CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—During the four weeks I was home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I laid out on the hammock, drove into town to shop, and met up with my friends.

Accustomed to Harvard students’ propensity to date sparingly and marry older, I was floored to discover, while catching up on hometown gossip, that many of the people I had gone to high school with were planning to get married in the next few years. Their high school relationships, which I previously viewed as mere juvenile affairs, had become more than that—they were the beginnings of their future.

But I should have realized this, as relationships often become serious quickly in my hometown, and marriage typically comes in the early twenties, during or after an education at a community or state college.

Today, after a year of lectures in Sanders Theatre, meals in Annenberg, comps, and exams, marriage is a far, far thing from my mind. But for my friends at home, it is very real, a possibility that motivates many of their actions and plans.

This realization was only strengthened by a long-overdue project of mine: typing out my journals from elementary school. Those from third and fourth grade are full of exploits of all kinds, from tramping through the water of half-melted streams to shopping at the local mall.

A game my friends would often play during sleepovers at that time focused on how and when our lives would change: “Who will be first to get married?” and “Where will we be in ten years?,” we’d ask ourselves. One friend wanted to grow up to be like the women she’d seen at O’Hare airport–dressed for success, attaché case in hand. In our rural area, a career spent in business suits and first-class was unknown and therefore, impressive.

I learned while home that one of our sleepover compatriots, who had played, shopped, and shared her dreams with us when we were younger, was pregnant. She had moved with her boyfriend to a different state after our high school graduation, and the last time I had really spoken to her was early last fall, one night after I had moved into Mower.

Phone in hand, I stumbled down to the basement of my dorm to talk to her. In the course of her telling me how exciting it was to move into an apartment with her boyfriend, to buy silverware and pots and pans with him, to build a life with another person, I realized much how further along she was than me in developing the relationships and making the decisions that separate adolescence from adulthood. I told her how much I liked my room, my roommates, and my classes, but in comparison to her, I felt silly, immature.

Maturity, growth, and change come to people in different ways, and it is tempting—perhaps even appropriate—to fault my friends for limiting their lives by making so many “adult” decisions at such an early stage. But what right do I have, when my life is so uncomplicated by comparison?

As I bumble through the “major” decisions and challenges of my life— choosing a concentration, picking classes, making friends, and getting to the dining hall before it closes—my friends are holding jobs, paying car insurance, finding life partners, and soon, raising a child.

I’d like to say that it is a luxury to be able to spend my twenties as an unattached young adult, free to live wherever, do whatever, or see whatever I’d like, for my life should be more interesting and more varied as a result.

It’s just that when I go home and realize my friends will reach many of those “firsts” we used to talk about long before I’ll even have my first job, I sometimes wonder if, by going to Harvard, I’ve somehow avoided the difficult business of growing up.

Brittney L. Moraski ’09, a Crimson news editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Dunster House. Although she has now written for the editorial page, she is still under the mistaken impression that news is more fun.