Will they think I'm crazy if I text back too fast?

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 21^st 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.