While most college students commit to meetings they hardly show up to and plans that are hard to keep, some are committing to a life-long spouse. They go through college with a ring on their finger that holds more commitment than most of us can understand.
For some, getting engaged in college is the last thing on their minds, let alone having a relationship. Aside from education, the traditional image that college shows is for partying, hooking up, letting loose and not worrying about all adult responsibilities until after graduation. For some, however, all of this is not the case.
Caroline Pugh, a sophomore communications major at the University of Maryland, is one of those people. Pugh met her fiancé her sophomore year of high school and started dating him their senior year of high school. A year and a half later, they were engaged.
“We were friends for a few years before dating senior year,” Pugh said. “I think the friendship really made our relationship grow very easy.”
When asked about the shift from dating to being engaged, Pugh said it was nothing too different. Though she felt more secure with the title, they already knew how they had felt about each other. Pugh and her fiancé had full support from each other’s families, but it was people they weren’t very close to her that were judgmental.
To some, a year and a half of dating, especially starting in high school, still does not add up to engagement. Though Pugh knew it wouldn’t be considered completely acceptable at the time, when her fiancé surprised her by proposing a day before Valentine’s Day in their favorite restaurant, she said yes immediately.
“To be honest I never thought I’d be engaged this young,” Pugh said. “But I met the right person and we just knew we wanted to be together.”
Pugh said she does intend on waiting until she graduates to get married, because she felt it was impossible to move up in a career without a degree. They will have had about a two-in-a-half-year long engagement. “We also knew we wanted to be completely financially independent when we got married and wanted to be successful.”
In a 2003 questionnaire from the Washington Square News, Dr. Allison Conner, a clinical psychologist in New York City who provides therapy for couples and individuals in her private practice, said one of the stresses that couples in college getting married or plan to get married face is not being professionally established.
Pugh said they already have a great system going, as her fiancé is already in a full-time job and saving up money. All the goals they plan to reach and waiting before getting married has allowed them to become more patient and show those around them how serious they are.
Planning this far in the future at the age of 20 and still in college is not something people do often, but Pugh and her fiancé seem to have goals they intend on achieving.
However, Dr. Conner had some concerns with couples getting married too young. “In their late teens and early twenties, people are still forming their adult identities, and are still doing a lot of growing psychologically.”
Dr. Conner said to wait until after about age 27 to get married to make sure this growth has passed. Though she was questioned in 2003, in a survey from the U.S. Census Bureau in 2010 with a .1 percent margin of error, the median age at first marriage for females was 26.7 years and 28.7 years for males.
This may be why it is hard for most college students to imagine being engaged while in college, but in some cases like Pugh’s, finding the right person is more important than statistics.