Playing House

Last weekend I ventured across the country to Pennsylvania where I met up with 12 of my closest friends from college. For some, it had been an entire year since I’d last seen them, and others only a few months. Regardless, the day we graduated in May of 2008 was the last time we had all stood at the exact same point in our lives. We were all graduates preparing to leave the world of college behind. Little did we know that the directions each of us would take over the course of the next year would be drastically different. Some of us chose to travel, visiting new parts of the US and foreign countries. Some of us moved to new states or to the other side of the country from where we grew up. Some of us got our dream jobs and quickly settled into adulthood. And two of us… got engaged.

Ah yes, two of us will soon be moving on to the wonderful world of marriage, with two others not far behind. Then there are a few of us who are in serious or semi-serious relationships and may or may not have already begun looking at rings… And then there are the rest of us. The lone rangers who try to put a weekend like this into perspective. "OK… I’m 23 years old, a year out of college, at the beginning of my career, still trying to get my feet under me, I'm not in a long term relationship…AND IT’S REALLY OK THAT I’M NOT FALLING MADLY IN LOVE, PICKING OUT RINGS, GETTING ENGAGED IN PARIS, OR PLANNING MY WEDDING...... REALLY!"

Really? How in the world did this happen? How is it possible that spending 2 days around a few engaged people can make a girl crazy. Well, here’s my logic… followed by a little perspective. Every girl wants to fall in love with Prince Charming and have a fairy tale wedding. (Now, I know some of us just want to marry Mr. Right and have a wedding where Uncle Paul doesn’t get drunk and try to dance on the table, but just go with it.) From a young age, we begin incorporating marriage into our lives. Playing make-believe, better known as “House” typically involved a husband and a wife. Or at least a wife, for that matter. Some little girls are smart enough to know that the “husband” is not always a reliable “character” in make-believe, so they leave him out all together.

As we get older, we move on to the teen-bop stage. The “Oh, he is so hot, I’d marry him” stage. Then we move on to our first few serious boyfriends. It’s at this stage where we occasionally start putting ourselves into the “wife” role. Cooking dinner for a boyfriend who just got home from work and gives us the “Hi honey, how was your day?” followed by a kiss on the cheek. We’ve all snapped into Make-Believe world where we’re happily married and making dinner for the husband we love and living the perfect life. If we’re smart, we snap out of it just as quickly.

Here’s the perspective: My friends who are engaged have been with their boyfriends for at least four years. Four Years! That’s a long time. They know at this point that they want to spend the rest of their lives with those men. So those of us spending our time flittering around in la-la land, pretending to make dinner for a “husband” we’ve been dating for a few months, and then getting emotional about the fact that EVERYONE around us is getting married is insane. Don’t worry, I’m fully aware of how crazy this rant sounds. Luckily, I’ve already had my epiphany and snapped myself right out of Make-Believe.

So, in closing, for those of us lone rangers out there who are feeling the pressure from “everyone else” a few steps ahead of us on the relationship path, we need to relax. Let’s join the rest of the twenty-something year olds who are busy dancing on bars, driving cars like they’re stolen, and dating for the giddiness of a first kiss. Love and marriage will come along in their own time for each of us. And look at the bright side, at least none of our friends are having kids. Oh wait…