Being a married twenty something is sometimes an interesting paradox. I often feel like I am in two worlds at once. In one sense I am the young recently graduated girl who doesn’t have a career yet but is living life and having fun. However, correspondingly I am the married woman who worries about setting up joint bank accounts, saving for a car, and planning out the meals for the week.
This paradox came to my attention most recently when visiting one of my other young married friends. I stepped into her apartment and my jaw dropped. It was the most perfectly decorated newlywed apartment I had ever seen. A bright couch with matching throw pillows, twinkle lights bordering the living room, and perfectly coordinating artwork with pictures of them, cute phrases and hand stained frames. In the few short months that they had been married, she had fully transformed their living space into a cute but sophisticated home. Meanwhile our apartment still looks like the cluttered house of a college student who has tried to spruce things up in a hurry because her parents are coming over to visit. I have to admit that I felt like a bit of a failure in the moment, seeing the way my friend had so well embraced a new more adult phase of life. She seemed to have it all together.
I however, the girl wobbling between two worlds, definitely do not have it all together. I’d love to have a perfectly decorated apartment—but for me the wish and the reality seem very far apart. I try to think about reorganizing the apartment and I groan. I groan because it seems hard enough just trying to keep up with dishes and laundry. I groan because I am not a visually artistic person and I don’t really know how to make my home go from chaos to cute. And also, I groan because a part of me just wants to stay in the chaotic, passionate phase of life and not grow up. Just because I am married, it doesn’t mean that I have to start having wine tasting parties and wearing pearls and going to pottery barn on the weekends. I don’t know why, but somehow the redecoration of my apartment is symbolic to me of that move into maturity, adulthood, and being a boring married person. If I make that move, it makes my life seem settled, when in reality, even though my love life is set, the rest of my life is completely up in the air.
I know a lot of young married couples, but sometimes its still hard to relate to them because all of them seem to be on a career track already, and they have decent salaries and know where they want to be in five years. My husband and I are not like that. Neither of us have any clue what we’re doing and we’re just surviving the best we can. I feel a disparity because even though we’re in this club of married people, it seems like we don’t really belong because we don’t have adult careers. Maybe that’s silly but its still how I feel. If I think about it objectively I know that just because you’re married it doesn’t mean you have to have everything figured out. And I know that I don’t need to compare our life to anyone else’s. But I can’t help feeling the pull between the two worlds. I feel like I don’t quite belong in either world and so for the time being I’m stuck somewhere in the middle trying to get a grasp on where I am and where I’m going.
Snow Whore, I think you have perfectly encapsulated what a lot of us twenty-somethings are going through, married or not. It’s an easy trap to compare yourself to others, and there will always be someone with a cuter apartment, better job, nicer car, etc, but that doesn’t mean they are better than you or even that they actually have it all together. You are still moving towards something–you have goals, even if they aren’t entirely fleshed out yet. So cut yourself some slack. And besides, you happen to look great in pearls.