If you have parents with a healthy relationship, you don’t learn that you don’t have to be married. I thought being a healthy adult meant you had to have a spouse. I didn’t know any different.

Milano reflects on how a stable, traditional family model can quietly set marriage up as the default marker of adulthood. The quote suggests that when the only “healthy” template you see is a partnered one, it can be hard to imagine singleness as equally complete or mature. Her point is not anti-marriage but pro-choice: emotional health and adult identity need not be validated by having a spouse. The admission “I didn’t know any different” underscores how social norms are often absorbed unconsciously, and how personal growth can involve unlearning inherited assumptions about what a successful life must look like.