It was much like the day you realize that your parents aren’t superheroes. That day when you hear them utter a “bad” word or tell a little white lie. It’s the gross usurpation of a layer of innocence that replaces your blissful ignorance with a brand new perception of the world – and all its imperfections.
These feelings were what I experienced when I realized that my picture-perfect happily ever after view of marriage, taught to me in a way that only Disney movies could teach, was not everyone’s fairy-tale ending.
I was a freshman, sitting in my dorm room in Lucille Clement, talking to my roommate about marriage. In that one conversation, every concept that I had been conditioned to believe, as it pertained to marriage, shattered to the ground as I asked myself, “What if I don’t get married?”
Only a few moments later the question was, “Why have I never considered this?” My ideas about marriage have gone through some serious reconstruction-a complete renovation, that began with a metaphorical demolition of my initial beliefs, the infrastructure of my ideas about saying “I do.”
I previously thought of marriage as an inevitable truth. Just like every little girl gets a period, every little girl will one day get married. Then I found out that not all little girls, like those who have Turner syndrome, might not get periods, so my basis for this theory went out the window. I never considered the possibility that maybe every little girl doesn’t want to get married (much like most don’t want to get periods).
Then I realized that there’s a pretty good chance that I could be one of those proverbial eternal bridesmaids. The problem is not so much that this is my potential destiny. The problem is, I think I’m okay with it. I had always been told that one day I would “grow up, get married, and have children.” Well even if these things happen, they may not happen in the traditional sequential order, and who says that they have to?
When I consider the ever-increasing rate of failed marriages, I have to wonder why so many can’t make it too far past the starting gate. Then I think about how easy it is in every day life to terminate our commitments. In effect, there aren’t many things in life that can offer any practical experience or comparability that would allow one to understand the weightiness of such a contract as marriage. For instance, as the end of the semester draws closer, we wonder, where would we be if it weren’t for the advent of the late withdraw?
I don’t even like the fact that my cell phone company makes me enter a two-year contract, but isn’t that what marriage is? It was intended to be a lifelong contract, but with so many things in our everyday lives that are ephemeral in nature, what experience in life provides enough comparability to help one to understand the gravity of marriage?

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