Engaged?

I've been noticing a pattern lately. A pattern that I'm not entirely fond of. A bunch of girls I went to high school with are getting engaged and I can't figure out why now. In the past week alone, 4 girls I went to school with announced their engagements and before that several more, plus a few that have already tied the knot. We are 21 years old, none of us have finished college yet, and the majority of these girls have been with their boyfriends for less than a year. In all honesty I'm disturbed by it.

At first I was feeling defeated by this. Because of how many engagements I've been seeing from people my age, I was feeling like I was the one out of the norm. I was feeling like maybe I'm the outcast here, the only one NOT getting married. I don't know why I was thinking that way, it's not like I'm even CLOSE to a point in my life where marriage would be an appropriate next step or even an option, (and even if it was, I wouldn't want to yet) but for some reason I kept thinking I was the crazy one.

It wasn't until a friend calmed me down by slapping some sense into me and talking to me about how abnormal THEY are. At this point in life we are supposed to be in school, dating, focusing on getting a degree and soon a career and finding out who we are. It's only the girls who don't believe in those values that are getting married at this age. In high school people referred to these girls as "The God Squad" and it didn't click until now that it's only the girls in that group choosing to tie the knot at such a young age (and it's not that they don't have values in general, it's just that they apparently value being a wife above all else).

Now, far be it from me to say when someone is ready to get married, I have no idea what constitutes being ready for that but if you knew you had found the person you wanted to spend your life with, then what's the big rush? Is it sex? Or is it that you just don't have any reasons worth waiting for, like a career or a life?

For me personally, I know that marriage can wait until I have a stable career and have been with this person for long enough to be 100% sure that a marriage could work. There's just no way of knowing that when you haven't even been with that person for a single year yet. It really just doesn't make sense to me.

Maybe the reason I feel defeated by this is because I feel sorry for those girls. It's almost like a feeling of, "damn, lost another one to marriage." I don't want to see my friends go down a certain path because of sex or because they don't consider their future worth waiting for.

It's buying into patriarchy. It's buying into the fact that society tells us that the only future a woman has to worry about is getting married and starting a family. But that is not true. I am not going to college to get my "MRS" I'm going to college to get a degree in Communications and learn how to be the person I want to be. I'm still growing up and figuring things out.

I do want to get married someday, but that day does not have to be when I'm 21 and still in college. I'm young, I still feel like a kid sometimes. I still feel like a kid and we're talking about marriage? We're young! We're still in school for crying out loud. And I just don't understand why people absolutely cannot wait until we have at least graduated from college. Why?