Before I was in a long-term monogamous relationship, I thought everything about old perceptions of romance had changed. People get married whenever the hell they want to! Or don’t! And no one cares! Then I fell in love with and developed a healthy, cohabitational relationship and bam. Everyone cared whether or not we were going to get married, and expectations grew and grew.
The longer we were together the more engagement ring ads popped up in my Facebook feed, and questions of ‘do you think you’ll get married someday’ became increasingly aggressive and expectational. People I thought were do-whatever-the-fuck-you-want types started getting all up in our business. There has been research from Pew and other organizations showing that conservatives tend to marry younger and have children earlier, and liberals tend to marry older and have children later. But at a ripe young 27, I was even feeling pressure from my liberal friends, it was just more apologetic.
Now that we are engaged, five years after starting to date, and having lived together almost all of that time, the commercial pressures of planning a wedding weigh heavy. There are so many expectations, from our friends and family and the wedding industry. Narratives of perfection and self-actualization run rampant and it is proving difficult to resist the temptations that are so aggressively advertised to us. While we are more empowered now than ever to resist doing the things we don’t want to do, the pressure remains and it’s ours to succumb to.
