Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend..

It's fall and all I see is white.

White tulle, white shoes, white dresses, little bags of white rice; everywhere I look I'm surrounded by weddings, and I just turned 24 this month. I can't say I expected to be making the wedding circuit for at least another few years, but I've already been a bridesmaid once (at a few days past 23) and I'm due to be grooms-maid in March. Which coincidentally is after the wedding I have this weekend, and before the wedding I'm attending in June. And no, these aren't family relatives or older friends; none of them are any older than I am, and yet in my circle of pals, I have all of three who are single. Now I know a lot of single ladies (or Glee boys) would be chiming to have ring put on their fingers, but this phenomenon has me feeling more curious than desperate. As a group of kids who grew up when the 50% divorce rate statistic was thrown around as often as "Hit Me Baby One More Time" came on the radio, you would think we'd be a bit wary of jumping into marriage so soon after college. When you combine that with the fact that the US census has us currently at the highest age of first marriage rates in history, this seems like a strange phenomenon. Therefore, I decided to do what any 20-something would do, and hit up everyone I know, in reality and virtually, to see when they got married and why. Surprisingly, most of what I heard merely confirmed that my friends aren't freaks, and this might be a trend after all.

Growing up, I lived with two parents who just hit their twenty-five year anniversary. My mom was married previously, at the age of nineteen, and it ended as rapidly as we're told those marriages do. They were, as my aunt likes to say, "babies." She then met my father, they married when she was 26 and he was 30, had me at 28/32, and my sister at 35/39. We've got the dogs and a white picket fence, and dear God does this sound like an ad for the American Dream of life in the 'burbs. It wasn't and it's not, because behind every fence there is reality in which parents squabble, fight and act like children, money gets tight, and the dogs wreck the house. All a day in the life, right? Who wants to sign up? Apparently plenty of people, and they want to do it right now.

In my pop culture saturated mind, that means either they listened to too much Crosby Stills Nash & Young growing up, or they didn't watch enough 90s sitcoms, and are therefore giving the previous generations a middle finger salute. I can't have been the only one who remembers Ally McBeal as the young single hotshot lawyer, or the epitome of the single and allegedly loving it, Sex and the City foursome. They were thirty somethings, who were all very successful, living in great New York City apartments, and miraculously affording a Dolce and Gabanna addiction on a single income. They partied, dated, and had sex intermittently with whomever they wanted, and didn't bother settling down until they were in their late thirties. This is what those of us who had HBO in our dorms were weened on about life in the real world, and unlike the peers of those characters, it seems we're taking a pass on that lifestyle. Maybe we looked past the glittery dresses and ridiculously impractical shoes and saw the haggard lines of the lifestyle on their faces? Did we think Samantha was a bit sad for never finding a lasting relationship? Or Charolotte's desperate search for a husband was more about fulfilling society's norms than falling in love? And Carrie's nonstop critique of the ever-elusive Mr.Big only showed that she direly needed to internalize it, and take a long look at herself. Instead of role models for singledom, perhaps these were our, "What Not to Be," cautionary tales. Maybe they saw through all the independence and saw loneliness.

A good friend of mine seems to agree with that assessment, though she's ardently against young marriage. Erin provided a very well thought out quote about not being tied down in your twenties, because it's a time to be transitory, but the real meat of the matter came while idly discussing the topic:

"I think we're naive to think we're at a point in our lives where we should settle down. I think our generation is just nervous about facing the world alone without a sense of stability, which was lost post-college. I mean, jesus, my friend was married, divorced and remarried by the time she was 23. That's fucked up. Who are we to know who we're going to be in a year at this point in our lives?"

Honestly, this was more along the lines of how I thought people would feel about marriage. As I said, my parents married in 1984 in their late twenties/early thirties, my aunts on my mother's side married at thirty, and my father's sister married in her fifties. While I don't think marrying young was frowned upon, it was resolutely stated that a person's first priority is establishing him/herself independently. While no one in the family would call herself a traditional feminist, I come from very strong women, who love their husbands dearly, and whose families come first, but they know what and who they are outside of that dimension, regardless of whether they are stay at home mothers or working women. When I decided to write about this topic, I contacted my aunt, whom I affectionately deemed Gooma at a young age. She responded with a hefty answer about what she learned by waiting, which I think is full of insight and worth quoting in whole:

"This is what I learned by waiting:
1.) There is no other human being on the
earth that can "complete" me- including my spouse or my children. (to be honest, only Jesus can do that - but I suspect you won't use that in your quote). Getting married to fill a void in myself is an ingredient to failure. If I am not happy with who I am and love myself well, then I cannot and will not love another well. Time, experience and maturity is the only thing that will teach us this.
2.) Marriage should not be entered into if one has an eye on the "back
door."
3.) Marriage is NOT a spectator sport, it must be engaged and one
must give it their all and take the joys and the losses and always come back together as a team.
4.)The game is won when one learns selflessness, not
selfishness. Again - MATURITY (age and experience) does this.
5.) I do not try to change my husband, I married him as is, with no warranty, and no plans for a trade-in and think that I am a fortunate woman."

Now this is where it gets exceedingly interesting to me. She's not against marriage, she's not telling us to forsake family for our careers, or that being a contemporary woman means not settling down. Gooma's a woman who, as you can see, has deep Christian family values, but doesn't advocate rushing into them. She argues the importance of taking the time to know who we are separately before we tie ourselves to someone as an item. Personally, while I'm a rather self-assured and introspective person, my life is simultaneously in a state of stasis and change. Everything changed after college, and yet I still don't know who or what I'm supposed to be. Honestly I can't fathom knowing entirely who and what I am and want to become to balance one half of a whole. As she said, how can I complete someone else when I'm not sure If I'm complete in myself?

The answer, I have discovered through a very scientific twitter/texting/emailing poll, is simple. Love. Shocking, isn't it? People get married because they love each other? I did attempt to do some legitimate research on this topic, I even went to JSTOR, a college gal's one-stop-shop for all things peer-reviewed and official, and unsurprisingly I got very dry results. People get married because of societal norms and it is expected of them to do so. They do it for economic security, which in these trying times I think we can all see the perks of a two income household. I read in "Marriage Delayed or Marriage Forgone? New Cohort Forecasts of First Marriage for U.S. Women," by Joshua R. Goldstein and Catherine T. Kenney, which I might add was exceedingly dull, that there is speculation of a positive relation between the highly educated and marriage. The old conclusion that the more educated you are, the less likely you are to marry, is apparently falling by the wayside.

It's been deemed therefore, that fools and smart folks alike can rush in, all in the name of love. It seems all the cheesy adages have some semblance of truth in them, because resoundingly the answers I received, from a wide berth of people, is that it's pointless to wait when you "just know." It's not about being too old or too young, it's not knowing yourself and getting established, and the statistics and societal norms are just words on a page. What I resoundingly discovered for those who are married or getting married at my age, it's not a growing trend, but rather people being in love and taking a risk on it.

So Instead of summarizing some of the great quotes and stories I've received while writing this article, I'll let them speak for themselves:

Alec, age 23, engaged to be married in March:
"I was lucky enough to meet my perfect life partner in my Sophomore year of college"

J.C., age 25, married last year:
"My parents got married when they were 19 and 23 so getting married at 24 didn't seem that odd to me. I don't think age matters as long as you understand the responsibility."

Kate, age 25, married at 22:
"Love is always enough if it matters to the people who feel it."

Amber married at 19, now 22:
"Met him in Army nursing school, he got me, I got him and it just felt wrong NOT to marry him. I've known him for four years now, and up until the last year or so, it has been going pretty well.Things have been difficult with both of us being deployed and I'm hoping that come January we'll be able to figure things out. :-)"

Vanessa, engaged at 20, married at 22:
"I got engaged at 20, married at 22. We knew it would happen 3 weeks after we met. It was just right. Waited 4 years though."

Kyla 24, married last year to J.C.:
"I never planned to get married at 23 and I'm not going to lie, it can be hard at times. You have all thesebig changes- graduating college, getting a job, paying bills, moving out of your parents house, and then add on top of that becoming a wife or husband can be alot. But the good thing is no matter how stressful it gets you know you can depend on that person to help you through it and be there for you."

Sarah married at 25:
" I got married at 25, three months shy of my 26th
birthday. If he would have proposed earlier, I would have gotten married earlier. My husband and I had been together for 6 1/2 years when we got married, and had been living together for 3 years at the time. Marriage was the next step, but besides that, we had been very serious from very early on in our relationship. We always knew we would get married. I consider myself lucky that we met when we were young. In comparison to many people we knew, we waited late. We saw a lot of our friends rush to get married young, only to end in divorce within a year, so I think that is one of the reasons we waited so long."

Tamora, married at 23:
"When the right one comes along, and you are both
certain of your feelings and commitment, you don't put it off."

For all my ranting about finding out who I and what I'm supposed to be doing with my life, seeing everyone listed, who may not necessarily know any better than I do, find happiness, is uplifting. It's not a Disney fairy tale or a 90s television show telling me how to be, but rather a bit of proof that we don't always have to be put together, or to quote my high school's motto, "know who you are and be that well" (St.Francis of Assisi if you're wondering). I may not know what it means to be a grown-up, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.Maybe getting married early is just a way to deal with the confusion through the support of someone else. Maybe it's finding your soul mate/life partner/significant other/that jerk who doesn't do their dishes. Maybe it's a financial move or succumbing to societal pressure. Maybe trying to analyze this through an age lens is pointless.

Maybe love is the answer.

Or maybe I should stop thinking about it and go splurge on an obscenely over-priced dress and shoes I can't afford, and enjoy the wedding circuit.

Afterall, it worked for the Sex and the City gals...