Why is Everyone Around Me Getting Married!!!!
Our Cultural Obsession with Relationships
I’ve gotten to the point in my life where everyone around me is either getting married or getting into serious relationships and it’s jarring. Maybe it’s a midwestern thing as we’re all only still in our early 20s, but I thought I’d have more time before I started hearing about engagements and weddings. Even some of my closest friends who aren’t in relationships want to be married before 30. Meanwhile, me and my sister’s desire to take our time or forgo procreation and marriage altogether leaves the people around us shocked.
As I ponder how quickly we’re all growing up and making these big potentially life-altering decisions, I find myself really confused. I just don’t understand what the rush is.
I feel like we’re in the midst of a cultural obsession with relationships. Which I guess makes sense considering we are in the middle of a relationship and sex recession. According to The Hill, more than 60% of young men are single which is twice that compared to young women. In response to this, there seems to be an increase in the amount of ‘relationship gurus’ popping up all over social media selling books (mostly to women from what I’m seeing) on how to get into a relationship and make it last. ‘Alpha males’ on Youtube and TikTok have branched into this area, encouraging women to be more ‘submissive’ and ' feminine’ in order to make it easier for a man to be a man (whatever that means).
In our pursuit of marriage, I feel we approach the issue from a very romanticized lens, especially as young people. I think we compare it to something out of a Disney movie where everyone says I do and they all live happily ever after. We do it thinking that the love we have for each other will be enough and whatever problems we have before the wedding will naturally resolve themselves later and even if it doesn’t, love will save the day.
There is a more practical side to it too. Many of my peers want children and in an attempt to avoid a mad scramble towards the end of our fertility years, we nab a father or mother for our children young. But I believe there’s something deeper.
As loneliness becomes a more well-known epidemic, I think there’s an idea that being in a relationship will remedy any current or potential loneliness we do feel or will feel. Along with other forms of companionship, I think being in a relationship provides us an escape from the parts of ourselves that we are subconsciously afraid to face. Confronting parts of ourselves we’ve rejected or hidden away from ourselves and the world is hard. Dealing with it alone in the world is even harder.
A relationship seems to be the correct solution for this. There’s nothing that can’t be accomplished with someone’s love. We figure maybe loving ourselves won’t be so hard if we find someone else to do it for us while we figure out how to do it ourselves.
Until we realize that ‘wherever you go there you are.’
The parts of ourselves we hide away have a way of attracting people who bring it into the light and it's only then we realize that love is no substitute for self-acceptance.
The difficulty that comes with managing all the responsibilities that come with adulthood is made clear by many members of my generation. It seems like everywhere I look everyone is crumbling under the pressure of having to sustain their own humanity. Men are struggling emotionally without women to do the emotional labor for them. Everybody (particularly women) is complaining about the nuisance of working for a paycheck and wives humble brag about not having to work due to their wonderful provider husband and boyfriend.
So I can understand the desire to obtain a romantic partner you can outsource any emotional, financial, social, and household labor. Being human is hard and having someone else to be human with makes things just a little bit easier. But at the same time, I wonder where the unwillingness to manage your own humanity comes from. Relationships can be just as hard as life, after all. S. Is learning the ropes of your own personhood so much more distasteful than learning to be in a committed partnership?
But getting older means understanding that a relationship communicates to the world a certain type of social success. The type of person we are able to get into a relationship with communicates our value and worth by proxy and sometimes it’s just low-hanging fruit. A way to show the world that even if our life didn’t turn out the way it did or we didn’t achieve the dreams we wanted to achieve, in the end, we were still lovable/desirable etc. enough to achieve a relationship.
Despite the number of marriages and couplings that are beginning to fill my life, I’ve yet to feel the pressure to follow suit. An issue most likely due to my upbringing. My mother and my father raised me to become a woman before I became a wife and mother. My own mother had me and my twin sister at 36 and married in the same decade. Although they would love for me to marry and have children, doing it as soon as possible is never something they’ve encouraged. Considering the path the world is going down, I think my parent’s encouragement to decenter men, marriage, and children in my life and my identity as a woman may serve me more than I realize.
Regardless of what my parents would like, I have no interest in taking up a life partner. The energy that I would have to invest in taking on the responsibilities, ups and downs, nuances, and intricacies that go into getting and staying in a relationship would be better spent cultivating my interests and passions.
I’m still young so no one is raising an eyebrow yet, but as I get older and continue to move through life single I’ll be expecting judgment and negative assumptions made about my value, my worth, my desirability, my lovability etc. But I know I’ll learn to take it in stride as I pour my energy into building the life of my dreams. Even though young marriages are statistically more likely to fail, I hope all my peers go on to have successful ones.
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