Every day that I drive to work, I pass by rows and rows of
these little, perfect suburban houses and all I can do is shudder at the
thought of ever living in one.
Now before you jump all over me saying that I’m judging the
suburbs too quickly, please give me a moment to explain myself: my generation
keeps pushing the “married with kids” age further and further back. For women,
the average age for becoming a first time mother is now at an all time high of
26 and most marry (if they marry at all) at this age or later on average.
Now I could just go through the article Time wrote with the
catchy, yet vaguely insulting title of “Help! My Parents are Millennials!”
which was about par for the course considering their equally obnoxious “The ME
ME ME Generation” cover article from 2013, but instead of spewing the same
nonsense “research” that Time seems to think embodies and explains my
generation, I’ll just go ahead and give you my reasons for marrying and having
kids later (if at all).
If you haven’t talked to a 20-something recently and heard
their loud and dripping with distain sigh in response to the “so, you seeing
anyone?” question, let me go ahead and shine some light on this reaction.
Most of the time, we can’t really give you a straight answer
as to if we’re “seeing someone” because we don’t even know what classifies as
“seeing someone” anymore. We can be “talking” to someone (read: texting
somewhere between sporadically or constantly), casually dating a few people,
sleeping with someone, spending a lot of time with someone and being romantic
but there’s no official title, seeing someone a lot when you are out and
hooking up with them after a night at the bars, dating someone with a pledge of
“commitment,” or the ever elusive white whale of the boyfriend/girlfriend
title.
So the short answer to the “Are you seeing anyone?”
question: we actually don’t know.
This is probably why it’s taking us longer to get married.
We get so stuck in the endless merry-go-round of nonsense that is 21st
century dating that we can’t even figure out what dating even means anymore.
Usually we just kind of end up stumbling into relationships by accident and
then after a fairly painful series of “So…what are we?” conversations, you
occasionally end up in a relationship.
As someone who goes back and forth every week (sometimes every
day) with deciding if I’m done with dating or not, it’s a suuuuuper fun
experience (did I make the sarcasm clear enough there?).
Even finding a person to go through this painful dance with
is like finding a needle in a haystack that’s on fire.
There are bars, coffee shops, Tinder, OkCupid, Match, speed
dating events, friends of friends, work, college, that person who was bold
enough to put their number on your Starbuck’s cup, parents’ choices, siblings’
suggestions on and on and on until we can barely keep straight who we’ve met in
real life and who we’ve just electronically communicated with.
Imagine for a second analyzing and reanalyzing every single
letter you typed in a text message and sending it to four different people to
read before you send it to the intended recipient because you weren’t sure if
“Okay!” was too enthusiastic a response to a “Let’s grab a drink sometime”
message.
See what I mean? It’s like managing a second life totally
outside of yourself because you’re not convinced that you, as you are, are good enough for that person getting that message.
We have a million and one ways to get rejected now and
you’re asking us why we aren’t settling down sooner? Why would we choose to rush
into things when most of us come from divorced/separated/constantly
fighting/only-pseudo functioning parents?
We’re petrified of ending up alone, but at the same time
we’re petrified of ending up in a relationship that’s miserable, so much so
that we sometimes find ourselves backsliding into things that were comfortable
and kind of functional at one point so “Why not?”
Now at one point I know that we’re all going to end up right
where we are supposed to be. And as someone who is constantly confused and
frustrated by dating I can say with assurance (okay….pseudo-assurance) that
we’ll find that person for all of us.
It’s just a matter of timing and chemistry (A la Robin: “And
timing’s a bitch”). But we’ll get there.
Just stop rushing us into commitment and making us feel bad
about pushing the marriage and babies age up. We’re going to take our sweet
time, so you might as well just sit back with the popcorn and relax. We’ll
stumble into it eventually.
