An important part of a good marriage is also being mature enough to want and be able to maintain a good marriage.
Through most of my 20s, I was flighty, emotionally detached, obsessed with buying last-minute international plane tickets and eager to sample the full rainbow of attractive men in this world. I was in no position to be any kind of partner to anyone-- I needed to become whole on my own first. Any kind of marriage I tried to put together then would have fallen apart spectacularly. And if you think it’s tough dating as a 35 year old, imagine trying to date as a 35 year old divorcee- perhaps even with a kid in tow.
I never read it so literally; I thought it was advice along the lines of making dating a priority if marriage is something you want to do, because if you don’t, and you put your career (or whatever) first, then later on you’ll end up looking at a pool of prospective mates with a lower normal:loser ratio when compared to what you had in your 20s.
I also assumed that advice like “get married in your 20s” ought to be filtered through the lens of the person giving the advice. If it’s your grandmother, keep in mind that she’s imagining things like they were in 1955 or whenever, not the reality of 2015.
Nobody in their right mind would disagree with this - and neither will I.
Maybe we are talking about somewhat different things. I don’t mean “marry the first guy who has a job and doesn’t scratch himself in public”. I mean more “we broke up because I want to focus on my career”, and finding out ten years later that the employed guys who don’t scratch themselves and who are otherwise perfectly good are already married to someone else and aren’t on the market.
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An important part of a good marriage is also being mature enough to want and be able to maintain a good marriage
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Heavens yes, and thats the other half of the issue. Mr. Good Enough isn’t going to be happy if he marries Ms. Not Good Enough, and neither is she. In that case, I would guess Ms. N.G.E. has to grow up and take her chances later, and the advice to marry in your 20s is not for her.
I would have felt absolutely horrible if my parents given me that advice. Simply dating was the furthest thing from my mind when I was in my 20s, let alone marriage and family. To have my father sit me down and express his concerns over my waning marriagibility would have given me a huge complex. I was very uncertain of myself back then. Back then, I was still about following other people’s “shoulds”. Knowing that I was almost certainly going to disappoint my father by “disregarding” his advice would have made me feel quite crappy.
And no, there wouldn’t have been anything I could have done to follow that advice. It’s not like someone advising you on the wisdom of opening a bank account…where you can ask them to accompany you to Wells Fargo and walk you through the process. What, is Daddy going to fix me up with the perfect guy, like he’s helping me pick out my first car or something? As much as he may want to have that kind of power, he doesn’t have it. So it would have been advice without any useful information, even if I had wanted to follow it. No thanks.
I think nearly everyone in this thread agrees, “Don’t get married too early and don’t get married too late.”
But people saying, “Don’t get married too early” think the other side is advocating too-early marriage, and those who say “Don’t get married too late” think the other side is advocating too-late marriage.
I think parents who are genuinely concerned about their children’s wellbeing, rather than advising them on statistics pertaining to age and marriageability, would advise them that they are valued individuals whose worth is not tied to their marital or procreative status.
If parents have a daughter in her teens or twenties whose priority is above all else marriage and children, I think they should advise her that she is a valued individual whose worth is not tied to her marital or procreative status.
I guess I’ve just never known someone who actually broke up with someone to “focus on their career”. I have known people who broke up because their immediate priorities were different–one wanted to go to grad school in a different state, the other wanted to stay at a current job, that sort of thing. Or one wanted to get married and have babies on a very different time table than the other. But if you actually care more about your job or your grad school opportunity than you care about the other person/the partnership, well, that doesn’t sound like a very solid base for a marriage. If you can’t find a way to make a compromise there that truly feels like a good deal for both of you, you’re going to struggle with a lot of other compromises, as well.
I don’t have any daughters, just one 11 year old son.
If he marries at all, I hope he he’ll do it when it feels right. I honestly don’t care whether that’s when he’s 22 or 52.
I’d say the same thing if I had a girl. Is she met Mr. Right in college, I’d be thrilled for her. If he didn’t come along until she was 60, or never came along at all, I’d never dream of telling her she’d made the wrong decision.
People also end up marrying those they are around a lot. so that’s why we see so many doctors married to other doctors, lawyers married to other lawyers.
The advice I gave was “If marriage/kids are important to you don’t rule it out … be open to the possibility.”
Apprarently, this is what passes for rabid sexist intolerance these days.
And if that was the case, I might give different advice. I was responding to the question in the OP, that did not specify what said daughter’s paramour looked like.
Currently, about 60% of college graduates are women. Women have been the majority of college graduates for awhile now, and the trend shows no signs or reversing. If we assume that college graduates (male and female) strongly prefer to marry other college graduates, what might that lead to in the future?
I agree. If you start a thread on advice for sons, send me a note and I’ll post my opinions.
You may wish to consider the radical possibility that the genders value different characteristics differently.
All of the above and more.
If they’re really and truly happy staying unmarried, well then fine and good; my advice was conditional, after all. As for the rest, we’re in YMMMV here, but this is simply not my observation/impression. I sense/observe a lot of women marrying Walter White when they’re 35 and being quietly unsatisfied with him, because they deep down felt they deserved better than they got.
And before you say it: yes, a lot of guys deep down think they deserve Scarlett Johanssen, and that’s a problem, too.
My advice is/was more along the lines of “if you see a Walter White and you like him OK, don’t assume that you will do better, and indeed don’t even assume you’ll do as well.”
I also very, very strongly agree with Shodan’s assessment that "A successful marriage is not something you find, it is something you make. " I think the rhetoric about finding a “soulmate” is immensely destructive.
I agree. Most of this advice is aimed towards women, (see thread title). But it takes two people to get married. Culturally it’s the male who is suppose to propose marriage, shouldn’t this type of advice be aimed towards young men. There are plenty of stories out there of girlfriends who are ready to get married and just waiting/nagging their boyfriend to propose.
I’m imagining my father telling me something like this. Upon hearing the words “don’t assume that you will do better than just some guy with a job that you like OK”, I’d be too upset to listen to him any more and I’d probably walk away from him. The truth is he has said similar things and I put that advice in the same reject pile that “Women have to train men to be decent mates” and “Your standards need to be more realistic”, and plenty more of his oldies but goodies have gone.
“Don’t assume that you will do better” is what Nice Guys say when they’ve been rejected. It is what people with low self-esteem tell themselves when they settle for lousy spouses. It isn’t what fathers who are truly concerned about their young daughter’s well-being should be advising. And it isn’t what people who understand female dating preferences say.
My cousin remarried when she was 42 and her groom was 51. He’d never been married before, but twenty-three years later they are still very happy. We all wish she could have met him first! But then there would not have been her two wonderful sons from her first marriage. Their bio dad rarely sees his grandkids, but #2 is a marvelous grandpa sub.
Mr or Ms Right can come along later.
And just as a joke, does anyone remember the Beverly Hillbillies episode in which ?Granny spoke about the ideal age for girls to marry?
Thirteen and fourteen a girl’s in her prime,
Fifteen and sixteen she’s still got time.
Seventeen and eighteen she’s almost done,
Nineteen and twenty, her pa needs a gun.
It would help if so many women wouldnt change the minute they get that ring. My wife, after we got back from our honeymoon, went thru my stuff and threw out all kinds of things she didnt like.
Its also why I always tell bachelors to never spend alot of money on furniture because when you get married your wife will want to throw it all out and get new anyways.
But that’s like a tautology; if marriage is a thing you want, you will make dating a priority. You don’t need advice. If it isn’t, someone telling you you’ll want it later, and to resist the temptation to pay attention to the things you love now because you’ll regret it later is futile.
And, again, to me marriage is about meeting a good match. If you’ve met a good match, you’ll eventually get married, career or no. That’s what having a good match means. If you haven’t, you shouldn’t.
It’s always perfectly possible that you *won’t *do better than whatever guy is under discussion. So what? That’s irrelevant; it has zero bearing on whether you should marry the guy.
The idea that you should marry the best person you can get is dependent on the idea that marriage is a necessity of life. For a LOT of people, men and women, it isn’t. It’s something that would be absolutely wonderful if the right person comes along, but why the hell would you want to do it with the wrong one?
“Go with the thing you like OK” is good advice for making an essential decision–one that can be easily modified if things don’t work out.
Like, I’d tell someone who doesn’t know what to study in school to choose what they like “OK” if they’re clueless and it’s time for them to select a major. I’d tell them to choose an “OK” job over no job at all. If they are trying to eat more healthily, I’d tell them to eat the vegetables they like “OK” instead of waiting for the perfect vegetable to land on their plate.
If you choose the wrong major, job, or vegetable, the consequences aren’t likely to follow you for the rest of your life.
But marriage is different. A lot of people are old-fashioned and actually plan to take marriage vows seriously. It’s not a temporary situation for them. It’s FOREVER. Who wants to be stuck with “OK” for the rest of her life? A woman can do “OK” all by herself.
Maybe there was a day when women were so powerless that marriage was absolutely essential to their survival and well-being, so settling for “OK” made sense. But that day is not now. If men are banking on their mere “OK-ness” seeing them to their romantic goals, they’re going to be in for a rude awakening. Especially as fertility treatments become more affordable and household furniture becomes easier to move.
You would think so, but there are plenty of people who know now that they want X one day, but act in a way today that makes it less likely that they will ever get X. Either they don’t realize that doing Y will make it less likely for them to get X or they think they have plenty of time to make up for it. It’s not restricted to marriage and it’s not restricted to women. I know plenty of people who want to retire early- I can collect my pension at 55 and a lot of people I know want to completely retire at 55. They don’t want to collect their pension and get another full or part-time job- they want to stop working entirely. It can be done and plenty of people do it - but not the people who buy a new car every three years or take a expensive vacations every year or had kids/decide to upgrade to a bigger, more expensive house in their forties. There’s nothing wrong with choosing those things, just like there’s nothing wrong with focusing on a career rather than dating- the problem is for the people who don’t even realize they are choosing.
Back to marriage, there are also people like my sister-in-law. She knew she wanted to end up married, and after she was in a relationship for a couple of years, I asked her if she knew what she wanted , what he wanted etc. She got all starry-eyed and said things like " I could have another baby" when what I asked her was whether she knew if he wanted kids. I remember telling her she needed to figure out what she wanted and what he wanted lest she wake up one day and realize she had spent her life with him without meaning to. She didn’t quite do that- she woke up one day after they were together 12 years, mentioned marriage for apparently the first time and found out he didn’t want to get married, at least not to her. She then broke up with him. She would have been better off if she had known that 10 years earlier, but although her long term goal was to get married, her immediate goal was to have a man.
