It’s been a while since I’ve hopped on Craigslist. The spammers really screwed things up, and I’ve given up on finding romance on the Internet. Alas, boredom beckoned, and I wandered over to my oldstomping grounds, just for kicks. I came across this one post.

To the younger ones (Queens)
Date: 2009-09-04, 1:29PM EDT

Don’t listen to media reports or statistics or studies about marrying later in life… in your thirties, forties. For thousands of years it was about virginity and it was something special…. then came “woman’s liberation” I remember the media campaigns… telling women to get a career first not to depend on their husbands. At the same time came the porn campaign…. Playboy, Screw magazine…etc… Then television had double beds instead of two single beds (like in “I love Lucy”). In the late 70’s, single parent household was not taught in University…. what was taught in Sociology was that the Extended family became the Nuclear family…. so Grandma and Grandpa were not living at home with their kids anymore….(even though I know that in most Ethnicities the Extended family remained intact). Now it is… over 50% single parent households with over 50% divorce….all this progress in a matter of forty years (I am being funny, it is not progress but a decline in morality).Having trusted in opinions of writers of that generation, and coming to the realization that if there was not some kind of agenda to destroy the family… they all must have been just a bunch of magazine and television show promoters with no care for the world and the outcome of the propaganda…. I am surely one that did wait to marry…. and do regret it. Now, it is too late. I don’t care the fairy tales that you may hear from the media about older people marrying…. it is not the same. They must all have stocks in fertility clinics. Marry young, marry young, marry young. When you hit forty…chasing after a toddler is not the same as chasing the toddler when you are twenty two. At fifty this should be your Grandpa and Grandma days. Don’t buy into the lies…. marry young. Marriage is compromise.

I’ve always been a huge fan of the idea of high school sweethearts. I never did buy into the whole business of marrying later in life. Hell, my plan for life was to join the Army upon leaving high school and then leave to become a police officer. Get married by the age of 26 and have kids by 28. I didn’t want to have a huge gap between my kids and I. I wanted to spend as many years with them as I could.

As usual, the best laid plans fall apart. Circumstances change, decisions are made, opportunities are lost. Life happens. But this post reminds me that time keeps forging forward, life keeps moving on. It puts things into perspective. I’m happy for all of my friends who’ve already gotten married, and sometimes, when it’s 4AM and the moon glows through the hazy skies and all I can hear is the wind and distant tires treading the pavement and leaves bumping into each other, sometimes I wonder if I’ve got what it takes to live life alone. I let the hush of the trees silence my mind so that I may fall asleep.