By Alexandra Perez | Staff Writer
I noticed an engagement ring on campus the other day. It was an incredibly small detail that made me pause for a second. Mostly because it seemed so out of place among all the students walking to class. I looked twice, and found myself wondering why this sight felt so significant.
An engagement ring carries a strange amount of certainty for a place like college, defined by uncertainty. I know I am still making decisions that feel consequential enough to shape my life. Things like what I want to pursue as a career, where I want to live, and who I am becoming. So when I see an engagement ring on FIU campus, I can’t help but think about what makes a person feel ready to make a decision even more committal than all of those.
To me, college is encapsulated by a collection of a couple distinct adjectives: Dorms, classes, exams, laptops. And apparently, engagement rings?
On a college campus, this becomes a strange visual juxtaposition. It’s slightly jarring to see something that is a public declaration alongside university students. Maybe that’s because I cannot imagine being an undergraduate student and deciding that now is the time to get married.
Now to be clear, I am not suggesting that FIU students are getting married en masse. Most students I know are not married, and probably aren’t thinking about marriage seriously yet. But this fact is exactly why the occasional ring on the left hand stands out so much.
Before I dive into it, let me establish the broader context: the median age at first marriage in the U.S. has risen substantially over time. In 2024, Census data put the median age at first marriage at roughly 30 for men and 28 for women nationally.
The fact that marriage has moved later isn’t random. College, career-building, women’s expanded educational and professional opportunities, changing attitudes toward relationships and changing economic realities have all contributed to a different path into adulthood. Basically, the world has changed. And “traditional” timelines have changed with it.
Interestingly, young people do not always enter college planning to get married. In Rachel Allison’s study of 45 engaged or married college students between the ages of 18 and 23, many initially expected to postpone marriage, but changed their minds as relationships deepened and certain factors made marriage feel more and more reasonable. For some, the question eventually became less of “Why would I get married this young?” and more “Why wouldn’t I?”
And this is where I struggle to understand young marriage. College is not a waiting room for adulthood. It is not the interlude before life begins. As a matter of fact, it is the period in which adulthood is actually being built. There is an education to pursue, a career to imagine, places to live, values to develop, and a version of yourself you have not met yet. And if you somehow forget all the others, that last one is the most important.
Marriage does not prevent that growth, but it does mean that your growth is no longer entirely yours to navigate. Your decisions become shared. And this is a massive commitment to introduce while you’re still determining what those decisions even are.
I like to think about it like a plant. Young adulthood needs room to grow toward whatever direction it takes, and college is one of the few environments designed to provide that room. Marriage provides structure, which can be great when a life has begun to take shape. But putting that structure around someone who is still figuring out what kind of life they want can inevitably influence the direction in which they grow.
In case you missed it: You are the plant.
You get a remarkably small window in life where you are totally encouraged to be selfish about your future. College is that time, why not use it?
But I do think that there is a deeper meaning underneath all of this. Marriage can feel like the obvious destination. And maybe that’s just why it stands out to me, because it’s so… expected. We are all familiar with the progression: date, get serious, meet the parents, get engaged, get married. When a sequence becomes that familiar, it becomes much too easy to follow it without stopping to ask whether we actually chose it.
Marriage has also historically been tied to a model of adulthood that is molded by the forming of a household, economic dependence, having children, and rigid gender roles. And I don’t know about you, but I have very little interest in preserving the idea that adulthood should follow a prescribed script, particularly one that has historically limited women’s independence and defined their value through marriage and domesticity (as noted by Psychology Today).
The lives of the modern adult do not necessarily follow that same structure, and I think that’s a good thing. In the same way that all things must change at some point, we have moved away from the social expectations that once upheld the belief that made early marriage seem necessary or inevitable. So taking into account that those expectations no longer fit the lives of many young adults, they should not be treated as timeless.
This is part of what makes young marriage so difficult for me to understand. If we have changed the way we understand adulthood, independence, and relationships, then we should probably also be willing to question whether marriage needs to be treated as this inevitable next step.
To further this point, bringing back the article by Allison can offer another layer. Many of the students she studied knew that marrying so young was unusual, but they did not necessarily see themselves as rejecting the norm. Rather, they saw themselves as the exception. Interestingly enough, they viewed their relationship as different, saw themselves as ready, and though they were mature enough.
And in truth, maybe they were.
But I still struggle with the idea that being the exception should mean accelerating a timeline that no longer reflects the world we live in. College gives us a rare period to grow, change and be unapologetically self-directed before our choices become shared with someone else.
Maybe that is why the occasional engagement ring still catches me off guard: not because I think young people cannot love deeply, but because I think there is something valuable about allowing yourself to become before asking someone else to build a life around who you are.
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The opinions presented on this page do not represent the views of the PantherNOW Editorial Board. These views are separate from editorials and reflect the perspectives of contributing writers and/or university community members.
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