when people marry

You might find this to be an odd post. Just warning you.

I hate social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. I find them to be vanity projects, destroyers of the English language and people's ability to communicate in person, and huge time suckers.* But, alas, I have accounts for specific purposes (I joined for other reasons but eventually came to my current state of opinion). I joined Facebook when it was only available to students at certain universities, so it's been a long time. I only keep a membership to periodically check on the status of people I grew up with but don't really keep in contact with. And that's what prompts me to blog this morning.

I got a friend request and a message from people I know, so I figured I should log in. While I was there I glanced at people's updates and clicked on specific people I wanted to peek into the lives of. That is how I discovered that one of my childhood friends (we've known each other more than twenty years) is engaged and comments on her page seem to indicate she is getting married this summer.

Don't worry, I'm not griping about not being invited to the wedding--I would have never have expected that. We have kept in touch only sporadically, and the last time I saw her was nearly three years ago (though that's, honestly, a lot more recently than anyone else I grew up with) when I first moved to L.A.

This hit me in a way that is hard for me to really understand. What I think it is, is that I've finally hit an age where people from my cohort are really going to start doing this. 25 isn't that young to get married by most of society's standards, but it certainly is to me!

I have plenty of friends that are married. In fact, I probably have more friends that are or have been married than aren't, but that's because I've never quite fit in with my own peers and have always had older friends (my recent friend request was from my high school English teacher). So it's not the idea of marriage that is sticking me either.

I also know other people from growing up that are married and married younger (I haven't talked to them since before the nuptials), but I wouldn't really call them friends. I doubt my name would even register with them today (but you never know about such things).

This is the first actual friend from my childhood that is getting married (that I know about anyway). She's one of the few people that I have any fond memories of growing up. Other people's reputations in my mind are marred by acts of meanness, taint from close association with those people, or just the superficiality I feel they might have had for any regard for me.

I don't know what to do with all this. I'm not having a quarter-life crisis. I have no interest in getting married within the decade (or ever). This is just a little introspection on my role in social expectations and how others fulfilling them impacts me.


* You could say this about a lot of internet stuff, but I don't hate the internet. I'm entirely dependent on it, and I'm the first to admit it. I also use it to socialize and do a lot of online dating, but I find this other stuff to be too invasive and pushy and entirely driven by capitalistic greed (the companies, not the users).