I’m 18, in college and engaged. My life has been a shithole of abuse and mistreatment by my parents and I’ve endured more hardships than most people could even imagine. I graduated high school a year early and despite my past life, I have no record, never done drugs and never even gotten drunk, despite plenty of opportunities. My whole life, I’ve done nothing but drag myself up and survive against the odds, and had people kick me down and spit in my face for it when something goes right for me. When I got into college, I met the girl of my dreams. She’s crazy gorgeous, super smart, has a great sense of humor and has every little thing I could ever want, except she’s not into football, and isn’t sure that Marvel is better than DC. But when we got engaged after 4 months of knowing each other (3 months of dating), we had to keep it a secret. Some of my close and trusted friends that I told were ecstatic.

Others friends, on the other hand, flipped their s*** on me and freaked out. One of my friends has been engaged for over a year and will have known her husband for 7 years when they get married (she’ll be 26) and she got outright angry at me and called me stupid and said I was rushing into things. She tried to tell me that the only way to get married was to wait and weigh your other options for a while, and to make sure it was a long engagement in case I found someone else. In fact, a number of people have tried to tell me that.

Is that what the modern idea of love is? Find someone you want to spend your life with and then keep your distance from them for a while so you can f*** around with other people for a while if you want to? My fiance’s mom (who doesn’t know we’re engaged yet) told her that if we get married, she’ll probably break up with me and f*** some other guys for a while first. What the hell is wrong with people? That’s not love. That’s letting lust rule your life and doing what makes you happy in the moment, not in your forever. My fiance and I are having a long engagement for financial reasons — if we play our cards right, when we graduate college we can get married and have about $75,000 in savings between the two of us and not much for college debt. We consider ourselves already married: there is no room for screwing around with other people, because we can’t imagine wanting to do that. We want to spend every second we can for the rest of our lives together. When we hold each other and look into each others’ eyes, there is no where we would rather be, we’re completely lost in each other. That’s love, people. People can sense it, just being in the same room as us. They take one look at us next to each other and can tell that there’s no place we’d rather be for the rest of our lives. Not this, I have to wait for 7 years and make sure no one better is going to come along before I settle for this person b*******.

Seeing so many people around me lost and not knowing what love is makes me so sad. But what makes me most sad is why people don’t even want real love, or think people that have love are stupid or out of their minds. My fiance and I are sick of pretending that we’re not spending our lives with each other and having to wear our rings on our right hands around her family and some of our friends. I’m sick of feeling like I have to be ashamed of something this beautiful. So f*** everyone that thinks love is stupid, because most of you don’t even know what it is. Stop trying to find someone better or thinking you’ll spend your life settling. If you love someone, you’ll know it, and it’ll be so amazing you won’t be able to contain it, and you sure as hell won’t waste a tenth of your life waiting to spend your life with them if you have a choice.