My column today is probably limited to my personal experience and I’m not sure how many other people feel this way.

I was in the Rhatigan Student Center during my freshman year, and there was this girl sitting by herself at a table close to mine — nothing out of the ordinary. Though there was food on both sides of the table, I wasn’t sure if the food was meant for two people or not.

“Are you waiting for someone?” I asked her, blissfully unaware of how the word nosy was defined.

“Yeah, I’m waiting for my husband,” she said. She must have been 20 years old at the most. Given that this happened during peak hours at the RSC, it was quite noisy.

“Did you say cousin?” I asked, honestly puzzled if she had actually said the word ‘husband’ or not. She replied that no, she did mean, “husband.”

Just one word flew through my head — BIZARRE.

You see, the people I knew from back home in India rarely ever get married that young, despite all the arranged marriage stories you might have heard about. Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.

It was just that I had a one-sentence monologue that played in my head for the next few hours: “These kids are so young.”

I had always believed that you went to school, got a job in your field of education, and only when you had stacked up a good balance in your bank account over the next few years did you give into society’s pressure and consider getting married. Following that, you became boring and, eventually, died.

The more I thought about the conversation, and about how different their life was from my (obviously elegant) life plan, the more terrified I felt for them.

Over the next few months, I came to see how a decision to get married at such a young age could be an easy, even mundane, choice to make. There is, after all, a sense of security knowing you aren’t the only one making such a decision.

The fact that people do start earning at a younger age out here, combined with better employee protection programs, does make it easier to start a life as a married couple, and while I’m still terrified by the mere idea of getting married young, I wish the young married couples in college the best.