Not long ago, I had a friend, who was recently married, pull me aside in a men's room when I had brought a date to have dinner with him and his wife. The desperation in his eyes told me all I needed to know. "Please tell me you're going to sleep with this girl," he told me, "because I can't. My life is over. Look at me, look me in the eyes: Don't. Ever. Get. Married. You got that? Ever. Don't get me wrong, she's great, but she's ALWAYS THERE."
Frightening, isn't it?
As school has ended for so many this summer, decisions must have inevitably been made about the future of many college relationships. Most will eventually go their separate ways, but some of them will end up staying with their college sweethearts in the hopes of getting married and living happily ever after. And an idea like that is an idea on par with an invasion of China.
Life together in college may have been fun, but that life you knew is over.
Remember those endless Saturday nights spent closing down Balls, then adjourning to an off-campus house for a flip-cup tourney? Or those girls/guys trips to Vegas or Miami or New Orleans, where you did things you swore you'd never speak of again? Or the excitement of meeting someone new in a place you never thought you would?
Those are all, for the rest of your life, finished.
You have doomed yourself to a world of social events that only include other couples. While your single friends incessantly drunk dial you with tales of their mid-20s, you're already three hours deep into a sober night's sleep. The late-night flip-cup party has been replaced by a "party" that consists of you and three other couples sitting on a couch watching "It's Me or the Dog."
That's if you're lucky enough to avoid "Grey's Anatomy."
The craziest part of your social calendar becomes "game night," where you might even invite over a few single friends for a rousing game of Pictionary. Or if things get REALLY out of control, a "couples vs. singles" game of beer pong. But the festivities won't be lasting much past midnight, and your best case scenario is a few minutes of drunk couple's sex where the guy can't function and the girl can't move.
Meanwhile your single friends have used this as a pre-party and won't be getting home until you are getting up.
The highlight of your week will be watching playoff hockey with a guy you vaguely know from work, just so you can get out of the house. It's not that you like hockey, or that your wife is even that bad. But when you spend every hour of every day with someone, you look for any, and I mean any, excuse to take a break. TV and movies like to make marriage look like endless love or complete misery.
But in reality, it is neither. It is a lot of monotony and a lot of compromise, with a little resentment thrown in.
Or so I am told.
In your 20s, you still have so much to accomplish and so much to experience, tying yourself to someone can only lead to bad things. There'll always be other people, but you only get one life.
Matthew Meltzer is a journalism graduate student.
