Some of you will be 27 years old, and totally nailing it. You’ll have a house, a job that allows you to go on holidays to places called Kfejwjgdag where the beaches are like angels’ laughter, and a relationship with an ideal person you’ve been seeing for around six years meaning, oh my god, maybe there’ll be a question popped soon. And it isn’t going to be ‘Aren’t the beaches in Kfejwjgdag like angels’ laughter?’.
Recent research has found that females think 27 is the perfect age to get married – the researchers (Rendeevoo, a dating app, no less!) asked 1,000 women, which is basically the whole world and means it has to be true.
So in the spirit of Not Putting Pressure On People To Get Married At A Particular Age, here is my own scientifically researched list of reasons why you don’t need to get married when you’re 27. Yeah, survey, stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Then remain single until whenever you like, because there’s no universally ideal time to get married – everyone’s different, we’re all at varying stages, and it’s research like this that makes people panic sign-up to flirty apps that OH VERY CLEVER I SEE WHAT YOU’VE DONE THERE.
1. It’s 2015
We’re not in Victorian times when you’d shrivel up my family fortune on the off-chance of getting a swashbuckling older gent who rides a horse and wears those weird tights that look like lady’s underwear. Aged 16. I’ve got shit to do.
I’ve got to find somewhere to live that isn’t full of rats or human shit (genuinely, the Property Guardians route can be great, or you can go and look round a library that has an actual human shit on the floor for £400 a month).
I don’t even have time to swash my own buckles. No, seriously, I have to go to a cobbler and sort out the buckles on my shoes, but keep having to do other stuff like sort out the prescription for the contraceptive pill I definitely don’t need at the moment. And the cobbler is fit as well. FFS.*
*Seriously. Everyone in our building calls him fit cobbler. And I said it wasn’t like the Victorian times anymore.
**2. You have financial reasons **
No matter how much money I earn, I will still always have to eat just beans in the final week before pay day. This is a signifier that a person shouldn’t be allowed to share a bank account, or any of their finances, with another human.
**3. Dating is shit now **
How are we expected to find someone when everyone is Netflix and Chilling or sending fucking charms to each other because they were in the same coffee shop? That’s creepy. Both of these things are creepy.
Most people I know who go on Tinder dates end up with a friend of a friend anyway, after they stopped going on Tinder dates and started using the time to hang out with their mates. But if everyone is married at 27, there are no mates to hang out with anymore, so I really hope people don’t read this (totally valid COUGH) research and start hitching themselves all over the place.
**4. You’re still a child **
Twtnety seven years old isn’t like it used to be. Sure, it might be for some of my friends, the aforementioned Nailing It crowd who are already married, with dogs and jobs and key fobs (I needed a third thing to rhyme, I’m not sure if they have key fobs but it sounds grown up), but personally I don’t feel grown up enough to say, ‘Can my husband come to the party?’
Look, I still have parties. Sometimes I drink too much and shout. I haven’t yet figured out how to get up in the morning and go to work without running around yelling ‘FUCK’.
I could get married, if I had a boyfriend, but then I’d just be playing pretend and ignoring the fact that, now, it’s more than acceptable to be a bit blurry around the edges at 27. I only got my first job three years ago, and am still on junior pay. I rent. I don’t want to have a husband.
**5. You can save it for your thirties **
This is a bit of a continuation of the last point, but still: if you get married in your twenties, what do you have to look forward to for the next 50 YEARS? Or 60 years, if you live to 80?
Why not save a bit of the big-scale house buying commitment until you’re in your thirties so, when people ask you about your twenties, you can smile and say, ‘Oh I lived’ in a wistful voice? Rather than saying, ‘Oh it was the same as this.’ This being your fifties.
**6. We don’t need more age-shaming **
It’s hard enough realising you’re in your late twenties and are no longer one of the Hot Cool Young Crowd (face it: you were never in the Hot Cool Young Crowd) without feeling bad for not being married, too.
Life is full of upsetting milestones designed to get website hits by preying on your desire to compare yourself to what that particular writer deems as ‘normal’. Lists like ‘30 things to do before you’re 30’ are designed to make you want to stab yourself with a birth certificate. So ignore the pressures and get married when you bloody well want to, if you even bloody well want to.
**7. You fail the Dog Test **
A good measure of whether you’re mature enough to get married is to ask yourself if you’re mature enough to own a dog without killing it. Cats are a lot easier, because they fanny around and leave you all the time and probably have about five owners in different houses, but dogs need constant attention.
If you’re not in, they get sad and miss you. If you forget to feed them, they will poo everywhere. If you don’t walk them, they go all droopy like a dog-plant. If they get ill, it costs a shitload to make them better.
If you can’t cope with this level of responsibility, you are not in a position to call someone a wife or a husband. I had a cactus last year and it died, so that’s the sort of level I’m dealing with over here.
**8. You don’t fail The Furniture Test **
Another measure is if you don’t get excited about tiles and sofas. If you look at a DFS advert and have any opinion other than ‘That’s a DFS advert’ then you should probably get married. Good for you.
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Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.