Why aren't you married yet?

This past Christmas weekend for the Anderson family was spent around the Christmas tree opening a number of carefully purchased and homemade gifts, in the kitchen making honey-glazed ham, twice-baked potatoes and chili, drinking beer, watching family favorites like Anne of Avonlea and engaging in innumerable conversations. But the best part of my family’s Christmases, especially as a 20-something, is that I never arrive home to the obnoxious question: Why aren't you married yet?

You know what I'm talking about, the anything but subtle stares at my empty left hand, that relative that nudges my boyfriend and inquires why he hasn’t popped the question yet, aunts and uncles thinking it’s odd that I haven’t “settled down” yet. While I know that everyone in my immediate family thinks from time to time, “I wonder who will be the first to marry, to have kids, to go back to school, etc.” it’s not a pressure placed on us by my parents or each other. I'm lucky because my family is pretty chill about the whole thing but for many others aside from my family, this is not the case.

I remember when I graduated from undergrad, a Bachelor of Science with honors from a fairly prominent Mid-West school, I attended a high school play that my brother was in. I had participated in the same high school drama group in my day and it was exciting to go back and see things from the audiences’ perspective. I also looked forward to seeing old faces and hearing all of the news from the people I spent so much time with in high school. While my brother’s performance was great (they always are) I walked away from that experience extremely frustrated, sad and feeling my recent achievements were nothing more than a walk around the park.

You see, every person who I spoke to following the performance glanced at my finger. They asked if I was dating anyone. Asked me why I wasn’t married yet, when I wanted to have kids. Several of my friends from high school had rings, husbands, even babies to show off and they were the popular ones. I, on the other hand, was a bore. I was even disappointing it felt, because I had been gone for four years and, in their eyes, had nothing to show for it. My saving grace was a friend of my mothers who asked what I had been up to and I explained that I had been accepted into graduate school in Boston and was moving in the fall. She exclaimed, with a giant smile on her face, “That’s so impressive, Tomika! How exciting?! Good for you!” Without her comment, I might have burst into tears. The pity expressed towards me made me feel like I had accomplished nothing. Like without a husband and baby of my own, I had nothing to offer the world. It was so disheartening especially because it came from not only the older generation of mothers and grandmothers, but from my own peers.

Why is it that even now, with all that we’ve done in our 20s, those of us who have not chosen marriage and babies are the “late bloomers?” I don’t look at my friends who have made the choice to start a family right away as “jumping the gun.” They have simply made a choice that works for them and I respect that, tremendously. Of my closest friends, I have some from all different choices: those that married out of high school and are celebrating 10 year anniversaries and have two or three children. I have some that are on a second marriage. I have some that did four years of school, met their soul mate and are on year five of a great union. I have some who have decided this is the year to adopt a baby and for many, last year was the year to create their own. I have friends who are working on the PhDs and DMAs. Who are living with a significant other in a new place. Several are in the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Teach for America, City Year, or some other National Service offering. Who have been employed at one job for eight straight years and loved every minute of it. Some who are going back to school to finish and some that dropped out never to go back. You name it, my group of friends has done it and I love that! Why is there a standard placed on us? Why is there a specific time when things must be done. Why do the singletons get pitied (especially women). And why, oh why do people not understand why I am not married!?

Don’t get me wrong. I want to be married some day. I look forward to my wedding and settling down. I really want to be a mom and adopt children to love as my own. I want to give birth and experience the joy of carrying a child. I want to grow old with my husband and experience the highs and lows of marriage. But not today. And, it is my decision, not society’s to decide when it is right for me. Instead, I wish that 20-something accomplishments could be appreciated across the board. Whether you’re working hard at a career, married with baby number four on the way or just now going to college. As long as you’re out doing I think that is all that is important.

And, for now, I’ll just shrug off the marriage question and hope that those asking it can appreciate my decisions (even when I’ve failed) and be happy for me. I’m happy, for me, why shouldn’t they be?

The One Where...

I’ve loved the tv show Friends since college. While I wasn’t allowed to watch it in early high school, I got hooked on the show when it entered its 7^th season my freshman year. At the time I loved the characters, their clothes, the dramatic relationships and the cool things they got to do.  It wasn’t until the show had ended and I was living in California in 2006 that I finally grasped why I loved the show so much.

When I moved to Boston after undergrad, I was essentially on my own. I knew only one person from my past and the rest were new. Everything else was new too: new coffee shops, new highways, new banks, new ways to get to work, new everything. It was one of the hardest years of my life because I lacked a family. Don’t get me wrong, I have one of the best families around and even from a distance, my parents and siblings kept in touch and were supportive in every way they knew how. But still, they weren’t nearby and weren’t able to be supportive in the ways they were in high school and college. 

When you grow up and leave home, you can’t take your family with you. Instead, you create a new family; a family of friends. Friends become your parents, offering you advice and guidance as you take on the biggest challenges of your young life. They become your siblings, the people who you take on the world with and are daring with. They become your aunts and uncles, the people who help you create those really random memories and you have your favorite one who you know will always be the life of the party.

For me, my family of friends has held me together through some really great and really awful times in my 20s. From being alone in Boston, where my “family” consisted of an old acquaintance from college who became my brother, a new, younger sister who had more faith in me than I had in myself, and a group of Irish cousins who gave me more joy than I had experienced in a long time, to Kansas City and my current family of college friends who are teaching me by leading by example through their marriages, births, divorces, career success and failures, and more. Even my small, temporary families during my year in California and when I started my first "grown-up" job at MARC have each contributed greatly to my individual growth and development.

I love the show Friends because it showed that sometimes, life can be undefined and scary but with a "family of friends," you’ll be okay. I’ve been thinking a ton about this lately because of the bleakness of my current situation of still trying to figure out my life plan. I plan on doing a series of blogs on "friends as family" with some first-hand accounts of what it’s like to leave home and create a new family, as it brings many different ways of surviving. But until then, I’ll share with you a brief quote from Time Magazine that sums this up:


“No sitcom has ever been as deliberately self-effacing as Friends. The title, the theme song, the episode names ("The One Where...") were self-explanatory at best, insipid at worst. They were friends; they were there for each other. Move along, nothing more to see. But it wasn't just the sharp writing or the comic rapport that made Friends great. Its Gen-X characters were the children of divorce, suicide and cross-dressing, trying to grow up without any clear models of how to do it. They built ersatz families and had kids by adoption, surrogacy, out of wedlock or with their gay ex-wives. The show never pretended to be about anything weightier than 'We were on a break.' But the well-hidden secret of this show was that it called itself Friends, and was really about family.”

I’m realizing more and more each day how great my “family” is, and has been, and how it is your family of friends that gets you through your quarter-life crisis.