Go to college, meet your soul mate, graduate from college, marry soul mate, live happily ever after.
To most this probably looks like a fairly typical timeline. It’s not my timeline of choice, and I know it’s not the chosen plan for many others, but I think it’s safe to say it’s fairly typical.
I don’t know where the idea originated or when it entered during my upbringing (my parents didn’t even meet in college), but at some point in my early life it became known to me that this is generally the way things happen, and I’m sure many of you would say the same. A recent study found 96 percent of college students either want to marry or are already married.
The problem with this idea is that many people haven’t let go of it by the time they enter college; it’s engrained into our minds, setting us on some preconceived path to always be on the lookout for a potential soul mate, or a suitable substitute, because heaven forbid we graduate from college single.
Starting recently, I haven’t been able to open the Sunday edition of my hometown paper, The Birmingham News, without spotting at least one person I know in the weddings and engagements section. It’s odd to me every time, yet it never sinks in.
My boyfriend has served in two weddings, one of which I recently attended, where the bride and groom were my age. I stood watching them exchange lifelong vows, watching them take the first steps into their adult lives together, yet it didn’t sink in.
I checked Facebook on Valentine’s Day and saw a section of Facebook valentines. At least half of them mentioned marriage or getting engaged. I’m the same age as all of the posters of those valentines, and yet it just won’t sink in.
Maybe it’s a maturity issue. Maybe by the time some people graduate from college they feel ready to throw themselves into the real world full force-career, bills, spouse, the whole shebang, all at once. Maybe I just don’t feel that a year from now, when I graduate, I will be mature enough to handle marriage. Scratch the maybe; I definitely don’t. I’ve been in a relationship for a year and a half, and I know I definitely don’t. I still feel like a kid, and don’t so many of us, or is it just me?
So I have to ask-why the rush?
I think it’s this notion of college being the time to meet the person you’ll marry and post-graduation being the time to tie the knot.
So much could be achieved from waiting. Regardless of how mature we may believe ourselves to be at 22 or so, we’re still very young, and judging by my wishy-washy seesaw of a career search thus far, I’d say we don’t really know what we want, and we don’t fully know the adults we’re going to become.
Yes, we have ideas and inklings of where our lives are headed, vagaries that are sure to become clearer with each passing year, but to throw the uncertain aside to jump into a lifelong commitment is not an act of play.
I think if everyone were to live post-college lives independently for a time, marriages built from the union of two independent adults would be more successful than the union of two barely adult college kids. It’s not even a matter of conjecture; it’s been shown long-lasting marriages occur between people who marry slightly later in life.
And why wouldn’t that be the case? A single, say, 30-year old with a career and a relatively stable life is most likely secure in his identity and knows exactly what he wants, and can therefore find someone willing to share it. A single 20-year-old might think he knows his career path and what he wants from life, but those are so malleable early in life.
Not to say everyone who marries young will end up divorcing, or that everyone who marries young isn’t right for each other, but I think we could all do our part in curbing the astonishingly high divorce rate (recently set around 40 percent) if everyone would just cool their marital jets for a while and focus on their individual paths.
I’d be willing to bet if you did that you’d soon run into someone on the same path as yourself.