My friend confided she isn’t tripping the light fantastic with her husband, but he’s a good father and they live in a decent house and he’s basically adequate. It is pretty much a roommate situation.
If mediocre marriage means struggling, “can’t divorce cuz it costs too much” distrustful yikes, stay single. My neighbor is in that type of situation. The wife is cantankerous, suspicious, always keeping track of his every move, and they don’t want to split cuz she doesn’t work and at least takes care of the kids and house situation and that the neighbor doesn’t want to start over.
Velocity: I just sort of skimmed the thread, but I’m guessing you’re going to get a lot of Disney-esque, “every marriage should be perfect, and if it’s not perfect you should get divorced” kinds of answers. I’m speaking off the cuff here, but I think you’re right: we live in a world of limited options. Not everyone is beautiful, not everyone is smart, not everyone is chipper all the time, and there’s a reason they cut to credits at the “happily ever after” part.
Suppose the romantics are right, and there’s a “perfect woman” out there for you. She’s approximately your age, she’s not already married, and she’s just waiting for you to come along. There’s approximately 320 million people in the US, or around 160 females. If you want to meet her in the next 20 years, you’ll need to meet 8 million women a year. And that’s assuming she lives in the US. If she lives somewhere else, you’ll need to meet around 200 million women a year.
Anyway, whether they admit to it or not, everybody eventually settles, or marries for the wrong reason(s): hormones, money, loneliness, “white knight syndrome,” or whatever.
But to answer your question, if you want to get married and have a child or children, you should probably do it within the next five years if you’re going to marry someone approximately your own age. If you marry younger (than yourself), you could wait as long as ten.
But a marriage of convenience doesn’t have to be mediocre; I’ve known all ranges of marriage “results” that started out of convenience. Some were a damn good fit (and at least one I know of involved people who were about as romantic as a pair of bricks - troo wuv would never have entered the equation for either of them), some were meh, some were horrid.
Marriage satisfaction is in the eyes of the spouses.
The mother of an ex fell in love for the first time in her life when she was past 60 (she had been in a rather mediocre marriage, had numerous lovers, both during and after the marriage, but never had been in love). So, you never know.
On the other hand, there are two big problems with this approach:
Rarely do relationships that have issues get better over time; they get worse. So mediocre today could be terrible in a few years.
You may run into someone you feel something much better than mediocre for at any time. What will you do then? Leave your mediocre spouse and mediocre kids? Cheat? Deny yourself non-mediocreness? None of them great options.
IMO, you can probably do a few notches better than mediocre, even if perfect is unrealistic.
The critical thing is to determine if you can be happy living alone. If you can’t, then I recommend getting counselling to sort that out. If you can, then don’t get married unless you and another person love each other and really enjoy being with each other beyond any doubt. If you find yourself doing a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether you should propose or not, I would recommend not.
My wife and I love each other very much but for a variety of reasons our marriage is going off the rails and we recently initiated marriage counselling. Will it work? I don’t know but I’m reaching a point at which I no longer care why it’s the way it is and I’m not willing to waste a lot of time (I’m 56). If it collapses I’m fully prepared to go it alone.
So a long answer to a short question. In summary, though age-independent it’s completely dependent on both parties’ abilities to compromise without feeling screwed.
If you’re a woman in the late 20s and going for some children, then a mediocre marriage is better than none. Probably most marriages are mediocre anyway, social media just make it seem like everybody else have amazing lives.
“Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.”
If you go into it thinking its mediocre, then you’re doomed from the start. Don’t even bother.
If you go into it optimistic and eager–even if you know the person you’re with is not the best fit for you–you still might be doomed. But at least with a positive outlook, you’ll be willing to work at it and rationalize away the bad parts. Just as we do with jobs we’re not particularly ecstatic about.
My feeling is that if a marriage is satisfying some need (financial security, companionship, parenting) to a high enough degree then it isn’t a mediocre marriage. It may not be a love-based traditional marriage, but if it’s working for people involved, then it’s a good marriage.
If it’s making you consistently unhappy, no matter the upside it’s a bad marriage, and should be avoided.
But Velocity wasn’t asking about a neither-good-nor-bad marriage, s/he was asking about a mediocre one. Mediocre doesn’t mean “average”, it means “rather poor; perhaps not so far as ‘bad’, even in a non-marriage context, but distinctly sub-par”.
To answer your question, Velocity: unless it’s a citizenship thing, never. And sometimes not even then. Solitude isn’t the endless horror show people make it out to be.
I can see getting married to someone who isn’t the great love of your life if the biological clock is ticking and you don’t want to go it alone. But I wouldn’t expect the marriage to last. The devotion to co-parenting maybe, but not the marriage.
I’m a widow and was married to my husband for 30 years. He truly was my soulmate. I would like to still be married, but I just haven’t been able to bring myself to settle for the men I’ve met who have been Mr. Just Ok.
I’d entertain shacking up with someone before I’d marry them if they were just Mr. Ok (my mother is spinning in her grave! lol). Maybe it’s because I’m an old fogey, but marriage means something to me and I wouldn’t want to have one that was that much of a compromise.
If it’s neither good or bad, what would you be getting out of the partnership?
I mean, I could see putting up with a loveless marriage if I needed the financial support of a partner. Or if I were sick/disabled and unable to cook and clean house. Or if i wanted a kid and I was too scared to do the single parent thing. Or if I wanted the social benefits of having a spouse (like hanging out with other couples or being treated like a “grown up” like backwards-thinking family). But a loveless marriage isn’t the same thing as a “mediocre” one. it just means that it’s more of a business relationship than a romantic one. (I actually understand the former a lot more than the latter.)
If it is a giant pile of “meh”, I don’t see what the point would be.
If I had to bet, the OP is in a relationship with someone he feels only so-so about, and is feeling pressured to make marriage the logical next step. Problem is he’s not really feeling motivated to marry, but he also doesn’t want to give up the safety and familiarity of his relationship.
This is a common scenario. I doubt he will get married to his current gf. The more likely situation is that they break up (probably instigated by her when she finally wakes up and smells the reluctance) and then, within 2 months, he will fall madly in love with his rebound gf, to whom he will propose and marry in less than 1 year.
If you aren’t married yet, but have the opportunity for a mediocre one, don’t do it. Don’t even consider it. A marriage is a legal agreement that explicitly gives at least half of anything you have right now, and anything you earn during the marriage to the female spouse. (family courts are gender biased)
So these marriages drag on long after the relationship would have ended if both partners had been single. The arguing gets meaner and meaner.
It’s not just the asset division (most American households don’t accumulate wealth on a day to day basis, this and the corrupt medical system may be why), it’s that it’s a lot more expensive to dissolve a marriage than to get one in the first place. Divorce fees are a lot more than the fees to pay the court for a marriage.
Anyways, don’t see a reason to do it, ever. If you wanna have kids, just get your girlfriend pregnant and pay the child support if she breaks up with you. (also, don’t have a kid if you can’t afford one)
A marriage is a crude centuries old legal agreement that was invented to serve the needs of societies long dead.
Imo, more people should be “scared” to do the single parent thing. Children take an enormous amount of time and other resources, and while single adults can rear healthy children, I think it is irresponsible to plan to rear children as a single adult. Kids deserve more than one parent. If you want children, you should attempt to rope in another parent, first.