I amazed my dad the other day by commenting that I wasn't going to start saving for my children's college educations at the behest of a mailed solicitation from Key Bank. This, despite knowing that if I want my hypothetical children to have a decent college education without having to jump through the financial hoops that plague my friends, now would probably be the time to start saving.
What surprised him wasn't that I realized how much financial planning goes into raising kids, but rather that it was the first time he'd ever heard me refer to kids as a possibility in my life.
I was at pains to explain to him that I'd been dealing with the offer of "assistance with financial planning for your child's educations" in a hypothetical manner - and it wasn't a case of protesting too much, I assure you. Although I'd love to be an aunt, or even a grandparent, I haven't the slightest inclination toward being a mother. This seems to set me apart from most of my friends.
They, you see, are all getting married. And here I am, never having had a serious relationship with a guy in my life.
All right, not everyone I know is tying the knot . but the numbers are beginning to climb. Three years ago, hearing that someone my age had gotten married was likely to provoke stares of shock, and yet in the past year I've found out that two girls I knew back in high school are taking this huge step, as is one of the guys I met here my freshman year.
Marriages aside, there are more serious relationships whirling around me than I can count. I watch people I've known since high school, people I've known since my freshman year here, Getting Involved. Making Commitments.
Breaking Up.
Then the cycle repeats. All these friends are tying themselves into knots to make sure their relationships work out, or else beating themselves emotionally senseless when they don't. Meanwhile, I stand back and wonder how they can expend so much energy on something that, to me, seems so meaningless.
But then I ask myself, is it in fact meaningless after all? Homo sapiens is a social species, after all. It's probably coded, somewhere between the G's, A's, T's, T's, A's, C's, and A's in our DNA, that we'll spend our whole lives lusting after people who are either: a) inaccessible, b) disinterested or c) completely and utterly unworthy of our affections. I remember back when I was in high school, a well-known female R&B singer bought herself a huge diamond ring and announced that she wouldn't so much as consider getting into a relationship until she found a man who was willing to take as good care of her as she was of herself. Surprising? It seems that way at first.
But why was that report newsworthy in the first place? Here was a woman simply following through to the most inevitable conclusion, one which is now gaining a bit more credibility as actresses like Nicole Kidman and Goldie Hawn are seen with men years their juniors. Thanks to the women's right movement embarked upon by generations before ours, women no longer have to rely on men to provide for them. Materially speaking, or otherwise.
As, around me, my friends' relationships are progressing to "next steps" and "higher levels," I've come to realize that as long as I'm happy with where I am, it doesn't matter how many of the people around me are wrapped up in miniature soap operas. So long as I can look back and think, "I'm glad I did this," instead of, "Why didn't I do that differently," then I must be living my life the right way.
Maybe that's why the idea of my friends getting married, getting engaged, even having relationships doesn't bother me as much as common sense, my biological clock and society indicate it should. When I think of my future, as a writer, as a person, I don't think of myself and someone at my side. I think of me. This is probably something that would be interpreted as selfishness, or a failing, because there are such a small number of people willing to step up and say they're happy with where they are in life, when they're not with someone else.
So while my flatmates hold conversations about how a woman's fertility drops dramatically after the age of twenty-seven, I ask myself if in good conscience I can add to the problem of too-many-billion people trying to get by on what's available in the first place. Then I ask myself if having someone else in my life, constantly, whether boyfriend or husband or child, is one of my priorities. And I realize it's not.
I'll happily be single, a twenty-year-old Bridget Jones, and I'll happily enrich my own life with every variety of experience I can imagine - and never mind passing them on, except through the writing and memories I leave behind.
