Has anyone noticed that everyone in the world is getting engaged? It's like in the last six months, the rest of the 20-somethings got a memo that I somehow totally missed. I think it's so wonderful that people are choosing to celebrate their love and share their lives together, and also every time I see a new engagement on Facebook (thanks for those adorable popup notifications, Zuck), I want to pull my hair out and scream. Just a little bit.
So why does it stress me out when other people get engaged? Is it because I feel like I'm losing the rat race? Is it because I'm frustrated with the current state of my life? It's certainly not that I want to be engaged - I'm actually very happily single at the moment. When people get engaged, it seems like they have their lives together and are focused and successful. However, I've learned from talking with these crazy engaged folk that, generally speaking, they feel just as lost as I do being 20-somethings and trying to figure out this crazy little thing called life. So if we're all really lost little lambs in the woods together, why the unease on my part?
I was thinking about my strangely unreasonable engagement woes, and suddenly my mind started wandering and thinking about the things that I've committed myself to over the last few years. No commitments to people, pets, apartments, etc., but commitments to ideas. Like sex-positivity. And body-positivity. And feminism.
Which is when I came up with the radical notion of...(drum roll please)...LIFE POSITIVITY! Okay, I looked it up and it's definitely a term that's been used by all sorts of holistic living organizations, and I think that's awesome. But that's not quite how I'm using it.
Sex-positivity, to me, means keeping an open mind about sexuality and celebrating every person's choices (as long as they're consensual), even if they're not necessarily what I would choose. Body-positivity is about keeping an open mind about the diversity of the human body - celebrating people's choices to love their bodies at any size. So life-positivity would mean keeping an open mind about life decisions.
I don't want to be engaged right now. And that's okay. And it's also okay that friends of mine feel differently. And I don't need to feel pressured by that, because I can celebrate their choices WHILE also celebrating my own choices. Unlike in college, where everyone was pretty much at the same stage in their lives, now 20-somethings are all over the place. Some of us are in grad school. Some of us are getting married and having babies. Some of us are traveling the world. Some of us are earning millions. Some of us are living paycheck to paycheck. And that's all okay. I don't think any of these choices are inherently better or worse than any other. Also, each person needs different things in their lives at different times.
So gosh Amy, wouldn't it be way easier for you to be life-positive and celebrate people's choices without getting strange feelings when people who you knew as 5-year-olds are getting married? Yes, yes it would be easier. And I'm working on it one day at a time. I encourage you to do the same and embrace life-positivity in your own life! Let me know how it goes! Any stories about successes/failures/epiphanies?
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