Amid all the 20-somethings who are dating long-distance or meeting the beau’s parents or bugging their boyfriends to get a new mattress, there is the strange breed of 20-somethings who are (gasp!) single.
You might think that after the ripe old age of 22, we cease to exist. But I can stand here as living proof: Not every 20-something is hitched. Or attached. Or spoken for.
All kidding aside, singledom has been on my mind recently, and mostly because people just won’t stop bugging me about it. I say this with love, friends — being single is not a disease. But there’s something special about your coupled-up friends that makes them want to set you up with a friend of a friend of their brother’s friend. Or text you stealth pictures of a potential love matches they found in a bar.
Luckily I don’t have the kind of extended family that also jumps on the bandwagon. I can’t imagine my grandma poking around asking when I was going to find a hubs and tie the knot. My parents didn’t marry until they were 27, and that was before the generation of 20-somethings taking their sweet time growing up.
I’m not against dating or relationships. If a friend honestly had someone in mind, I’d do the blind date. I started a profile on eHarmony before I realized how much dough I’d have to cough up. I’m just against the idea that every single person is without a romance because they’re failing at their lives. Single people are real, too — and sometimes, even OK with it.
What about you — single or attached — have you felt or did you feel the pressure to start dating? Get engaged? Have kids immediately once you married? Is anyone else feeling this rush?
I found that I had to build up a decent tolerance to the relationship question over the years, but after seeing friends marry and divorce, being single doesn’t seem so bad. Having recently moved from Chicago to York it’s a totally different culture. There were so many single people so it was hardly questioned (even for those of us pushing the higher 20s). Grad school was great because there were tons of people who were single and my age. Here I see lots of people younger than me who are married and with kids. It’s quite a change.
E-Harmony, while effective, gets to be quite laborious if you want results. It’s like a strange mix of facebook and the 2nd grade do you want to date me check the box yes or no letters. Also, not cheap. But hey, who can put a price on love?
I think it’s definitely true that it matters where you live and who your friends are. In college (and in my hometown), most of my friends were single. And even now, post-grad, I only have a few close friends from college and home who are married. But when you start hanging out with all couples, it’s very different!
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