It's just a feeling and no one knows yet.
This is mostly just to organize my thoughts and sort out exactly how I'm feeling about things and why. Because I am, as we know, nothing if not analytical, and this is why I make a good academic.
So...
My horoscope for the last few weeks has been almost horrendously preoccupied with romance and relationships. In addition to this, it seems that hardly a week can pass without my hearing about someone my age or younger who's getting married. Also, there are at least two wedding-related television programs being repeatedly advertised during shows for which I am most definitely the target audience. All of this is, of course, environmentally related to the multiple recent conversations regarding getting married/having children and the prevalent sentiment within my immediate and extended family that it's time to have another wedding.
I understand that there is a great deal of social pressure on women my age to be in active pursuit of a stable, married life, so it's certainly not just me. I might suggest that having a large, conservative family in which I am the only adult not married or in a serious relationship only serves to increase this pressure, but that's a self-pitying observation and rather beside the point. The point, I suppose, is that I am entirely aware that there are objective, quantifiable causes for my current emotional conflict and that I am certainly not the only young woman to experience this. The unfortunate fact, however, is that being able to define and intellectualize a specific feeling doesn't make you feel it any less.
And the bottom line is that I feel like I missed something, like there's one little line of programing that I just don't have. It isn't that I don't necessarily want a stable life with a romantic partner, simply that, in the event, I want it on my terms and in my own time. And I don't want to feel like there's something wrong with me for taking my own path. This is, of course, related to the long-standing issue of my insecurities and the conflicting signals received from my family and, frankly, the rest of the world, a concept to which I will return later in this post.
Another matter, which feeds into the insecurity, is that the very idea of dating and relationships makes me feel absolutely and endlessly inept. I have never been able to socialize easily, and I do -and always will- have trouble connecting with people. I have absolutely no idea how to flirt or to meet people with whom to flirt and even less of an idea of how to behave on a date of any kind. I seem to very good at getting people to like me and am utterly at a loss when they do, especially since it tends to be people with whom I should not under any circumstances become romantically involved. Which tends to mean that I end up just fooling around with them without any kind of emotional involvement. Which is, you know, fun, but not exactly conducive to emotional growth and openness.
It is worth noting that a mitigating factor in this outpouring is the fact that my sister is home for the summer, and my sister is the single person most adept at making me feel entirely worthless. I hate it when skinny girls talk about how they need to loose weight and how clothes make them look fat, and my sister, who is about 20 inches around, cannot put on an outfit without doing that very thing. If I ask her to stop, she complains that she's insecure, but, if I tell her she looks nice, she ignores it, all the while berating me for what I do, what I eat, how I dress, what I think, how and talk, and anything else she can think of. Why I let this get to me and affect in any way my self-image, I have no idea, but I do.
I realize, objectively, that I am a reasonably attractive woman, but it is very difficult to bare that in mind when in the constant company of people who seem to find very little of value in my personal presentation, to the point of finding fault with 90% of my wardrobe, something I tend to take great pride in. Of course, I'm saying this and sounding twice as shallow as my sister acts, so I'm not sure where that leaves me.
Having actually written all of this out, I've now fizzled rather epically and seem to have accomplished nothing more than whining for a few hundred words and engaging in a terrific act of self-pity.
Fuck my life. For real.