College place to find self, not soulmate

By: Shelly Lorts

Posted: 7/1/09

Summer is the season of weddings. I've spent a lot of days of my life being forced into frilly little dresses and dragged to weddings by my parents, but this is the first year that I've crossed that threshold of true adulthood and attended the weddings of my own friends.
There's something really strange about watching your best friend from middle school walk down the aisle in a real white dress, to a real groom with a real minister waiting at the end to legally bond her to another human for the rest of her life.
All of these weddings (and news of the weddings that I wasn't invited to) got me thinking about a pattern that I've noticed in girls my age. Two years ago I sat down with a good friend for our weekly Pinkberry date and gab session - if you haven't had Pinkberry, I suggest you drop this newspaper right now and drive straight to LA; it will change your life.
Harper was 20 at the time, the daughter of a prominent film producer and heiress to a small Hollywood franchise that we all grew up with. Of all my friends in LA, Harper was the least fake and the most loveable. These weekly dates usually turned into dating confessions, concerns and tears, this night being no exception. We had recently decided that Harper was going through a "quarter-life-crisis," a normal event for a college student - if you haven't been there yet, believe me: it's coming.
Harper was talking about yet another date gone wrong. She poked at her strawberry freckled frozen yogurt and said, "Shell, I'm just so scared that I'll never find him." As a girl, I can sympathize; my theory is that whether or not we realize it, we have all come to expect that we go to college, meet the perfect guy, graduate and get married. It's the unspoken plan. And though there is a little piece at the core of me that longs for this too, I started wondering why we should have to expect this. When did marriage become the be-all, end-all for self worth? Are we so afraid that we might end up alone that we're willing to run the altar just so that we can secure someone for the future?
So I told Harper exactly what I would want to hear: he's out there; your perfect soul mate is out there and as soon as you stop looking, he'll come to you. The truth is no one wants to be patient for love. College has become one big hunting ground for a husband because someone established that this must be our timeline. By the way, I have it on good authority that at our 10 year high school reunions, we're going to be hearing about who's getting a divorce.
Here's what I know: you can't truly be happy and secure with someone else until you're happy and secure with yourself. I don't believe that we're at a point in our early 20's that we know ourselves enough to say, "This is who I'm going to be forever, so this is what you can expect 10 years down the road if you marry me."
Like any rule though, there are exceptions: If you've been with the guy for years and grown with him and prepared to blend your lives, perfect, take that plunge. It's the impulse to rush into it that's the problem. College and early adult life should be about finding you, not him. Don't build your life around someone else, let your lives merge once you've figured out what you want and need for yourself.
I do believe that Harper will find her perfect guy: she's a special kind of person, so of course she deserves a special kind of guy. But in the meantime, she's building a career and she's dating and she's seeing what's out there. That way, when he does come along, she'll know what she wants in a guy because she'll have experienced all of things that she doesn't want. And if he waits a few years to find her, then hey, she'll have some amazing experiences that shaped the woman that he's going to marry.

Shelly Lorts is a senior in liberal studies. The opinions expressed in her columns do not necessarily represent the opinion of The Daily Barometer staff. Lorts can be reached at forum@ailybarometer.com