Everyone you know is a liar

As I've mentioned, I'm engaged.  Engaged to a wonderful, intelligent, funny, attractive woman that, in all likelihood, wakes up every morning, looks over to me, and breathes a long, bewildered sigh.

I'm 25.  I'm getting married.  I work a full-time job.

I believe it was in a famous Talking Heads song where they posed the elegant question: "what series of events led me to this particular juncture in my life?"

Growing up is weird.  As a kid, you always think of "when I grow up" as a destination.  An end goal that your childhood and adolescence are straining toward.  But as you get older, you start to wonder when you'll actually feel like you broke through the finish line and became an adult.

At first, I thought it would be the end of high school.  High school teachers delight in telling their students how "things are really going to change once you get into college," how "professors won't want to help you," and that "you're going to have to do things for yourself."  Of course, you arrive in college and within the first semester you learn what a load of crap that was.  Professors are about as unwilling to meet you as a clingy ex-girlfriend.  I think some of them actually get so bored that they start arranging boxes and papers and books as haphazardly as possible in some sort of unspoken "who can look busier" competition between faculty.  Seriously, have you seen some of those offices?  Didn't these people have mothers?

So you spend your college years rationalizing that the reason you weren't an adult yet was because even though you're 18, 21, 22, in the case of the dude who was "totally cool with doing whatever" after the party 27... and of course you don't feel like an adult yet.  You haven't experienced the real world.  And honestly, I think there's some weight to that.  My roommate junior year played World of Warcraft and I'm convinced he hadn't seen the real world in a very, very long time.  He's a tax accountant now, by the way.  Just so you know, the guy filing your 1040-EZ might very well have logged a couple thousand hours in college pretending to be an Undead Priest.  Bless you, Internet.

Graduation comes and goes, the job search drags, and finally it finds you.  The legends were true!  The "real world" lies in wait--finally!  Adulthood!  And then the first weekend of your gainfully employed, apartment-lease signing life, you sit around for twelve straight hours in your underwear eating cereal from a coffee cup and playing Street Fighter.

What happened?  To quote the immortal words of Queen's rock epic Bohemian Rhapsody: "Is this the real world that everyone was talking about?"

No, of course not.  For that, you have to get married!  Of course, with marriage comes responsibility.  The opportunity to find that enduring partner with whom you entwine your soul and forge an eternal, enduring bond, fortified against the stress and strain of any challenge, obstacle, or temptation or some gay shit like that. 

And now I have found that special someone.  And it hadn't occurred to me until a few days ago as I sat there watching her try on wedding dresses, seeing her veiled visage a radiant glow, her body accentuated and vibrant and alive under the layers of satin, looking as beautiful as the day I met her that this is the woman that a few hours ago with whom I lay in bed, hands wrapped tightly around her subtle curves, and had been blowing tummy farts on.

Adulthood, my friends, is a lie.  And those who perpetuate it, and we, the ones who believe in it and chase it, are all liars.