People I went to high school with are beginning to get engaged, and it fills me with the particular brand of anxiety that I typically reserve for the existential crises I get when I’ve been awake for too long or reading some weird, experimental book.

Granted, most of these fiancé(e)s were seniors when I was a freshman, so it’s not like my hometown is being overrun with nineteen-year-old couples. Although, a girl from my year did just buy a house with her boyfriend. Like a real house, one that they’re not even renting. I have no idea how this happened, but the parts of her life I’ve observed stalked via Instagram are very cute, so good for her, I suppose.

But still, the notion that people who were technically part of my high school experience (even if I didn’t know them very well or at all) are getting ready to marry someone who was, more than likely, their high school sweetheart, fills me with terror. I’m not going to use this time to attack people who marry young or marry the same person they’ve been with since they were fifteen; I hope they’re happy and confident with their decisions.

I just don’t know why it rubs me the wrong way so much.

Perhaps the strangeness stems from the fact that the average age for an American to get married is 29. And yet, 21-23 seems to be fairly common for alumni of my high school.

Maybe the dread I feel when I hear that my former peers are gettin’ hitched is because I’ve never had a serious relationship: on more than one occasion, I’ve been talking to friends about old boyfriends and crushes and what not and I’ve completely forgotten that I dated my first boyfriend the summer before my freshman year of college. (If you’re reading this, I am terribly sorry). On a vaguely related note, a friend from high school recently asked me, without any humor or irony, if I and a mutual guy friend secretly dated in high school. My love life is so boring that my friends are imagining up fake relationships because they cannot fathom that it’s as negligible as it really is.

To use the words of several “real” adults, I’m supposedly mature for my age. Which might be true in part, but I’m not even close to being mature enough to even consider getting married anytime soon. Perhaps I feel self conscious when people two or three years older than me are getting to move on to that next step in their life because, by comparison, I feel so very far behind. Maybe it makes me feel like I’m missing out on something I’ve yet to really want or pursue or gives me a false sense of immaturity since there is such a stark lifestyle divide between being a student and enjoying married life and starting to discuss having children.