We’ve been told that times are changing, people are getting married much older, and that young adults fear commitment much more than they did in the past. So you can imagine my surprise when I came across a survey by the Independent Women’s Forum that showed that 63 percent of women plan on finding their spouse in college. 

This mindset starts young—I remember high school conversations with girlfriends about our college plans. We considered the level of excellence of a university, the degree programs each had, the culture of the school and, most importantly, we knew all of the male-to-female ratios. We all definitely wanted a favorable dating pool. 

Society often dictates that we are supposed to want a happy marriage and family, yet at the same time, we are taught to achieve greatness and find a career we love. With both of these expectations thrown at students—women especially—it makes me wonder, is this statistic simply women attempting to multi-task, or does it have darker insinuations?

This time of year, it seems like peers are getting engaged left and right. I see marriages and engagements overshadowing academic and career achievements. I’ve seen friends spiral into depression and unhappiness after a breakup, and I blame this on the expectation that they have to find their future spouse by 20.

This seems so backward and old-fashioned, especially when we constantly see such high rates of marital unhappiness, not to mention plenty of literature on the increased chances of getting divorced when you marry young. This article is by no means an attack on the institution of marriage, but instead an attempt to understand why marriage is often the hidden objective behind receiving an education. The reasoning behind getting married right after graduation in our generation is different from why our parents did the same. 

While we advance as a society, the pressure to grow up and become financially successful has increased. We are the children of a poor economy and high levels of unemployment. We don’t want to become our older siblings, who moved back into our parents’ house when they graduated from college. 

The comfort of ensuring that you won’t be going it alone is a huge motivation for marrying young. Marriage, which is supposed to be a mature decision and perhaps the biggest decision of our lives, has become a security blanket, a solution to our fear of being alone and a symptom of our inability to take care of ourselves.

Also, perhaps some perceive the real accomplishment in graduating from college is the newfound ability to get married and start a family. Women are given this four-year “grace” period to stay single and unattached while they finish their studies. After that graduation cap is thrown up joyously, the clock begins ticking. Especially with single people, the expectation for marriage is yet another reason why the post-graduation “real-world” looms over their lives ominously. 

The promise of marriage after graduation shouldn’t be something that detracts from the motivation to find a passion to carry throughout our lives. Women are not the only gender affected by this trend; men shouldn’t feel like they have to pursue careers they feel no enthusiasm for because they expect to have to provide for a family sooner rather than later. 

Sixty-three percent of women hope to find a spouse in college, and this is representative of the fears of women, as they relate to society’s expectations. They fear that they won’t be able to find anyone suitable post-graduation, that they will enter the workforce and the world of adulthood alone and that they will miss out on something by not orienting their life and career around a family.