Sometimes I see my friends who are younger than me getting married, and I'm jealous. Or I see my friends my age who've been married years and have kids. I'm sad. It bothers me. I start wishing I'd had that. The chance to begin that stage of my life that early. I'll wish that I'd met my boyfriend sooner and that we'd gotten married two and a half years ago, and I think how great things would be now. I plan it all out in my head, something that never can happen because that opportunity is already gone. And it makes me sad.
Then I think of all the times my life has gone exactly as I planned for it to. Which is to say, I realize that it never has. I can't know what will happen in the future, and I can't know what would have happened in the past had things been different, or even how things would be now.
I realize that I feel as though we've wasted time, as though the years we didn't spend together have somehow been wasted because we never can live them together.
But those years have made us who we are. Those years have given us the ability to be happy together, something I don't know we would have had if we'd been together sooner. The experiences we each lived in the time before we met are why we love each other the way we do now, and it would be difficult for me to say I wish I could change that. There are certainly things I regret and things that bother me from both of our pasts, but I can't say I wish that to avoid it we'd been together the whole time, that we'd married when I was eighteen or nineteen and that we had three kids by now. I want a family, but I want that when we're ready for one.
I want to marry soon, in the year I'm twenty two, which isn't as old of an age as I sometimes think it is. I don't want to wait for another five years, or anything of the sort. But I'm glad we're in the position we are today. Because if we weren't in this position, we may not have ever gotten married at all. I'm glad that I don't marry at eighteen because I wasn't the person I am today, and I'm glad that it is the person I am today who will be marrying the person my boyfriend is today.
