for me. I’d like a relationship, but… I had beliefs that weren’t very healthy. I believed men were only after one thing. I had some challenges I was working through around my relationship with men. And maybe some of you can relate to this - sometimes you have to go through unpacking. I needed to unpack all of these beliefs I had about love and relationships, and my beliefs weren’t coming from a very healthy place. So they had all stemmed from somewhere unhealthy and I was carrying them through.

Yes, I would see friends move in with their partners and be in relationships, and I wanted an element of that. But at the same time, there was the “but” for me that I was almost afraid of it. I needed to work on it because I had all these extras that would come up. It was a bit of a roller coaster for me. I’d want a relationship, maybe I’d start dating somebody, the fear would come up, I would keep people at arm’s length. These were my patterns. This is what I would do.

My twenties were really difficult - there was a lot of depression. I wasn’t in a great place and something needed to change. I have a very vivid moment in my back garden in Ireland where it was like, I know something needs to change because if I don’t change now, I could see the way it was going to pan out. I wasn’t living life to my fullest by any means and I was very caught in the past - in past heartbreak, past trauma. I was feeling very stuck.

So in my thirties, I went to therapy. That’s where my work started. And I had my own Eat, Pray, Love story. At 33, I decided I wanted to take myself out of my current environment. I rented my house out, gave up my job, and went traveling to India for a few months to practice yoga. I didn’t know anybody, but I just thought I’ll go and do this.

What I didn’t realise at the time, but I do now, is that you take yourself with you. You think getting yourself away is going to be the thing, but it made me face things that I needed to face. It made me look at myself and made me reconnect with myself. A yoga practice very much does that anyway - it’s the physical movement, the breath, the mind, combining everything.

I went back to India many times. It was a really healing practice for me. When I moved back, I came to the UK and settled in London. I continued working on self-growth and self-development. I had great friends, I was building a great career, but I knew that if I didn’t work on myself, everything I did was going to be rooted in the past and would just keep repeating itself.

How they met

I met my husband online when I was 39. We met for a drink in the early afternoon in central London and we got on so well. I found him attractive, I found him interesting. We didn’t go too much into values on our first date, but it was a very easy, fun first date. My thing is always: would you like to see them for date number two? I don’t go any further than that. I just take those first few dates very simply.

For me, that was something I knew was a bit different because it felt quite mutual that the two of us were doing that. We felt very much on the same page. And things just started rolling from there.

I was 39, he was 41. Early on, we started having conversations about what we wanted - are we on the same path here? And we were very much aligned. He wanted to have children too. It kept moving along in the right direction.

Now I’m going to put in a “but” here: as much as the dating for us was all going great, in the background, I was freaking out a lot. Sometimes the work happens when you’re in the relationship. And I got frightened. I wanted to pull away. The old habits came in, even though I was enjoying myself, even though I found him attractive, even though all of this was happening. My autopilot kicked in and I was ready to go. I was ready to get out of there.

I didn’t get out of there. I worked through it very hard. Some of the early dates for us were very raw because I got quite upset sometimes because I was confronted with this. But for some reason I got to a stage where I could be vulnerable. And the man that was in front of me was not running either. He was someone who was telling me it was okay, that he wasn’t fazed by it. And that was a wonderful thing for me and probably what I needed.

We got together at the end of October. Early the next year I fell pregnant and I had a miscarriage - a very early stage miscarriage. Although it was devastating, it showed us something of what we really wanted. It was like, yes, this is what we want, let's move forward together.

A few months later, maybe five months later, I fell pregnant again. And that was the pregnancy with my son, who’s now six. When he was one and a half, I fell pregnant again and had another miscarriage. Then I fell pregnant again and that was my twin girls.

My son was born on the 14th of January and the girls were born on the 13th of January, two years later. So for one day we had three kids under two. All three of my children were born in my forties without any fertility treatments (a question I get asked a lot).

What felt hard about love before meeting him?

The biggest thing for me was that my love life was kept in a box. It wasn’t integrated as part of me in my everyday life. It was always this thing that kind of came out of the box for a while, and then I’d put it back in the box. It was confronting, so I tried to push it away.

It wasn’t until probably my mid-thirties that I started to deal with that a little bit better and bring that side of my life actually integrated into me.

I stayed hopeful because my mom used to say, “What’s meant for you won’t pass you by.” And I used to just have that in me - what will be, will be for me. And for some reason I had a bit of peace with that. I had peace around acceptance of where I was in my life. I had gone through a lot of acceptance of what was in the past and I was in a place where I felt, this will be.

I also found my community. I found the yoga community, which took me away from believing that there was something wrong with me because I wasn’t following this lifestyle that everyone else was. If you find yourself where all your friends are moving in with people or getting married and having babies, it’s really helpful to find a group of friends or move into a community where you can start building other friendships. Not that you want to leave your old friends, but you need people who can fully understand where you are.

What advice would you give someone who is looking for love in their thirties and thinks it is too late?

First of all, it will be okay. Whatever happens, it’s okay. Whether you meet your person or you don’t meet your person, everything’s going to be okay.

And the other thing is that if you’re on a different timeline than other people around you, there’s nothing wrong with you. We’re all on our own journey. I wish we could take timelines away and rip them up. I know we have a biological side of things, but live your life as best you can and look after you. I think everything else falls into place.

Being an older mom can have such a stigma around it, but I don’t know any different. I was 40 when I had my first baby and I was 42 when I had the girls. Some people say it’s very selfish that when you get older, your children are going to be without parents. But unfortunately anything can happen to any of us at any stage. I can’t live my life like that. For me, I’ve had no health issues around it, thankfully. My children have had no health issues because of it. Parenthood is wonderfully chaotic whatever age we’re at.

Katie’s story is such a powerful reminder that your timeline doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s. That you can spend your entire 30s single, do all the inner work, and still have moments where you want to run. And that when you meet the right person, things can move so much faster than you ever imagined.

If you want to hear more of Katie’s story and dive deeper into her journey, I had the most incredible conversation with her on the Turning 30 podcast last year where she shared her story in detail and we chatted about lots of topics in relation to finding love post 35. You can listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple or YouTube (or wherever you listen to your podcasts).

And if Katie’s story resonates with you - if you’re on your own timeline, doing the inner work, and looking for a community of women who just get it - I’d love to invite you to join Turning. As Katie mentioned in her story, something crucial in your single chapter is finding your people, the ones who can understand and support you. Turning can be that safe space and community for you.

As you signed up to the Love After 35 special series you get a $50 discount when you sign up for the Quarterly option- which gives you the option to join for as little as $66 a month for the first three months! (the usual price is $99). Use code LOVEAFTER35 at the check-out page.

Looking forward to meeting you inside.

With Love, ​
Emma x

Turning 30 Coach​
​www.turning30coach.com ​

​​​