In the early 2000s, it was considered stupid to marry in your early 20s. Whose idea was that?

THIS PAST SUMMER, my brain developed a strange new set of reflexes without any warning. As the days lengthened, I found myself continually drawn to unprecedented thoughts of saving every penny, the rapper Drake, and getting married. These desires arrived intrusively, as if my train had come sooner than expected and I’d been standing too close to the tracks.

I moved into to a $625 room in Park Slope. This seemed promising – I was no longer living at my mom’s apartment and my boyfriend could stay over without pushing his luck. I started a temporary job at a pop culture factory (see: Viacom, not Warhol) the next day. I was hired to help disguise a credit card advertisement as a social media contest, which meant I was under contract to take Twitter screenshots and caption them with a mix of awe and branding. It was my first “real job,” but not quite — there were few benefits, and definitely no medical ones.

As the stream of empty filler details refreshed in real time, the longer days seemed like a curse. Despite all the dead moments of free time, I kept missing deadlines on unpaid freelance articles and claiming writer’s block due to ridiculous reasons like the wrong desk, nonexistent cat allergies, and the rising cost of IKEA furniture. My most productive initiative was a blog called The Daily Sadface, whose commentary only ever consisted of a photo above a colon and a right-facing parenthesis.

I’d never really played with more than a MASH-like “Politician, artist, Spaniard?” concept of my own marriage before, but I’d also never been 22, confronted by a void-like future, and living in a constant state of dread. (I’d never been so in love with someone, either, so let that stand in my defense.) I celebrated the first anniversary of my college graduation with a new plan: replace my fledgling career efforts with a life as a wife. I couldn’t let any more time pass without a single certainty in my horizon. In the vision of a proposal, a honeymoon, and a family, I found the comfort I was missing in my career (or lack thereof).

At first, it was as if the idea get married had been generated as a survival tool, like an adrenaline rush to strengthen me during bursts of aimlessness. The first noticeable change happened on my commute — I was no longer busying my sleepy gaze with fellow subway riders’ headphones, nail color or brand-name perfume. I stopped eavesdropping, and I hardly read. All I could see were diamonds. Soon after, they popped up on line at Starbucks, on TV shows I’d seen too many times, on Facebook ads next to my ex-boyfriend’s new photos. (Mark Zuckerberg proved his worth with that one). I realized I’d never paid attention to these rings because I’d never felt a pronounced difference between their owners and me. But now, these women all had something I desperately wanted: an indication of an exciting future, and with it, an enviable life of purpose.

The more sensible stopgap may have been to just apply to grad school, but I didn’t want sensible anymore. (Clearly.) I wanted romance; the challenge of human interaction under those close conditions. I’d never not killed a plant, but maybe it was finally the right time to be that better version of myself, to keep things alive. It wouldn’t be about the rent, or the dress, or the insurance — neither of us had the money for those to factor in, anyway. It would be about love, and family, and cooperation. I didn’t care if we lived in a shack. I just hoped we could be free, together. Free to sleep in, stay out, write in silence or at full volume, eat junk, cook healthy, read for work, work on books. Why couldn’t we live our lives like a legally-bound pair of halfway-cool sixteen year olds? (Well, because that’s all we could afford, as my salary was about the same as my allowance, but that’s not the point.)

The delusion continued past the point of the Park Slope den, carrying over (more sporadically) when I signed a lease for a tiny Greenpoint apartment. At one of the lowest points, I spent a subway ride drafting an email to my roommate, letting her know she’d probably have to look for another sublet since I had plans to turn her room into a nursery, probably in the coming year.

I love paradoxes, but being one was taking it a bit too far: I felt like a savior to myself, but a traitor to my generation. It eventually became impossible to stop the signals — it was as if I’d performed inception on myself, and even though I welcomed this new form of comfort, it troubled me that I could sense a lack of control over it. Getting married is surely the least cool thing you can do as a girl at 22, but how could I believe in the “end of marriage” if it was the one thing keeping me excited?

By the fall, I managed to snap out of my pity coma, but having eliminated the depression component of my marriage instinct, I fixated on finding the objective logic in it. I can see now that getting married to feel better about being unemployed is a terrible idea, but that doesn’t mean I’m completely over it. I was in love with someone who I wanted to be with and be better for, so why did I feel so dirty about even considering it? I came to judge my initial impulses as deluded, and I wasn’t even sure why.

Somewhere between gen X and Y, “marrying young” gained a negative connotation, and my generation has taken it as a badge. But I’m not convinced that the shift had anything to do with the actual young people who now live under it. What if we just internalized top-down warnings and intellectual admonishments to the point of manifesting them? Take these common arguments against it: Our parents married young and now they’re bitterly divorced; the economic situation is so bad that it would be stupid to even try to start a family; marriage trumps a career so I have to wait until I have the latter to even think about it. None of those explanations leave room for change or effort, and if we employ only the “hook up culture” narrative and combine it with the effect of newly-updated studies about the failure of traditional marriage, the result is a generation that doesn’t want it, and even when some do, is destined to fail at it. It’s both a wonderful excuse and a miscalculation of our character.

Through a combination of external influences and personal choices, 20somethings are more unstable than any previous generation, so much that scientists want to give us a new name and societal identity — but why are we so willing to do it under their terms? We’re considered underemployed, overmedicated, and non-commital by an older generation who I’ll just go ahead and consider overemployed, undermedicated and way too divorced. The relativity of these measurements is astounding, and it’s particularly magnified under the lens of millennial marriage. If our parents are bitterly divorced, can’t we learn from their mistakes? If the economic situation is so shitty, can’t we reconsider the family budget? And if we balance our careers with supportive partners, can’t we have both?

The fantasy I came up with during the summer was sparse, motivated not by visions of picket fences, but by ideas about how I could figure out my first stage of adulthood under the conditions being handed down to us. I’m tired of hearing analysis of my generation that both patronizes and manipulates us — and I could tell that part of my dizzying reactions to my marriage push had to do with this top-down identity conflict. But I think that fact that the college-educated millennial clan is growing up without the economic stability of previous young adults gives us the opportunity to affect marriage positively — not only because our environment is different than our parents’, but because this financial void might help erase the problems that plagued it in the first place. If there’s less about which to be selfish, greedy and individualistic, maybe husbands and wives could focus on building something other than swimming pools and credit.

It seems crazy that if a young person wants to make the commitment to get married, it can only happen if they’re rich, but that’s partly what we’ve decided for ourselves, and it makes no sense. Maybe we could start with the ring, that wasteful object of validation and envy. Girls could make a point to marry only if the ring were saved up for something much more important, like, um, anything other than diamonds. Then we could go from there.