I had a dream/nightmare yesterday afternoon where I was walking around an outdoor garden party venue and old male classmates from kindergarten leading up to college were pulling out engagement rings and proposing to their current girlfriends. Suddenly I imagined my facebook newsfeed filling up with notifications of engagements and weddings. The real kicker was that near the end of the dream, two guys from my high school (both that I know are straight, one is married) ended up engaged and immediately held their wedding at the same venue complete with a room full of elderly grandparent types.
And so begins the relationship (more like, lack of a relationship) panic attacks of my late-twenties. It is true that news of my old classmates or coworkers getting married has been growing in recent years and people tend to pair up as if they are trying to board Noah's Ark and finding opposite gender versions of themselves and procreating. In fact, the latest wave of marriages from this weekend alone were reminders that I need to get started on that whole marriage thing.

And now I am reminded of my favorite Shel Silverstein book from childhood, “The Missing Piece”, a story about a commitment-phobic shape who spends its life searching for the one missing shape that could makes it whole again. In the story, the shape learns that the missing piece was not the answer to its problems and that it was better off alone so that it could smell the flowers and notice the little things. When I read that story now, I feel like I am that shape and that searching for a person to complete “me” may not be the answer to everything. It is true, I do not want to be the last person in my group of friends to get hitched, but I am reminded of middle school when my main goal was to get a boyfriend, then after finally having a boyfriend, I was met with the reality that it did not solve all my problems and that I would have been better off spending more time studying for classes.