A couple from my freshman dorm got married in January. They hid the fact from their parents and everyone else until only recently. They’re young and in love and they know that they want to spend the rest of their lives with each other.

All of this is incredibly weird to me. I’m now acquainted with at least four married couples about my age — counting just those people with whom I have some kind of personal connection (though I didn’t know this particular couple too well). And two of my close friends each plan to get married to their girlfriends the summer after graduation, not two years from now.

I’m only twenty. Do I want to get married? Yes. Would I want to do it now? I don’t know. That’s a scary question. Who would I want to spend the rest of my life with? The only people whom I have known closely for longer than, say, seven years has been my immediate family, and I still like to get away from them, no matter how much I love them. The rest of my life?

Are these young ‘uns rushing it? I don’t know. They’re at different places than me. If I knew absolutely that I would be spending the next eighty years with this one person and that I would be enjoying every moment of it, if I knew that the conditions were right and I wanted to start a family, perhaps I wouldn’t wait either. There seems to be some powerful universal need to create couples, families, networks of friends. I used to think it was kind of sissy and weak to want a girlfriend, or at least to admit it. Now I know it’s just human. But still, it’s the gap between the intellectual understanding of that, and the idea that these kids my age are launching themselves into a till-death-do-us-part institution that just … grabs me by the balls and twists hard. Okay, well maybe not that. But it’s weird. Maybe they’re just more mature than me.

Here’s my stance: I’d like to fall in love, get married, have kids someday, when I meet the right girl. It might be tomorrow. (Probably not the getting married and having kids part. But you never know.) It might be in ten years. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I’ll be happy right now. For me, it’s useless to be miserable about not being with someone. Get on with life, see what comes. I guess that’s all any of us are doing.