Can You Hear the Bells?

Why is it that with increased frequency I hear: “well, I’m not going to marry the guy, so what’s the point?” As we progressively gain distance temporally from college, more and more twenty-somethings seem to weigh their relationships, and even first encounters, by whether or not it has marriage potential.

Sorry to be trite, but when did everyone’s clock start ticking? And at what point does the alarm go off? Can everyone please hit snooze?

An awkward truth to acknowledge, something changes after you graduate and are in the “real world” for a while. As we become more mature (for this purpose: “ma-tour”), we seek and value meaningful relationships in general, rather than blips to pass the time. In college, you were happy (and lucky!) if a budding interest lasted long enough to turn into a winter or spring formal date. Now, however, the question is a bit more serious.

It is practically an Olympic sport to meet new people, and we have little spare time aside from work hours, as I’ve talked about previously. Yet, more and more often at earlier stages of romantic escapades, I hear people say that crazy line that always is embarrassing yet bluntly honest: “well, it’s not like I’m going to marry the guy, so what’s the point?”

Marriage aside, having an inkling of serious potential with another is either there or its not. Period. For many people post-college – even if the chime of wedding bells is barely a discernable sound – the question of any sort of potential future looms ever-presently in their mind. Because otherwise, what is the point? These are not casual encounters to which I’m referring, but serious, or possibility becoming serious, relationships. Why spend a significant portion of your free time away from your friends and not meeting new people for something that you already know isn’t ever going anywhere?

All this being said, I fervently believe that to only think of the future while in the present, especially of a budding romance, places too much pressure on something that is probably not serious yet, and jinxes it. (I’m superstitious!) If something sparks, you have to run with it, not force it in a certain direction, and definitely not sit contemplating the future while your present slips away.

Finding a balance between pragmatism and romantic spontaneity is a key challenge to relationships. But nonetheless, that emphatic statement of my peers keeps reverberating in my mind: “It’s not like I’m going to marry the guy, so what’s the point?”