"You're getting married??"

"Dude, what the hell for? You're too young!"

I swear--if I had a dollar for every time someone said this to me this summer, my wedding would already be paid for. Every time I talked to someone at work and the subject of my approaching marriage came up in conversation, someone would shoot off about how I was missing out, how I was "ending my life before it even began". It got to the point where I became downright incredulous, on top of being thoroughly annoyed. Has the view of marriage really decayed to the point where it's seen as being nothing more than the eventual next step in the inevitable checklist process of life? Grow up, get a job, mess around, get tired of it, then settle down? Is that all that these people see it as? When one woman heard me say I was getting married, she flat-out blurted that if her son, who was my age, tried to get married, she would break the girl's legs to keep it from happening.

Now, I'm guessing this is because she believed her son just wasn't ready for the life-altering responsibility that comes with marriage. That's fine! God knows I have my days when I honestly wonder about what I'm getting myself into here. But is the public opinion of twenty-somethings really so low? And it's not even that--even people I work with who are my age call my choice into question. The mentality I keep running up against with them is that marriage is somehow the end of my enjoyment in life--that I'm going to be helplessly buried in responsibilities, losing sight of myself and my independence.

Well, every time someone would fire a comment or a question like this at me, I'd just smile passively and reply, "I just found the right girl, that's all. It could've taken me years before I found her, but I was lucky enough to find her sooner rather than later." I didn't have to waste time in my life looking for the right girl. I didn't have to feel my heart being broken from relationships gone wrong. I didn't have to "mess around"--not that I ever could bring myself to that kind of life if I tried.

But I wish--I so wish that I would've had the time and the courage to say this to all of them: "And you know what? Who says that getting married means I can't live life to the fullest anymore? Who says that it means I'm settling for less or settling down too early? This isn't the end of enjoying my life--the best times of my life are just beginning, because I get to live every minute of my entire life with a girl I became best friends with long before I told her that I loved her. I'm spending my life with someone I spent years getting to know as a confidante and companion before I knelt down in front of her and slid a ring onto her finger. I could never think of marriage to her as any kind of end. And if that's all you can see marriage as being for the young, maybe you're the one who needs to look twice."