On Marriage

I feel like everyone's getting married. Weird, right? I sometimes forget that this isn't high school anymore and I'm a young adult and so are a lot of my friends. But that still isn't enough to justify for me the fact that everyone seems to be talking about marriage. For a while I was a little upset because I felt that I was a little behind everyone else in this aspect. I've always been the girl who dreamed about my wedding and had ideas of how I imagined it to be. So to see this becoming people's realities when it still seems so distant in my life was kind of a weird thing to cope with.

But then I took some time to think about it. Really think. And I realized, why on earth would I want to get married in the next couple years?! No judgement of those who do, that's not the point of this post. The point is - I have SO much I want to do still in my life that I see myself doing, well, by myself to be quite honest. I want to go places, I want to do things, and in all those dreams of mine, I don't see myself being married and doing them! That would only complicate much of what I want to do. I want to travel, I want to live in another country for a while...I want to experience it fully and not feel tied down to something or someone other than my family.

"Tied down," how cliche, I know. And believe me, I never thought I'd hear myself describe it like that. That's not how I view it in the big picture; I still have my ideal wedding plan and I still believe that I'm going to find a wonderful man to be my other half. But I want time to develop my half first. I don't want to settle down with the first man I find in sunny Southern California that seems to be my prince charming, and then abandon my dreams as a 20-something year old! I have so much more world to see. I have too much hope and aspiration in me to be contained in this bubble from this moment onward. There's too much else to experience.

Yeah yeah, it can be argued that if its the person I'm going to marry, I'll want to share these dreams and experiences with them. But these are things I want to do myself. So that I can grow, so that I can learn, so that I can satiate my curiosity by my own means and not be limited by the expectations of others.  So much of my life has been spent doing what I thought was expected of me to do - I don't want to live that way anymore. I've been working on that a lot, in the present. But it took me until tonight to realize that that applies to how I view the future as well. You expect me to get married at the first opportunity? Too bad, I want to travel overseas.

I have too much going on in my mind to settle down anytime soon. I have too many ideas, too many dreams. Sure, one wonderful guy could change a lot for me; but there's some things I am determined to do in my lifetime that I don't think I could let anyone get in the way of.

Guys, I'm bewildering myself as I write this. Sometimes I just surprise the hell out of myself, with these epiphanies. It's 2:00 in the morning - I was talking about teddy bears and about to go to bed and I was struck with this compulsion to write about this. I like this. I like that I can think this way. Thank God. It took me long enough to get here.