Marriage isn't the ultimate life goal

So it’s this time of the year again. Churches are booked up till November, their bells can’t catch a break from all the joyous ringing, vows are exchanged left and right, babies are made (or have been made a few months earlier – but don’t tell anybody!).

The dreadful “wedding season” is with us once more.

It’s one of these things you never notice until you enter your late twenties. You wake up one day to find that suddenly everyone you knew – people you went to school with,  your kindergarten crush, even a couple of your exes, for Pete’s sake – is getting married. They spend their evenings picking wedding dresses and flower arrangements for the church, while you chill at your couch eating pizza rolls and watching Spongebob Squarepants.

That’s when you realize that there must be something wrong with you – or, at least, that’s what society wants you to think.

If I may put my two cents in, marriages and weddings are an anachronism, important only to people who have nothing better to do with their lives.

There, I said it. As a twenty-something fellow, don’t you have anything better to do – anything better to spend your hard-earned dough on – than ceremonies, grossly overpriced dresses and stupidly expensive venues?

Have you chased all your personal dreams, fulfilled all your selfish wishes, achieved your career goals, lived your life to the fullest?

Is a marriage – and a wedding – what YOU want? Because if it is, you may be seriously lacking in perspective. I mean, SERIOUSLY.

You may have found the person you want to spend your life with, granted. But here comes the paradox. If you’re so sure about your relationship, you don’t need a ceremony and a certificate to solidify it – it’s perfectly solid by itself.

And if it’s not, do you really think that a marriage can fix it? In that case, do you really think that this is the person to get hitched to?

Bollocks.

It’s all peer pressure, social convention and – in some cases – religious mumbo jumbo. Just take a look at that film, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”, to see how absurd it all is.

I’m not saying that, in the year 2016, there are no people who want to get married in their twenty-somethings – all I’m saying is that they’re narrow-minded products of a backwards society and they have their priorities all wrong.

Do feel free to feel offended, if you so choose. There’s more where that came from.

See, if you feel that your top priority in life is to “do your duty” towards your social circle, you’re doing it the wrong way. In the long run, all you do is create possible misery and perpetuate the very same flawed principles that produced a flawed person – you.

Bold words? Follow my train of thought for a bit.

See, deep down, people are egotistical, selfish creatures. All they basically want is to satisfy their needs and desires. If these needs and desires stay unfulfilled and repressed, they (the people, that is) become unhappy.

Unhappy, repressed people aren’t exactly spouse material, are they? And an unhappy marriage will largely lead to either an unhappy home or a divorce – either of them hardly ideal situations to raise children in, and why get married in the first place, if not to raise children?

So, do you mean to tell me that my twenty-something old acquaintances that are tying the knot next Sunday are mature, fulfilled people ready to start a family? That this is the summary of their dreams?

Again, bollocks.

Personally, I think they just feel obliged to do so, because they’ve been a couple for a long time; hell, they have been living together for, like, years now. And I can help but wonder once more – don’t they have anything better to do with a year’s worth of salaries than go through an awkward process nobody really enjoys?

They probably just feel it’s their duty, because they were taught that this is how things have to be – by people who were taught themselves the same thing, and the line goes on and on. And the “lesson” goes like this; when you’re 18, you have to go to college, when you’re 24, you have to get a job and when you’re 28, you have to get married. So they do.

Not that I have anything against a happy, loving couple securing the legal rights and benefits a marital status provides to them and their potential offspring, or against them sharing their joy with their loved ones.

But, if that really is the reason most people get married, wouldn’t a civil marriage and a celebration party with their friends and family – the people that matter to them the most – be enough?

Away from outdated, obsolete traditions and overbearing social circles?

Food for thought, people. Food for thought.