But presumably they wanted to. They didn’t rationally think it was a good idea while emotionally resenting the entire process and wishing they were focusing on whatever else instead.
I agree with this. There are genuine advantages to both. As far as grandchildren go, my parents are much more involved with the grandchildren that were born later. When they were in their 40s and 50s, they were still working. Where they lived was determined by their jobs, they didn’t have much vacation time, etc. etc. Now they are retired, they can live near their kids, they can babysit, they can host overnights–these things never happened with the older generation of grandkids. But that’s our family dynamic–my parents were both very career-focused through their 40s and 50s, and now are in reasonably good shape in their 60s.
Truly, anyone who thinks there is a context-less “best time” for kids is being silly. And, in any case, having kids as a time that isn’t the “best time” isn’t the end of the world, either.
I think marriages between older people are more likely to last because some of our energy is directed elsewhere instead of obsessing over little things in the relationship.
One hopes that with maturity we learn how to have conversations about what bothers or upsets us, and make changes to our behavior, instead of screaming and throwing wine glasses and storming out of the house.
I have noticed that a lot of men seem to want to marry slightly less-successful and less-educated women. I’ve always thought this is so there’s no question about who’s going to stay home with the kids, and whose career will come second. So the VP with an MBA will marry a teacher who might have a BA or an MA in education. Not stupid, but not a money-maker.
White-collar guys who are successful, smart, and highly verbal know they can pick from the entire pool of single women, not just from the pool of smart, successful, verbal women of a similar and slightly-younger age. Successful, smart, etc., women, however, tend to want to only select from the white-collar guys in the same pool. They often overlook the smart and successful blue-collar guy who owns his own business and makes a good living. This is a shame – I know several women with advanced degrees who married successful blue-collar guys and are quite happy.
Part of the reason, I suspect, is that men tend to value physical attractiveness more highly than other positive characteristics.
If we (somewhat cynically perhaps) assume that both men and women will agree to a relationship based on toting up internal “scores” of how attractive the other partner is - and ending up with someone with, basically, the same ‘score’ - men are more likely to give higher ‘marks’ to a woman who is physically attractive (as a generalization); they weigh ‘success’ and ‘smart’ less heavily.
So a man who is middlingly attractive but smart and successful is more likely to choose a woman who is highly attractive but middlingly smart and successful, than a woman who is, like him, middlingly attractive but smart and successful.
Such a woman would rate a lower “score” overall in the man-market, than the man with the same characteristics would rate in the woman-market.
Obviously, this is all a bunch of generalizations and there are of course lots of exceptions.
What else is the internet for? 
Anyone bother to look at the original Slashdot thread before getting up in arms?
You need a better cite to prove the point you’re trying to make. Why doesn’t this study look at lifetime earnings or peak earnings? Earnings between ages 33-35 is a particularly odd range to choose to assess the impact of a variable many in the survey wouldn’t have experienced yet. Also, why haven’t they controlled for married with children vs married without children?
You’re also misreading the study you presented. The $18k disparity in income for college educated women is between those who marry before the age of 20 and those who marry after the age of 30. The disparity is exactly the same between the same cohorts of men. Getting married earlier isn’t invariably correlated with higher earnings for men either. It’s mostly just the opposite, delaying marriage among college educated men is consistently associated with increased earnings up until the 30+ cohort, at which point earnings fall back to the 20-23 range, and plummet for the never married men. In regards to the drop off, you see it as a nice little bonus for young married men (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, don’t tell the dames in the office). I gather that the ambitious, confident guys who go on to lucrative careers can attract a mate more easily.
If your goal is to please all the people all the time, you are correct. But that’s an odd game to begin playing.
What’s the goal behind telling women (and just women) to do something they don’t want to do and/or aren’t ready to do?
You seriously believe that advice, opinions and judgment are only directed at women? Honestly, that’s the position you’re taking? In your world not even the phrase “Man Up” exists? It’s not remotely possible that you’re suffering from confirmation bias?
In regards to the OP, the goal was to respond to a terminally ill father’s solicitation for advice he could pass on to his daughter in a video. Someone offered some advice which he/she claims to draw from personal experiences. At this point they wrote what the OP quoted. Note the use of gender neutral pronouns. It wasn’t directed at just women, it was general advice.
Why do people do this? I imagine the goal anytime most people do it is to pass on advice they think will make someone else happier, their life better, or give them the reassurance/swift kick in the ass they need to “wake up”. Who the fuck knows?
Now explain how that can create a “no win situation” for women unless the purpose of the game is to please all the people all the time.
Yes, it is dispensed disproportionately to women. There are posters in this thread who have defended slanting this towards women, despite themselves being male.
The fact the this thread title wasn’t paraphrased to read “Advise your children to ‘get married in their 20’s’” is evidence of gender bias.
I already explained how it’s a “no win” situation. Whatever a woman does, someone (usually a man) will be there to remind her how she’s doing it all wrong. If she marries someone who turns out to be a loser, she was stupid for not seeing the warning signs. If she has kids before they’re financially ready, she’s irresponsible and stupid. If she divorces him because he’s not bringing in any money, she’s a golddigger. If she does the stay-at-home mother thing after graduating from an expensive college, she’s crazy for wasting her daddy’s money like that. If she waits till she’s in her 30s or 40s to start with the whole marrying/baby-making thing, she’s selfish for “wanting it all”.
Women are going to do what they want to do and what the cards allow for them, not what dying fathers or internet peanut galleries say they should do. So that’s why I’m wondering what the point is of all this advice.
I wouldn’t trust the meaningfulness of that data on a bet.
First of all, that’s “before age 20,” not “in their 20s.” And these days, how many college-educated women get married before age 20? Not only is it surely a group that’s small enough to be meaningless in this discussion, but there are probably other factors that distinguish such women; I bet most of them attended religious colleges, for instance.
But if the point at which incomes are compared is when the women are in their mid-30s, most women who get married in their 30s haven’t yet interrupted their career for childbearing by then; the women who got married in their 20s, or before age 20, mostly have.
You’d really want to compare income at, say, age 50, when both groups have done what career-interrupting they’re going to do, just at different times of life, to see if getting married earlier really causes loss of income down the road.
Looks like Crawlspace beat me to most of what I had to say. Guess I should have finished reading the thread before posting!
This is not a situation unique to women. If his family doesn’t have enough money, he should get off his lazy ass and get a second job or grow up and start working towards a promotion. If he spends too much time at work, he needs to “man up” and be a more dedicated father. If he stays at home with the kids while his wife works, he’s a pussy-whipped kept ‘man’. If his wife leaves him it’s his fault/he should have known better/he must have done something wrong. If he leaves his wife, he’s a scumbag looking for the bigger better deal. Fathers need to take a more active role in their daughters lives. He’s just a another man telling her how to live her life and needs to be ignored.
These are all opinions that are expressed by people on a regular basis. Like your examples, they are often mutually exclusive and create a situation in which a man can’t “win” - but only if he sees it as his job to please all the people all the time. That is an odd game to try to play and makes me roll my eyes when I hear people lament that they can’t “win” it. To quote The Wire, “The game is rigged, but you cannot lose if you do not play.”
I’d also take issue with the idea that it’s usually a man pointing out how a woman should live her life. Most of the pablum I see aimed at women about how to live their life is created by women. Looking through all the more popular women’s magazines on Wikipedia, for example, I didn’t see a single male editor in chief. However, since I’m a man, I’ve never been in a position to receive advice on how I should be living my life as a woman, so it could be a distorted perspective.
To bring us closer together dammit!!!
Look, men face bullshit. Women face bullshit. This particular piece of bullshit pertains to women.
Can we use child-bearing as a proxy for marriage? From here:
Which is hardly surprising to me. At age 37, my professional value is almost at its maximum, because of the years of experience, training, and credentials I’ve accumulated starting from my 20’s. Because few others can match my qualifications, I’m the only person who is doing my particular job. This means I’m much less disposable than others. I’ve also had plenty of time to establish a good reputation. Without kids and marital issues competing for my attention, I’ve been able to pretty much focus most of my energy on looking good at work.
So maternity leave will set me back far less than someone who is early in their career and still laying down the foundation for their career. Sure, that person can catch up in theory, but it’s much harder. Even after maternity leave is over, you’re still talking about frequent absences to take care of sick kids or make doctor appointments or compensate for unreliable daycare etc. All of these can make one less competitive at work (and school), and can create setbacks that compound over time. Whatever performance drops I experience after having kids will have occurred after I’ve made a name for myself. As we all know, it is easier to keep someone from rising through the ranks than it is to bring down someone who has risen.
That said, I know of several women who are married with kids who have accomplished what I have, over the same age period. So it’s hardly impossible to do this. Knowing this keeps me from feeling too smug.
Also from the paper I cited above:
The sentence in bold is the crux of it. Everyone knows that delaying marriage increases the risk of fertility issues and other problems. But do these negative risks offset the positive risks that come with marrying and starting a family later in life? To answer this question we need more than personal opinions, as these tend to be biased and self-serving.
Yes, we can. IMHO, this one succeeds in making the case where the other one failed. Thanks for digging it up!
It seems to me there is a problem, it is a self-correcting one.
If enough women start delaying child-rearing and marriage till their 30s and 40s, then men will either wait till their 30s and 40s to marry, or they will “settle” for women who don’t want a fancy career…of which there are many. And there will be higher demand for fertility services (including egg preservation), which means the costs of such services will drop.
And if the ramifications of being a maiden in waiting are so god-awful, women will go back to the “old” way of doing things before too long.
Or, the men will just decide that given porn and widely-available nonmarital sex, getting hitched isn’t worth it, or at least not worth doing until you’ve had a good long time of oat-sowing.
AFAICT, all of this is pretty much what is happening. And perhaps it will end well. In the meantime, there’s a lot of human casualties involved because of all the upheaval.
I mean, I think the “creative destruction” that accompanies a free-market economy is a long-run good thing, while simultaneously acknowledging that it can cause significant pain to people in the short-term (i.e. if we aren’t going to bail out the unprofitable factories, we better make sure that people understand that no job is forever and that they need to be prepared for change, and do what we can to help them adjust to the harsh realities of life).
In the space of a couple generations, we’ve pretty radically transformed gender relations and family structures. Even if we assume all of that is an unalloyed good, I think a parent talking to their child is not wrong to remind them that “y’know, this whole every-adult-expected-to-work-outside-of-the-house, male-female-earning-power-equality … it’s kind of an experiment we’re running, and while the vast majority of society is on board with thinking it’ll be better, it’s not like we have precedent for it, and even people totally down with the change acknowledge that it’s possible we’ll go back to the “old” way of doing things before too long. So y’know, be aware, think about it, maybe cover your bases.”
I think that would be an honest message to send. YMMV.