I Said Yes to Marriage. Not to Losing Myself, There's a Reason.

Carmen Román Mallén

7 hours ago

3 min read

I recently got engaged, and the first thing everyone asks is when the wedding is. But they’re really asking something much harder: when will you decide that this is actually forever? The truth is, I don’t even know if I want a wedding.

We may be the first generation to enter marriage knowing exactly how it can end, and choosing it anyway. I don’t even need to share the statistics. We all know them. Divorce is not some distant possibility we’ve heard about. We grew up with it. We’ve seen it in our families, our friends’ families, the lives of people around us, and now, even on the big screen.

Is it feminism? The fact that women can leave marriages that no longer serve them? Is it science? The fact that we can wait longer to have children, giving us more time to decide who we want to build a family with? Is it romanticism? Our need to turn love into something bigger, more cinematic, more permanent than it necessarily is? Maybe it’s all of the above.

My parents have been together since they were 19. They got married when they were 27. They’re celebrating 33 years of marriage this year. That is all I grew up with. And somehow, they are both the best and the worst example I could have had.

The best, because it’s obviously the best-case scenario. Don’t get me wrong, they’ve had hard patches too. They’ve had moments when things were difficult, when staying together probably required more work than either of them expected. But they overcame them. They stayed. They built a life together.

The worst, because I don’t think many of us will have this. I didn’t grow up around divorce, yet I know it so well. So many of my friends’ parents are divorced, probably close to half. I even have a friend who is already divorced at 30, which, if you ask me, is kinda fucking chic. We joke about it because what else are we supposed to do?

Somewhere between growing up with parents who stayed together and becoming adults surrounded by people who didn’t, I think we learned something different about love. We learned that forever is possible. But we also learned that it isn’t inevitable. And maybe that has changed the way we choose.

I don’t believe in soulmates. I really don’t. Or at least, I don’t believe there is one single person in this world made specifically for you, and that your job is to find them somehow.

I think you can have many soulmates throughout your life. As many as the places you’ve lived, the trips you’ve taken, the friendships you’ve had, the versions of yourself you’ve become. Some people come into your life and know you in ways no one else ever will. Some stay for decades. Some stay for a season. I don’t think that makes any of them less real.

And honestly, that belief gives me peace of mind. Not because I don’t think my boyfriend is one of those people. I do. I think he is the best life partner I could have asked for. But I also had a life before him. I had my own ideas, friends, ambitions, independence. I knew who I was before I met him, and I would still know who I was without him. That matters to me. Because I think not having that before you meet your “soulmate” can easily make you feel lost, worthless, or incomplete without them. And I just don’t think that’s true.

So if I know I can be happy on my own, why would I choose to spend forever with someone else? Because I’m not choosing him out of fear. I don’t want to stay because I’m scared I’ll never find anyone else. I don’t want to believe leaving means losing my one chance at love. And I definitely don’t want to believe this is the only life I can have. I want to choose someone because, even knowing I could build a different life with someone else, I don’t want to.

Maybe that is what commitment means to me now. Not finding the one person you are supposed to spend your life with, but finding someone you want to keep choosing, even when you know you could have lived other lives. There is something strangely comforting about knowing that I could be okay on my own and still wanting to be with someone. Maybe that is the difference between needing someone and choosing them. And maybe, in a generation that grew up knowing forever can end, choosing forever has become less about promising that nothing will ever change and more about promising to keep showing up through the changes.

I’m still not sure if I want the big, fat wedding. But I think I’m starting to understand what I want the promise to mean.