My entire life I had never heard of anyone wanting to get engaged in college. In fact I heard quite the opposite when it came to college students willing to commit to each other. That is until I got to Baylor. My first night of line camp, I was walking with a group of freshman girls and they began discussing getting the “ring by spring.” I curiously listened in as one girl piped up saying she desperately needed to find her future husband here, and of course thinking it was a joke I replied, “yeah, and I need to find my husband, and my future kids.” It did not go over well to say the least. That night I realized “ring by spring” was actually a real thing at Baylor.
The problem I had with the girl, who announced that she “needed” to find a husband in college, was that finding a husband was her primary goal. She wanted to find her life long soulmate by graduation, while I was just trying to graduate. My goals in college have always been my education, building a successful future, and trying to find myself. Finding a husband in college as a goal had never crossed my mind.
Before anyone thinks that I am against getting engaged in college, that is simply not the case. My problem with it is that if you are paying upwards of $50,000 a year at an institution and your main goal is to find someone to marry, then you are not allocating your funds correctly. If I am paying upwards of $50,000 to go to get a degree, my main goal is going to be to get that degree. If I find my husband along the way, then that is spectacular, but it is not the reason I came to college. I came to college for myself. I want to better my future and better myself before I pull someone else into it. I want to be someone, and have something if he leaves.
It is a complete cliché to want to find who you are in college, but it really is true. With my newfound independence, and not being around the people I had been around all my life, I realized I had been pretty much the same person for the last eighteen years. College made me see more of who I was in my first semester than most of my life had. Although sometimes as a college student it can be extremely difficult to find yourself when you are taking fifteen hours a semester, going to social events, and taking part in extracurricular activities. How does anyone have time to get a ring by spring, when I have trouble getting through a week of finals? How can someone find a soulmate, when I have trouble figuring out if I have found out who I am as a person?
I know I am going to change over these next four years and the person I am going to marry is going to change as well. After college there will be even more drastic changes to who we are as people, and who we are going to be. Committing your life to someone when you have yet to receive your diploma is the biggest gamble I can think of. I always hope it works out for people, but statistics are not always in their favor. I personally think that has to do with the fact that college is a bubble. You can think you have found yourself and whom you are going to spend the rest of your life with, but until the two of you have popped the bubble and moved onto building your own life, you can’t know for sure. So when it comes to “ring by spring”, I am a little less ambitious. All I really want is “A’s by Autumn.” .
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