Something is seriously up with the info in your link. The graph says that only 52% of women between 35 and 39 are able to get pregnant - which not only sounds like total bollix based on everything I’ve heard, read and seen, but is also completely contradicted within the page itself. For one thing, that same graph says that the infertility rate is 15% for women in that age group, so what happened to the other 33% of women? Also, the same page says, further down:
On topic: it would never occur to me to advise my kids on what age they should get married at, or in fact on whether they should get married at all. That’s just plain weird.
I agree. Past age 40 I cant think of a single decent guy I know of whom I would want to hook up with any woman I cared about.
BUT, there was this one guy I worked with at about age 42, ended up divorced and who was good looking, smart, and financially secure and guess what? The women at work found out he was “on the market” again and they came out of the woodwork.
Hmmm. So you’re saying women behave the way they do, at least in part, because of the options and incentives men give them. That does sounds reasonable to me.
Now, if we extend that logic, we might conclude that men behave the way they do because … errr … scratching my head here … hmmm … wow, that’s a poser.
It’s parenthetical because the thread is about advice to young women, which is something one gives because one thinks said young women are autonomous agents capable of making choices and taking charge of their lives. If you want to start a thread on advice to young men, I promise you I’ll keep any thoughts I have on what young women should be told in parentheses.
It’s true that historically, women are willing, (and often required,) to marry older men. More attention needs to be paid to the effect of having older sperm on the child’s health. Even though studies on this have been known for twenty years, somehow, the agenda at play is still aimed at getting girls tied down with early marriages despite how it hurts their long term financial security.
The agenda that wants women to be kept financially dependent on men is long standing and thoroughly documented.
It seems to be yet another thing that women can’t “win”.
If women start talking “marriage and baby” in her late teens, everyone rolls their eyes at her, telling her she needs to find herself first. They laugh at her if she looks for a husband in college (the old “MRS” degree thing) and tell her she needs to worry more about her education–preferably a STEM one. If she starts talking talking marriage+baby right after college, she’s got to sit through lectures about how she and her boyfriend don’t know each other well…how it would be irresponsible for them to start family-making when they’re both pulling in low salaries in an unstable job market…how the demands of graduate school and family conflict with one another…how no one wants to hire a woman if she’s going to just drop out of the workforce a year later and start pumping out babies.
If she waits till she’s in her 30s, she’s gets all this “advice” about how she’s waited too late and it’s her stupid fault for wanting too much out of life. For being selfish.
Women would be best to tune out all the busy-bodies, especially the male ones.
Never mind also that if she marries young, pops out 2 or 3 kids, loses her girlish figure as a result, maybe elects to being a SAHM because she does prioritize motherhood above career (because if she’s in her early 20’s, she likely doesn’t have a career anyway), and then lo and behold, winds up divorced and abandoned, there will be no shortage of people judging her not making smarter decisions. These same types will then judge her for demanding child support and alimony, and they will also tsk-tsk her when she tries to date.
So yeah, anyone advising their daughter to get married in their 20’s without factoring in the nonsense that very well might come with that choice is practicing bad parenting.
… just like I said, become a parent and you never do anything right again. It really doesn’t matter what advice you give your kids - it will always be wrong. Also, failing to advise your kids is even more wrong.
If you kids do well it will be despite you, but if they do poorly, it will be because of you. Guaranteed.
But which is the cause and which is the effect? The type of women who earn more are also more likely to focus on their careers first before marriage. And how much of it is due to people, all things being equal, earning more in their 30s than in their 20s?
You think men get a simple way to “win?” Get married young and your buddies will tell you you need to play the field and sow oats. Wait and women will complain you’re afraid of committement. etc. etc. Granted, it’s different groups of people, but it’s the same in your scenario above.
Nobody gets to make everyone else happy. That’s life.
Interesting that the male busybody in the thread is the one giving the advice about “decide what’s important to you and act accordingly.”
Bingo! And they’re 35 or 40, and the pool of available, non-losery, non-weirdo, non-psychotic potential partners has significantly dwindled in the meantime.
I think that’s what several of us are trying to point out- things do change over time, and that people should be aware of that, so they can make decisions accordingly.
But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily means that you should freak out and hunt down a spouse ASAP because you’re 31… unless being married is that important to you.
There’s no problem with not getting married until later, but I have a feeling that a lot of people just assume that since (in their 20s and early 30s) right now there are plenty of potential partners and plenty of ways to meet them, that it’ll always be that way, including my late 30s and 40s. And this isn’t really true- the population does dwindle, and the signal to noise ratio goes down as well.
To use a personal example, I have a friend who’s 43. She’s extremely attractive, very successful, stylish, kind, loving, etc… Thus far in her life, she’s been very career-focused, and never seemed to want to put the time in to grow and nurture a relationship. Starting in her late 30s though, she started to make more noise about men, etc… and the problem was, at that point the single men that we, her friends knew were mostly weirdos, losers or people otherwise damaged by prior relationships. Combine that with the fact that she’s good looking enough and successful enough for either to be intimidating, and that she’s looking for a guy who meets her concept of successful and attractive enough for her, and the poor girl can’t buy a date.
Which is a shame, because she’s got a lot to offer- she’s surprisingly geeky once you get to know her (she has EVERY MST3k episode on DVD that she dubbed herself, she plays some video games, watches shows like DragonBall Z, etc…) .
I kind of suspect that had she known that the pool of prospective spouses was going to dry up so significantly after she turned about 35, she’d have possibly made a different decision about being so career focused. She seems content, or at least she’s making the best of what she’s got, but I don’t know about truly happy, because I’ve seen her happier overall in the past.
Yeah, I do. This is especially the case because men have more influence on when marriage occurs than women do. I guarantee that if you were to poll 100 young adult couples to find out which gender was the most concerned about “where this is all going”, it will more often be the woman.
If you google the words “marriage", “delay” and "proposal”, the advice columns, blog posts, and personal commentaries are all about men stalling, not women. That’s not a coincidence, either.
Because the attention on women is disproportionate to the influence they have on marriage. It’s also in keeping with sexist ideology that insists a woman’s place is in the home, weighed down with kids.
Getting ribbed on by friends is nothing like having to listen to parents and family and a bunch of faceless strangers on the internet opine about what you should do with your life…as if it’s your societal duty to have babies before anything else.
Everyone would be better off tuning out the annoying peanut gallery. But especially women. Women are always getting told what to do and not to do with their sexuality, even though they are the ones who have to live with all the consequences and all the judgment (see the “single mother” stigma).
There isn’t just one male busybody in this thread.
This is a discussion board. We aren’t actually offering advice to anyone, but rather commenting on the reasonableness of the advice in the OP - which the OP invited. No-one in this thread is a “busybody”.
Or is it that simply having a different opinion makes you a “busybody”?
You may very well be describing me in the next ten years. I’ve always been career-focused and never cared about relationships. But this could easily change.
And you’re right, I would have a hard time jumping into the game at such a late age.
The same way it’s really hard to go back to college when you’re 43.
Or start a new career when you’re 43.
Or do anything new when you’re 43.
Not everyone is ready to go to college when they’re 18. We all know this. But we also know there are real advantages to going to college right after high school. Should a person who is not interested in college go there anyway? No, because someone who doesn’t want to do something isn’t going to be all that great at it. They will just waste their time and money, and make themselves and everyone else around them miserable. They’d be better off doing whatever it is they want to do, that makes them happy, damned what their parents want. Sure, there are trade-offs to going back to college as a middle-aged person. But if you arent ready for something, you aren’t ready for it. No sense in forcing it.
I see relationships the same way. Yes, if I wake up tomorrow with burning in my loins, I’ll probably wish I was twenty years younger. But I also know that 20 years ago, I wouldn’t have been ready to tackle a relationship. I would have been one of those “don’t stick your dick in the crazy” type of girlfriends. Someone who thinks it’s a shame I’m single doesn’t know me that well.
Your friend is content, so I don’t think her life is all that sad. It may seem sad to you because you have something she doesn’t have. But that’s projection. There are so many sad, pathetic, angry people who have SOs that the mere absence of one doesn’t signify anything about the quality of a person’s life, IMHO.
They are looking at income in their mid-30s, so this is accounting for age related income differences. And this statistic is for college educated women, who presumably had some kind of plan for investing the time and money it takes to get a degree.
But the bigger question is, where are the men? Presumably some men “prioritize fatherhood,” but they don’t seem to be penalized financially. And if men aren’t prioritizing family, why not? And why is it that we are being told women are happy to be “liberated” from mind-numbing “cubicle drudgery”, but men aren’t exactly hammering at the door to achieve that same freedom and joy?
We fought for a long time to be able to work. Why did we do that? Because we are crazy? Stupid? Mislead?
Or may it be that financial independence bring fulfillment, security, freedom, and more life options for women, just like it does for men? Obviously not all women want to focus on career, and that’s fine. Im sure a lot of men desire the same, and I would like them to have that freedom as well. But as long as we are working and basically doing the same thing as men, we shouldn’t have to make all kinds of extra choices and trade offs that men have never had to make. It’s just a job and a kid or two. It shouldn’t be somehow unachievable because we have innies instead of outies.
Some women are, some are not. Some men are, some men are not. Married men outearn married women for obvious reasons already elucidated: for good or ill, when couples with children switch to a single breadwinner, it’s almost always going to be the man who works.
For childless people in the same age bracket, there is only a slight income discrepancy, and it’s in favor of women.
What was sought was more of a choice. What’s been achieved is switching one societal expectation for another. Whether that’s an upgrade or not is another question.
It really doesn’t matter what advice you give your kids - it will always be wrong. Also, failing to advise your kids is even more wrong.