The questions, as most women know, start young – what do you want to be when you grow up? Do you have a boyfriend yet? Do you know what you want to do when you leave school? Then, in your 20s and 30s, they ramp up like the Riddler on steroids – which career have you chosen? Shouldn’t you be engaged by now? When are you going to get married? What about kids? 

The implication, often unspoken but rarely subtle, is the same – hurry, hurry, time’s passing by, don’t leave it too late! Act fast before your looks fade, your body sags, your hair turns grey. Before you know it, you’ll be an old maid, falling apart, past your prime, left on the shelf. Expired. Tick tock!

From an early age, women are put on the clock. Or, more precisely, they’re pitted against the clock in an unwinnable race against Father Time. And yet, a life filled with deadlines to be met and boxes to be ticked by certain age milestones is not how women thrive or want to live their lives.

“Deadlines on women are inherited narratives. They are not the truth,” says Eda Gungor, 42, founder of SEVA Wellbeing in Dubai. “Women are conditioned to feel that we’re on timelines, but they’re imaginary. These expectations come into our subconscious, then they become stories we tell ourselves. These pressures are not our essence – they are someone else’s rules.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Asma Hilal Lootah, 48, the Emirati founder and owner of Jumeirah’s The Hundred Wellness Centre. “Society rules are not from God – they are human-created, and I think society puts the pressure on us as women,” she says. “I remember when I reached 30, people would say, ‘You need to get married’ and ‘It might be too late to have children’. When you reach 40, your life begins, you gain more wisdom, and you realise it was all such rubbish.”

Living according to somebody else’s timeframe will be a familiar experience for many women, along with the internalised belief that we have a built-in expiration date. Which, okay, if we’re being literal, there is one – fertility.

From her first menstrual cycle until the end of menopause, a woman’s opportunity to bear children has a definitive beginning and end. Yet somehow, this singular aspect of womanhood has become the yardstick against which a woman’s usefulness to society – not her worth – is measured. As if having children were the only thing she is good for.

“When I reached 40, I did have a moment of ‘The clock’s ticking’,” says Maria Dowling, 57, founder of the eponymous Dubai hair salon. “I needed to decide if I was going to miss out or regret it, but I never saw myself pregnant and never saw myself having children. I do feel like you adhere to deadlines for your family. When you meet someone, they’ll ask, ‘When’s the big day?’ But once you get married, then it’s, ‘When are you having kids? You’re not getting any younger.’ Then you have one child and you’re being asked about having another. The expectations are never-ending.” 

The spotlight was shone on limitations and the way women internalise them at this year’s Golden Globes, when actress Demi Moore, 62, won her first major award since starting her career aged 19. Once the highest paid actress in Tinseltown, her filmography includes some of Hollywood’s most famous films – Ghost, A Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal – and her movies have generated over Dhs5.7 billion at the box office. And yet, in a poignant acceptance speech, she reflected on the limitations imposed upon her by a comment made decades previously.

“Thirty years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a popcorn actress, and at that time I made that mean that this wasn’t something I was allowed to have,” she said. “That I could do movies that were successful, that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged. And I bought in and believed that. And that corroded me over time to the point where I thought a few years ago this was it – maybe I’d done what I was supposed to do.”

The deadlines and constraints imposed on women evolved across millennia of being told to stay in your lane, there’s a good girl. Otherwise known as sitting down and shutting up – accepting the fate that has been decided for you. Based as they usually are on looks and age, societal limitations go into overdrive when a woman hits 50. This phenomenon has a name – invisible woman syndrome.

The concept is old, but the neat little soundbite stems from a 2016 article titled Invisible Woman Syndrome: Do You Have It by Melanie Joosten, a researcher at the National Ageing Research Institute (NARI). In it, Joosten noted, “Our society traditionally expects men and women to play different roles, and a woman’s role in a very conservative society – which we really are in many aspects – is to be attractive and to perhaps have the role of a mother.” She added, “If women start to no longer be attractive – which is what some people consider if a woman ages – then she becomes less relevant. The same doesn’t apply to men because, as they get older, they get more respect, if anything.”

Judging people by their aesthetic is a tricky business these days. A quick scroll through social media will turn up 50-, 60- and 70-year-old women who look decades younger, whether due to clean living, excellent surgical tweaks or, more likely, a mix of both. Not to mention that the casual dress code favoured by billionaire tech bros might lead one to believe they don’t have a dirham to their name. The traditional visual indicators of age – wrinkles, grey hair, cardigans – might be disappearing, but the mental, spiritual and emotional gauges of age – increased confidence and a clearer, more defined sense of the self – are directing women to seek out new challenges that lie in the opposite direction to the pasture society wants to put them out to.

For Dubai-based accessibility consultant and Paralympian Jessica Smith, 40, deadlines and time constraints were a way life since she was selected for the Australian swimming team at the age of 13. During the ten years she competed, following a stringent set of rules regarding training, diet and planning was the path to success. But when she retired from sport aged 22, she discovered that the deadlines that propelled her sporting life didn’t translate to her personal life.

“I felt the pressure to start the ‘next chapter’ was far more intense than representing my country,” she says. “I wasn’t even sure what the next chapter was. I felt societal pressure to be as successful in my next career path as I was in the pool. I told myself that, by the time I was 30, I needed to have a high-paying career, be married and ideally have two children. I’m not sure where any of these ideas came from, but I guess it was a combination of my own parents sharing their lived experiences, coupled with the idealist scenario portrayed in most Hollywood films.”

“Women’s lives and status have always been impacted and regulated by certain ‘time limits’ and an ideal that needs to be respected, especially regarding marriage and having children,” notes Dr Diana Cheaib Houry, psychologist at Thrive Wellbeing Centre. “The farther we are from this ideal, the more we can be in conflict within ourselves. Setting milestones is one of the coping mechanisms women can be using in order to have a certain control over this fear of missing out on certain aspect of their lives.” 

Now a mother-of-three, Jessica Smith says, “Over the years I have learnt that I needed to give myself flexibility and space, and so I’ve become more adaptable with the deadlines I set myself, mostly because I had to let go and surrender when the deadlines I had set for myself kept passing me by.”

The message for women of all ages is clear – deadlines are done. Not least because of the overwhelming disappointment that can arise when they are not met, but also because of the debilitating effect on mindset and evolution that self-restriction can have.

So, if we remove deadlines from life’s equation, how are we to celebrate our successes?

“Through the sense of accomplishment,” says Elisa Bruno, 42, CEO of Level Shoes. “Anything you choose to do for yourself comes with a feeling of accomplishment. When I feel I have achieved something, that makes me feel good and at peace with myself as part of a journey I have designed for myself.”

“We should always be sharing information and educating women to be aware of changes in their 20s, 30s, 40s, but that should never be utilised to scare them or make them feel the pressure of having to do something,” she adds. “Removing the self-limiting beliefs we often have in the early stages of our lives because of unwritten rules should replace age milestones.”

“When you set deadlines you restrict yourself, you get stuck and don’t flow,” adds Lootah. “Trust the process. I feel a complete sense of liberation and freedom when I follow my own rules.”

Tick…stop.