At What Age Do You Settle Down And Find The One?
If you ask my Jewish grandparents, they got married and started having children by the age of 19 or 20. That was in 1960. Let’s jump to 2017: how many 19 or 20 year olds do you know that PLANNED to get married and have a child or two at that age? I would suspect VERY VERY few, with emphasis on the very few part. None the less, that doesn’t stop my grandparents, aunts, mother, and maybe a nosy next door neighbor or two, from asking “Okay, when are you going to bring home a nice Jewish boy, get married, and start a family?” I would like to add that I get asked this topic EVERY holiday, birthday, and dinner I attend. So you can imagine how my answers are almost rehearsed at this point. “Yes, grandma I will give you great grandkids before you die”, “Yes, mom I will move home when it is time to have kids”, “Yes, Aunt he is Jewish”. If you know anything about a Jewish family, these are textbook questions asked regularly. STRAIGHT AND TO THE POINT.
Let’s get a few things straight. I am 23, single, and just picked up my entire life and moved from NJ to Southern California. It is safe to say, FAM, it won’t be happening any time soon. SORRY MOM. But why am I so hyped about this topic? I recently found myself at a Girls night out (or GNO for all those trendy millennial folks) pregame over the weekend. For all those readers that are still in college, YES pre-games STILL exist post-college. The only difference is that many of us have traded in those cheap shots of Smirnoff vodka that we all took in our freshman year dorms and tried to hide from our RAs, and upgraded to $10 bottle of wine that makes us feel classier. We are on a budget. DON’T judge us. LIFE is hard at 23 — let me tell you. Anyway, many of the girls at this pregame were a few years older than me, so you can imagine it was much to my surprise when weddings and bachelorette parties were the top conversation throughout the night. In my head it was almost comical. How could these girls all be engaged, married or attending weddings on the reg. At what age does the famous “Wedding season” start? I don’t know, but these girls were doing it! I was clearly inexperienced, but did my best to keep up. It is not that I don’t want to be doing that in a few years from now, but my friends and I back in NJ are nowhere near those stages of life yet. Yes I have friends with long term boyfriends, but with being only 2 years out of college, we are all focused on other things. Such as getting that promotion or salary raise from our entry level job that we have worked at while basically being the pledge of the office for the past 2 years; or paying off our insanely large student debt that never seems to grow smaller; or even doing what I desperately wanted to do, and move across the country without my friends and family and be truly independent for the first time in my life.
DISCLAIMER — I am sure it is totally possible to do all of that while still finding someone and getting married and settling down, but when the time is ready for me, I will face it head on. I am sure I am not alone in feeling that millennials have this societal pressure to do it all at once — to establish your career, get married and have kids by the time you are 30. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT PEOPLE? THAT IS NOT ALWAYS POSSIBLE. So don’t stress yourself out the next time you go home to a family dinner and your grandma asks you yet again, “So when are you getting married and having kids?” To that I say, LET ME LIVE GRANDMA, LET ME LIVE.
