A Little Bit Married?
Have you heard of being a little bit married? Do you feel like you are married to your significant other even though you don’t have a ring, the paperwork, or the shared health insurance?
The phrase comes from a book called A Little Bit Married by Hannah Seligson and was handed to me by a friend at work. I picked it up last night after it has been collecting dust on my book shelf for 6 or 7 months and now I can’t stop thinking about the concept of being a little bit married.
The concept follows Gen Y individuals and discusses how our outlook on marriage is different than our parents. The book touches on how we have trial periods that can also be called “mini marriages.” Our generation does everything married couples do without actually being married - We vacation with each other’s families, we celebrate holidays together, and we even cohabitate to make sure we can get along before walking down the aisle and it is all socially accepted.
It is a fact that our generation marries later in life than our parents. Today, the average age for a woman to get married is 27 and a man is 29 (Drphil.com). Instead of following our parents’ footsteps and marrying for financial security or because kids came into the picture, the book states that we are waiting around for our soul mates… The one person who is made for us. Until we find this one soul mate to marry, we jump around from relationship to relationship without the legal binds of marriage. Why? Because we can!
The book gives three good reasons why this happens - 1. The majority of us grew up in single parent households or with divorced parents so we are scared of the commitment. 2. We are more focused on our careers and want to be financially set before marrying or starting a family. 3. The creation of birth control - women have control over pregnancies, which means no one has to tied down or pressured to marry because of babies coming into the picture.
I always wonder what marriage “feels” like. As soon as my sister or close friends got engaged, I always wanted to know, “What does it feel like?” “Is anything different?” Most told me no, it is the same, but now they have a ring. When they got married and I would ask, “How does it feel to be married?” They all responsed, “The same!”
My experience of getting engaged was a little different - I felt different. I was and still am on Cloud 9 and I want to scream it from the tops of my lungs even 5 1/2 months later. Even though “fiance” is only a word and a title, I LOVE calling Beetle my fiance and being called his fiance. I think it is so much more descriptive of our relationship than just “boyfriend” and “girlfriend.” I have had countless “boyfriends” in the past, but I never felt the same for them as I feel for Beetle so the title just seemed ill-fitting and non-descript.
Beetle and I have fit into the little bit married category almost since we met. The first time I met his parents was at Seder dinner, I was moved into his townhouse within 4 months of becoming significant others and I spent my first Thanksgiving in the district with his family in Long Island. If that isn’t acting married, I don’t know what is! We went through all the same feelings the book explains about wanting to be financially set before walking down the aisle. If that wasn’t the case, we would have been one of those odd couples who were engaged and married within the first few months of meeting! Because my dad is out of the picture and my single-parent mom can’t financially afford to spent $30,000 on my wedding, Beetle and I always knew we would be paying for it out of our pockets. Even though we have talked marriage since the VERY beginning of our relationship, we knew it wasn’t smart to walk down the aisle yet. When me met, my $30,000 starting salary and $400 monthly school loans wasn’t going to help us with the married life we wanted, so we waited! We didn’t want the financial stress so we lived together for a year and a half and got settled financially and socially before we got engaged.
In that time, we learned a lot about each other, which includes his inability to shut off lights. The “trail run” or “mini marriage,” if you will, was a huge success and now we are ready to walk down the aisle on September 17, 2011. I am not sure how much our lives will change once we have the legal binding paperwork, but I do know that I can not wait to be his wife! Even though he finds ways to annoy me and get on my last nerve at times, I have so much love in my heart for him and I could not imagine waking up beside any one other man every morning for the rest of my life. Even if that means I have to shut off the lights for him! :)
