Saturday night, Colin held a small 25th birthday shindig at the fine Virgil’s Real BBQ in Times Square, involving countless pitchers of beer, several extremely large plates of hush puppies, and Colin putting in a remarkably strong showing against the Pig Out dinner sampler, affectionately nicknamed ‘the tour of mammals’.

Though the party degenerated into general drunken merriment on our roof, in a sober conversation earlier in the day, Colin admitted to being slightly freaked out by hitting the quarter of a century mark. And, with my own birthday just weeks away (July 16th, hint, hint), I similarly spent much of Sunday angsting about what turning 25 means, where I’m headed in life, where I want to go – in short, all the various and sundry sorts of possible soul-searching.

But, having observed friends of all ages, I don’t think Colin and I are unusual in having 25 angst. In fact, I’m now fairly certain that there are at least two big, scary ages, and that what those two ages are precisely largely breaks down by gender.

For guys, 25 is the first, as it signals the end (or, rather, should, though rarely actually does) of drunken collegiate stupidity. There’s a sense amongst guy friends that, up to 25, everything is sort of a warm-up lap, doesn’t actually count in the grand scheme of things. But, at 25, we’re suddenly playing for keeps. Marriage starts seeming like a real possibility. Jobs are swapped for ‘careers’. A general plan, a basic route through life, starts falling into place.

The second guy freak-out, then, is at 40, the first time that we, after blithely rolling full-throttle ahead on our laid-at-25 plans, stop and consider whether those were the right plans after all. Then, as they almost certainly weren’t, there’s the realization that wholesale reinvention would take altogether too much work, and that it would be vastly simpler to simply buy an overpriced sports car while pushing any nagging doubts into the back of our collective male unconscious.

Girls, on the other hand, blaze through 25 without batting an eyelash, only really slowing down at 30. Or, more precisely, at 29 – while we guys lack the foresight to start freaking out early, not really worrying about big issues into they’re shoved down our throat, girls, looking foreword, see 30 coming and start freaking out at least a full year in advance. Thirty’s a particularly big age for unmarried women, because, by then, there’s a definite sense that their friends are snatching up ‘the good ones’, and that, increasingly, their own love lives involve scraping towards the bottom of the guy barrel. So, the unmarrieds tend to go one of two routes: deciding that perhaps romance needn’t be like a movie, and settling for the first guy who doesn’t hit them or scratch himself (much) in public; or deciding that, actually, romance does need be like a movie, and that they’re willing to wait out for the real thing.

This second group, the ‘I’m okay with my life as it is, and I don’t need a guy to fill some gaping void in it, though, if a good one came along, that would be great’ group, then coasts along until 35 (or, again, more accurately, 34). At that point, the biological clock starts ticking increasingly loudly, and the sense of having all sorts of time gets replaced with a sense of having an ever-shrinking window for practical baby-popping. Usually, this group of girls has spent years convincing themselves that perhaps they don’t want kids anyway, and, having to constantly argue that fact against insistent ovaries (from what I’ve seen, a losing battle) is at the crux of the crisis and self-reinvention 34/35 requires.

At least, that’s how I see it.

Still, in my own life, I’m pleased to say I emerged from this weekend’s soul-searching with a slightly refined, though basically consistent, life vision. I’m hoping it holds for the next three weeks, until my birthday itself (again, July 16th, hint, hint), at which point I’m sure I’ll be tossed back to angstful ground zero, spending all day curled in the fetal position under the covers, rocking, sucking my thumb, and muttering quietly to myself.