Cookie Dough Unloced…
So I was looking through my Google Drive and I ran across something I wrote two years ago. I titled it "The Truth About Your 20s"and I am posting it here because I think it is important for people to understand who I am fully. And I think a large part of that is based on who I have been and my past experiences. I am also posting this for all my single peps out there to give you all a little perspective. This past year I met my fiancé and fell in love and now I am getting married but it wasn't always this way I was single and confused and I wrote a little something to express what I was going through so here goes something...
Is everyone, but me, getting married???
My mother always told me that I am only young once but sometimes I feel like I am doing it wrong. I was told that I would find a nice guy and get married and then have babies. This was presented to me as something that happens in your 20s, but here I am, 25, not married and depressingly single. So this stems from where most rants stem from...social media. I don’t know about anyone else but it seems like every single time I open my Facebook page or scroll my Instagram feed, someone is flashing their giant engagement ring or posting pictures of themselves with their 37 bridesmaids and groomsmen all in a line with their matching colors, like blush and bashful or purple and purple. I know this whole thing could be misconstrued as me hatin’ but honestly I’m not, well at least not completely. But in all seriousness am I the only person who is NOT in a super serious relationship on my way to getting engaged on my way to take that stroll into forever? I mean dang! Sometimes I just look at all their status updates and pictures and realize...I. Am. Single. As. Heck.
I realize that I am probably just over exaggerating the situation but it definitely doesn’t feel that way. I swear every time I pull up my Instagram somebody has posted their engagement photos then they are posting their wedding photos and then they post about buying their first house and before long they are posting about their first baby. Am I the only 25 year old who feels like I am behind on the curve somehow?? I feel like such a loser sometimes. I recently moved out of my mom’s house and out of my home state of Arkansas to live with my sister in Dallas, TX. I have no boyfriend and no prospects on the horizon. So many girls I went to high school with ended up marrying their high school sweetheart or their college boyfriend, when all I got out of high school and college were two framed degrees with my hideous middle name on them. One particular friend of mine has been engaged at least two times and she’s not even 23, but still no cigar. What is with the marriage epidemic that is sweeping my timeline? As I write this and open up my Instagram app, yet another girl I know just got engaged to a guy she started dating in high school. The idea of marriage and babies is probably the scariest thing in I could possibly see myself doing. I could definitely see myself indoor skydiving or hiking up a mountain but making a commitment to spent the rest of my life with one particular person is blood curdling scary. With the divorce rate at 53% and infidelity at an all time high I wonder if marriage is even a realistic expectation for me. After watching my parents marriage deteriorate I don’t know if marriage is even something I want for myself. Everyone who is married or has been married for a long time that I know all tell me “don’t do it!”, “enjoy your freedom”, and “this stuff is for the birds!” so I wonder if all my social media friends are liars, pretenders, or if they are genuinely as happy as they claim to be in their captions.
I know that relationships take time and work. I know Disney doesn’t show what happens after the credits role. I know there is a lot more to relationships that the surface and it helps when you know and understand who you are as an individual before you try to become a unit. I realize I need this time alone to really discover the kind of person that I am. Being alone in your 20’s helps you to know exactly the kind of person you are and the kind of person you want in your life. I was watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer the other day and you aren’t familiar with the show, the title is pretty self explanatory, but within the show Buffy falls in love several times over the course of several seasons but one guy that kept showing back up, was her high school sweetheart/vampire boyfriend named Angel. No matter who else she dated, what dangerous thing happened, or whatever spin off show he went to, the writers of Buffy always threw Angel back into the mix, And in the final few episodes Angel shows back up to help Buffy save the world again. But at this time Buffy is dating another vampire named Spike and Angel asks her to choose who she wants to be with. Now this is the same storyline as a lot of other shows, in the final show the main character must decide who they want to live happily ever after with, but Buffy throws out a plot twist. Buffy doesn’t choose anyone. She tells Angel and Spike that she is like cookie dough.(weird right?) But this is how she explains it, she says that even though she has slayed hundreds of vampires and saved the world on several occasions she isn’t finished “cooking” yet. She said that she was like cookie dough and she was still in the oven, and she wasn’t a fully cooked cookie yet. She didn’t choose to be with anyone because she knew and understood that she had to stay in the oven a little longer to be a completely baked cookie. She saved the world yet again and went on to capture all of her possibilities, but she still wasn’t complete. She wasn’t who she was going to be yet. And that is how I see marriage for myself right now. Although it honestly does feel like I am the only single person left on the planet I know it isn’t true. And although for me, finding someone when I was really young did not happen for me that doesn’t mean that the game is over. I know that there is someone out there for me. We are both just still in the “cookie dough” phases of our lives. I am still trying to figure out what kind of person I want to be and I’m sure he is too. When we are both fully baked to brown perfection we will be taken out of our perpetual “life oven” and be ready for consumption. So don’t fret if you don’t have anyone to crush on during the week just keep baking and know that you won’t be cookie dough forever.
