Marriage is NOT the Holy Grail. (one look at the divorce rate proves that). I know many women in their 40s, 50s and 60s who have never married and are perfectly happy. Why do you attach your happiness / sense of self to your marital status?
Until you are happy and content with yourself and your life - as it is, not how you would imagine it to be - you will not find true happiness in a relationship, as you will be looking to the other person for fulfillment - something that is not possible. That ridiculous line from Jerry McGuire ("you complete me") is NOT the position to function from. You should be complete AS YOU ARE! You need to find your happiness within yourself.
Again - this is not meant to sound harsh, but just some food for thought. Being single is hardly the worst thing that could happen to you.
I could not agree with your more. I was actually talking about this with a friend of mine the other day; why do people feel the need to use marriage as some sort of status-symbol? ANYONE can just get married. It doesn't make you more accomplished than me, it doesn't make you happier than me, and it doesn't make you better than me. I think people get so wrapped up in titles and thinking their lives need to adhere to some sort of time line, that if they don't accomplish this and that by this point in time then they are failures and I find THIS to be sad.
My best friend's family is very old-fashioned. And by old fashioned I mean you need to be married by 25, have kids by the time you're 30, and give up any sort of career outside of the house because it's your job to take care of your man and pump out kids (at least 4) for the rest of your life. The wives don't have friends outside of the family but the men can. So, once she turned 25, regardless of the fact that neither she nor her husband had any sort of financial stability, my BFF got married. Now she is pregnant and doesn't know how they will afford their child but it's "what you're supposed to do at this age (we're 29)." And let me tell you, she is one of the most miserable people I have ever met in my life! She never smiles anymore, stopped joking around, complains about everything...oh but she is married and she will rub that ring in your face if you ever challenge her. On the rare occasion that my BF of 4 yrs and I hang out with them, we can't survive the night without a "so when's the ring coming" comment and it drives me nuts. Neither my BF or I are ready to have kids yet, we are both going back to school and concentrating on our careers, so what is the rush? I see marriage as more of a proclamation of love and wanting to build a family with someone, not some ridiculous status symbol. There is nothing wrong with waiting until YOU are ready and until YOU find someone you can spend the rest of your life with, and that doesn't fit neatly into a time line. All the people pressuring you to get married aren't living your life, they won't suffer the hardships you will encounter, so why they have a say in anything you do is ridiculous. I think that's why divorce rates are so high; people are so ready to rush into what they think they should be doing instead of actually doing what they want to be doing. Which circles back to needing to be comfortable in your own skin before you can go about finding someone to spend your days with.
I also think technology made society SO lazy; it's like people don't know how to actually speak to each other and they can't recognize that relationships don't thrive off of text messaging and facebook comments. I also find people have gotten exceptionally disrespectful, and by that I mean cancelling plans at the last minute (as you mentioned) or not showing up at all, and I think this is because they forget there is an actual person on the other end of that text/set of plans if that makes sense. I don't remember ever having people cancel plans with me on a whim and now it happens SO often that I don't even make them with a majority of my "friends" anymore, as a lot of them just text me literally minutes before and say "sorry can't make it." We have gotten so emotionally lazy as a society and don't care about anything outside of blackberrys and dvr's.
And that's my little social commentary for the day, lol
