Just Another Middle-Aged Woman Grieving the Twenty Years She Wasted Trying to Find a Husband
And feeling grateful that I found myself, instead
It’s hard to look back on my twenties. What a terrible time. It was a decade when I arguably should have been delighted to explore my options, to devote time to my craft, to learn and experience so I could make good choices when the time for choosing came around.
Instead, I was obsessively fixated on one thing: getting married.
Although I had also hoped to graduate from college, I didn’t have any firm goals around that accomplishment. It didn’t matter to me if I graduated by the age of 22 or not. In fact, I had such a hard time deciding if I should major in literature or teaching, that I didn’t mind taking the long route to my degree, allowing for plenty of time to waffle.
But there most definitely was a timeline attached to my goal of getting married. That had to happen by the time I was 24. Why? That’s when my mother had walked down the aisle. She gave birth to me just before her 25th birthday.
Is that arbitrary to have chosen that age to achieve my wifely ambitions? To have based it on the simple fact that that’s how old my mother was when she got married?
