I’m 23, a full-time uni student, casually employed, love to go partying with my girlfriends and am working hard for the career I want. I’m also happily married.
Sound strange? You’d hope not in this day and age, but when some family and friends found out I was engaged at the age of 21, dismay was the overriding response.
“I thought you were going to be a career woman,” they’d say. “I still am!” I replied indignantly.
Others, whom I am just meeting or just find out I’m married, assume I’m keeping to religious values marrying so young. This is also not the case. I’m an agnostic and (embarrassingly, but quite contentedly) naive when it comes to religious faith.
It’s an ongoing point of discussion these days – whether a woman can have both family, or in this case, marriage and career. Obviously the belief is that you can’t have both, as I seemed to be giving it all away along with my hand in marriage.
But really, the times are changing. And they’re changing back. Mum said the feminists of the 60s protested hard so my generation of independent young career women could live footloose and fancy free (don’t quote her on that last bit). And we, as women, have so much to thank them for. But just ask my husband, I am all feminist-go-girl-power.
Apparently there is a recent “trend” of young women getting married. History is making a full circle. Marriage, like most things, takes on different dynamics in modern society. You can’t try and tell me marriage is exactly what it was fifty years ago with this gigantic divorce rate. And anyway, your marriage is what you make it.
The difference now is, I don’t rely on my husband to make me who I am, and neither does he of me. We love each other more than anything in the world, and want to be together forever – which I do believe we will be. But marriage for us, as we said in our non-religious vowels at Adelaide Oval on a sunny summer evening, is about “respect” and “support”.
It was our choice to make and that’s what we wanted and were ready for.
I’m not saying it’s going to be easy – our honeymoon was full of (somewhat tipsy) older married couples enlightening us on the ups and inevitable downs of marriage. I am willing to make sacrifices for my husband just as he has for me, and know how essential it is to make time for ‘us’. But, within reason, I will chase my goals and he will chase his. He can work all day, and so can I. We’ll be just like any other ‘career’ couple except we have demonstrated we’re serious about each other ‘til death do us part.
Perhaps when we begin a family in good time my argument will change – that old children or career chestnut is one I’m yet ill-equipped to argue. Maybe I’ll work and he’ll stay at home. That’s our decision to make.
But for now, I’ve got to get on to two assignments, organise my night out on Saturday and call around for some work experience. I’m like most girls my age but I have a loving husband to come home to at the end of each hard-working day.
