A friend of mine from college has written a beautiful reflection on marriage based on what she has observed since she herself got married 82 days ago. It’s not what you would expect to hear from a young newlywed.

The whole thing is worth reading, but I especially like when she addresses an article written several months ago on the merits of marrying young, which generated a good bit of discussion in the Catholic blogosphere and beyond:

The whole debate surrounding when to get married and why to get married (or not) seems to focus on broad-spectrum factors like education and life experience and how much you’ve traveled – and people come down on both sides of all those questions, but nobody ever seems to stop and ask: What about love?

So maybe I will do it: What about love? Not Hollywood love, not Taylor Swift song love, but real love, the kind that sees the good in the other person and lifts her up when she falls down and unloads the dishwasher and takes out the trash? Forget about age, or education, or income, or any other kind of externally observable characteristic that fits into a survey question. What if we talked to young women and girls and we said to them: Get married when you find a man you admire, a man who makes you laugh, a man who respects you and sees in you the goodness and beauty you sometimes doubt is there. Get married when you find that man, no sooner and no later.

Thank you, Miriel. In all the discussion I’ve read about when is the best time to get married, one word that has curiously been missing is love.

There is a perception that those of us who are still single after having reached our third decade on earth are so because we have made a conscious decision to forego marriage in order to selfishly pursue other personal interests (education, career, etc…). The reality for most of us, however, is simply that we have not yet found he (or she) whom our heart loves.