三人成虎

in case you can't read chinese, the title of this post translates into "three people make a tiger real". the story behind this chinese idiom goes something like this:

a king's adviser asked the king: if a person came to you and said that there was a tiger roaming around in the marketplace, would you believe him?
the king replied "no. that's ridiculous."
the adviser then asked if two people came to him with this information, would he believe them?
the king replied "hum... i don't think so."
finally the adviser asked the king if he would believe it if three people told him there was a tiger in the marketplace and then king replied "yes, i would believe that there is a tiger on the loose."
the adviser then chided the king for being so easily persuaded.

the lesson to be learned from this story is that rumor repeated often enough is easy to believe as fact.

the reason why i bring this up is because three female friends of mine have recently stated their desire to get married in the near future (none are in a serious relationship). as the story warns, i should take care in taking such things at face value, but two of them specifically mentioned wanting to have babies "soon". while these girls are older than me, i consider all of them to be in my peer group and this scares me immensely. for one thing, i'm not really ready to 'settle down' as that is what marriage inevitably brings. secondly, i'm not even close to being able to afford kids. my guess is that a child costs on the order of tens of thousands of dollars a year, which would necessitate a move to the suburbs and the nixing of any sort of super sized HDTV or fast car. three samples do not a study make, but it certainly warrants a little reflection--lest it be 'game over' too soon.