There are certain people we want to impress: family members, professors, employers, significant others, or parole officers, for instance. If you can show someone that you’re a mature, functioning adult, they will usually be impressed with you. Now I am, for all intents and purposes, a child. I have very few adult qualities. However, I’ve been pretty good at convincing people that I’m a full-blown adult, instead of a 6-foot-tall toddler. Sure, I spend a lot of my free time binge-watching Parks and Recreation and a lot of the food I eat has a cartoon mascot, but I’ve tricked quite a few people into thinking I’m a man who can act as a member of a mature society. There are a few surefire ways of fooling people into thinking you’re a grown-up.
Dress Well
It’s been said that “clothes make the man.” Distressed and ripped jeans, t-shirts with ironic, funny sayings on them, sports apparel: all things that should take a backseat if you’re not sitting at the kids’ table. To look more mature, wear clean, dark denim, shirts without graphics or giant logos, and shoes that weren't sold to you by a guy dressed as a referee. Look like GQ on the outside, even if you’re totally Nickelodeon Magazine on the inside.
Keep Your Hair Groomed
Your hair is either something you don’t care about at all or you obsess over every waking moment of your day. I fall into the latter category, so excuse the passion. We all need to take time and care about our hair. Much like our grandparents, we take our hair for granted and it won’t be around forever. (If you need to stop reading this to go call your grandma and tell her you love her, that’s totally fine.) That doesn’t mean simply washing your hair every couple of days. That means making sure it’s properly groomed, getting it cut frequently, and not letting it look unkempt. Of course, don’t overcare for your hair either. Don’t shampoo it or use products in it everyday. They can strip the natural oils your hair needs to be healthy.
Smell Like an Adult
If you haven’t already given up the Axe body spray or the super fruity vanilla teenage lady spray (that’s a brand, right?), let this be a wake-up call. Nobody will think you’re an adult if you smell like the junior high school locker room after gym class. Instead of spraying your scent profile out of the same type of can used for bug repellant, furniture polish and computer cleaner, spray it out of a glass bottle. By that I mean use cologne or perfume. Be careful though, because new cologne and perfume users often face the same problem that habitual body spray users have; they overuse. Nobody should be able to identify you by smell from any more than 3 feet away. It’s about subtlety. One spray to the neck of a decent cologne is enough for people to notice, but not so much that their nostrils burn.
Watch What You Say
There is a certain four-letter word you should never say to anyone you want to see you as an adult. That word, of course, is “dude”. Words like “dude”, “awesome” and “like” give off the impression that the only button down shirts you own are Hawaiian style. If you’re hanging out with your friends it’s totally fine to sound like one of the kids from Rocket Power, but if you’re expected to be an adult, maybe you should try to refine your vocabulary. Of course, swear words should go out the window as well. I’m not saying there isn’t a place in our culture for gratuitous sailor-speak, but if you’re trying to impress people with how mature you are, maybe it’s best that you don’t sound like a Quentin Tarantino script.
Sheathe the Phone
For many of us, pulling out and checking our phones every 15 seconds is common practice. For others, we don't need to pull it out every 15 seconds, because it's constantly in our hands. If you're interacting with anyone, it's common courtesy to give them your full, undivided attention. If you don't, and you're always checking your phone, people will see you as rude and immature. The thought of keeping our phones in our pockets is a scary idea. Just think of all of your friends' Instagramed meals and relationship goals tweets from "Common White Girl" that you'll be missing. Despite the harsh reality of waiting five minutes to find out the score of whatever random baseball game your ESPN app keeps updating you about, keeping your phone hidden will show that you're mature enough to show whoever you happen to be with that you respect them and value their time.
Learn How to Cook
As someone who is totally satisfied eating cereal for three meals a day, this is a weird topic for me to preach about. Learning how to cook is an important life skill that exemplifies your ability to survive in the real world and shows people how grown up you are. Let’s hash some things out here. Heating food isn’t cooking it. Even though commercials tell you otherwise, having Domino's delivered is really no different than throwing a Digorno pizza in the oven. Cooking food deals with more effort than taking something out of a box, placing it on a tray and waiting for it to get hot. If you want to ease yourself into cooking, start easy. Cook some pasta for yourself one night, then move into more complex recipes and meals. Eventually you’ll blow people away when you offer to cook them dinner and you give them a plate without any dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets on it.
