I’ll admit, it’s unfair.  When you’re young and beautiful and have the world at your feet, you have no clue what a good relationship looks and feels like.  You haven’t made enough mistakes in life.  You haven’t dated enough bad men, read enough good books, or listened to enough wise women to know what to look out for and what to avoid.

But as you get older – as you hit your 30s and beyond – wisdom begins to sink in.

I know so many twenty-something girls who get engaged to each and every one of their boyfriends.  It’s almost as if they celebrate commitment with an engagement.  They never get married, of course, but that’s not the point.  The point is to show the ring off to all their friends and have an excuse that their parents will accept to move in with their boyfriend.

Do these girls have any idea about what it takes to create a mature, healthy, growing relationship?  Of course not – they’re still growing up themselves.  They’re still finding out who they are.  They still think the world revolves around them and their needs.  Hurrah for them, I say! I think wistfully back to the days when I was naive enough to think that my actions didn’t affect others.  As you get older, you can’t help but see how we’re all interconnected.  You can no longer be selfish, but in return you feel part of a much larger world.

I wish that young women would take the time to learn more about themselves before jumping into an engagement.  I wish they’d take the time to learn what skills keep marriages together over decades.  Once upon a time, we could have relied on our parents or grandparents for that advice, but as the children of divorces we can’t trust folk wisdom.  Instead we have to turn to “experts”: counselors, online authors, agony aunts, and pastors.  Their advice is useful on one level but ineffectual in another.  We learn better by seeing a healthy relationship in action; reading about what makes a healthy relationship is only a shadow of the real thing.

Ultimately, we all have to grope our way to real love through making mistakes, trying to communicate, mimicking what works for others, and making a stand where our values are concerned. Healthy relationships come in all shapes and sizes, and no one – not even the experts featured in the pages of Real Women, Real Love – can prescribe what will work best for us.

For those girls who are swept up in the romance of marriage and engagement, they must make their own mistakes.  Sure, you can tell them that they’re not mature enough to get married.  You can tell them that they might be making a mistake.  But they’re determined to grow up, and they won’t be told that they don’t know how to love.  Your job is just to love them and be there for them when their castle in the air comes tumbling back to earth.