I will be the first to admit that I am a complete stereotype. I have been dreaming of my wedding from the time I was a little girl. When I was a freshman in college I discovered Pinterest, and the rest was history.

I pretty much have my wedding planned down to the very last quirky detail, and now at age 21, I’m aware that I’m a bit too green to get married. But what I never understood is why modern-day women waited until they are in their mid-thirties to “make that kind of commitment.” I figure that when you love someone, you love them, so why wait? I suppose it comes from a place of self-reliance. Women want to establish themselves in a career and test the waters when it comes to a relationship serious enough to eventually blossom into a marriage. However, the problem with that is, when a women hits the age of 30, her chances of fertility decrease by 40 percent. Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that people should get married whenever they damn well want, and should they choose to have children, great. However, it appears that the trend of women waiting to marry and have children is beginning to reverse.

In my travels of gallivanting through websites such as Pinterest, I’ve stumbled upon a few different articles from various wedding websites such as The Knot and Wedding Wire that have recalculated the way modern-day brides are thinking. According to The Knot, in 2010, the average age of a bride was 32, as of 2015, that dropped down to 27 in as little as five years. Why? Because brides are realizing that waiting doesn’t mean a whole lot. There’s also been a spike in pregnancies.

The articles seem to state that women are choosing to tie the knot a few years younger, so that that if and when the couple decides to conceive, the bride will be safely in the age regiment for a low-risk, healthy pregnancy. According to Dr. Rema Zolotti, a gynecologist from Los Angeles, there seems to be a direct correlation between the age of those getting married and the amount of children they want to have. Women are aiming to be married in their mid-20s, so that they can bear children in their late-20s to early 30s. But is pregnancy the only reason that the average marital age has gone down? Or have young brides begun to be romanticized again?

Generally speaking, the films that little girls watch usually portray weddings with the bride being extremely young, and marriage typically being the end game, followed by happily ever after. Every Disney princess is portrayed as a teenager between the ages of 16 and 18 (even Pocahontas, who was really 10 when she met John Smith…sorry, tangent.) So is it that women are actually reverting back to the ideal of happily ever after? Or perhaps people are beginning to understand that you don’t have to build a separate entity of a life pre-marriage. It is perfectly OK to build a life with the person you love, no matter what the age may be.

I must admit that I am pleased to see this statistic reversal beginning to take hold. I’m getting really sick of people making an appalled face when I said that my sister-in-law was 25 when she got married, and people rolling their eyes when I said I’d like to be comfortably settled and married at a fairly young age as well, although I’m in no rush. Happily ever after may not be exactly what everyone expects it to be, but it isn’t a mutually exclusive ideal. Anybody can make their own version of happily ever after.