So, I watched Suprise Wedding 2 last night on FOX.
Women lied to their boyfriends to bring them to Las Vegas, spent a week getting fitted for a wedding dress, and then appeared on the show telling their relationship story and why they were there.
They seemed to perpetuate a myth about women being marriage hungry and being willing to decieve and trick the man to get to the altar.
More disgusting was that KTLA did a segment on their news after the show with the single woman who’s man wouldn’t marry her. Under her name, they put the words: NOT MARRIED.
So, do straight women want to marry and straight men want to stay single? Do women have to connive and play by The Rules to get their dream man and wedding? Or, is this pepetuating a myth?
Along the lines of my OP, I truly wonder how straight women and men feel about marriage and the societal pressure to marry. Is it a sterotype that straight men and women are under constant pressure to marry and are treated as being lesser than for being unattached? Does the stigma truly grow with age?
The pressure to get married was very real for us. Actually, there were two very distinct pressures:
[1] To get married.
Part of this came from ourselves, since it was what we wanted. Some of it came specifically from my wife because she is moving on towards that imaginary age where you just have to have children already. Then our parents had the general low pressure desire for us to be married and not just living together. We’ve been on our own for a while, so this pressure wasn’t all that great.
[2] To have a wedding
This part sucked. There was pressure from all over the place for us to have a wedding. Her parents were pushing, my parents were pushing, our extended families felt they had some right to stick their noses in and push. Our friends kept pushing, our business associates kept pushing…and on and on and on.
I guess this is kind of a catch-22 proposal. Either nobody asks and you feel uncared for, or everybody asks all the time (When’s the date?) and you feel pressured.
We really wanted to be married, but we started to dread getting married.
We solved this by eloping to Bermuda. We sent 8 perfect days over there, and then just told everyone when we got back.
I’m not 100% sure but wasn’t the last marriage special on Fox men asking women to marry them?
I admit I might mislead my intended spouse to get her into a good position to ask her to marry me. I wouldn’t put her into a position where she’d be on national television and would have to marry me that same weekend. It seems unfair to put someone on the spot like that.
**
It was on Fox right? Please tell me you don’t expect class on Fox.
Well your first sentence there is a myth. It seems to me that most straight men I run into get married at some point. And the older I get the fewer single friends I can list.
Well, I proposed by accident. My SO and I had finished main course (I’d had pigeon ravioli followed by grilled kangaroo with beetroot and roasted garlic) and I was pondering my tremendous luck and the appropriateness of formalities, and she – thinking that perhaps I wanted dessert – asked me what was on my mind. “Oh, I was wondering whether we should be married” I said, and a couple of years later we had a celebration of our love with our friends and families. No pressure (my Mum said “We never thought you’d bother”), just a lovely day. YMMV.
Please. Women totally want to get married more then men. My friends and I get constant pressure from our girlfriends. “When am I getting a ring?”, “Where is this relationship going?”, “Yack, yack, yack”. It’s like they HAVE to get married unless they aren’t a whole person.
My girlfriend’s friends all went to college to get MRS degrees (going to college just to find a man and become a Mrs.). While me girlfriend and I stil have a good relationship, all her friends now have these dysfuntional mariages (they don’t speak to each other, husband cheats, wife is overbearing). And yet they all think there is something wrong with our relationship just because she doesn’t have some silly trinket on her finger.
I’m still on the young side (twenty), but none of my friends, male or female, have ever even considered getting married anytime soon. They certainly arn’t in college on a manhunt.
Of course this all may change when I start getting a bit older. But, I still think the old “women want nothing more than marriage” myth is just that, a myth. The women that I know are planning their careers and working towards their dreams, and perhaps hopeing to find love somewhere along the way. Shacking up is almost a financial neccessity here, and it definately isn’t viewed as either a path to or a substitute for marriage.
Well, within my general community (difficult to define, but Modern Orthodox Jewish, leaning right), there’s a lot of pressure on both sexes to get married. The girls feel it a couple of years earlier than the guys, but it is so expected that everyone will marry that people don’t even consider staying single as an option. I don’t think that girls are more desperate than guys in this reguard, just that they start obsessing earlier.
Interesting responses. In my experience, it has been exactly the opposite of the myth; my friends and I were all, to a woman, terrified of marraige. Most of the guys I knew, including mr. genie, didn’t take long to make up their minds at all and were dying to get married. Mr. genie took exactly 3 weeks of dating to decide I was the one for him–lucky for him, he didn’t say so, because I would have run screaming. It took me quite a while to decide to get married, and even then I had hysterics when he proposed (the proposal was a surprise to both of us).
I had one roomie who was surprised when she met a guy she liked and started dating him, since she hadn’t planned on any such thing. After a while, it started to look serious, and she came home one night and wandered around the apartment in a daze for a few hours, saying, “What do I do? This wasn’t supposed to happen. Help!”
And then, while some of us did have pressure for a Wedding, many of us did not. My above-mentioned roomie planned hers in 6 weeks; it was simple and lovely. Our wedding ran us less than $1000. My mom sewed my dress, we had cake and almonds and punch in the local church building, and the men wore suits (nothing would be more ridiculous than our dads in tuxes, anyway). We got a lot of compliments of the relaxed, enjoyable atmosphere of the reception. This was not atypical of the 14 weddings I attended that year in my (large) circle of acquaintances.
As a kid, both my mother and my mother’s mother urged my sister and me to avoid marriage if possible. Not that my folks had a bad marriage (they will celebrate 45 years together this year); I just think my mom and grandmother wanted us to explore options that they didn’t have when they were young. Perhaps they felt like the men of their respective generations had too much control, which was generally the case 50 to 100 years ago. Both my mom and grandmother were educated, independent women who loved their husbands fiercely yet chafed at the societal constraints of the time. Ultimately they had to choose between professional careers or the men they loved.
(For many women of past generations, marriage usually meant the end of your independence, which —with a bit of historical perspective— was not necesarily a bad thing. Indeed, many businesses years ago had policies against hiring married women because they felt as if the womens’ husbands should be supporting them, thereby relieving them of the need to work.)
Therefore, I was never, ever pressured to marry. I was taught to please myself without being selfish, to accomplish things that were important to me, to experience as much of life and culture as I could, to become a complete person first, and then —and only then— would I be a suitable mate for the man whose life I wanted to share. Their theory was, I am nobody’s better half; I am a whole. And it takes two whole people to make a marriage work. As my own first (and hopefully only) marriage looms, I think I’ve managed to follow my mother’s and grandmother’s advice. I think I’m ready. Time will tell.
From my own experience, and from observing the experiences of my friends (all of us mid to late '20s), “women want to get married more than men” is definitely not a myth but a hardcore reality. Sometimes it gets nasty and what should be a joyous occasion becomes a source of discord. There seems to be a strong pressure for women to snare good men as soon as possible when encountered. In some cases, there is pressure to snare man period.
I am not sure why it is so, but then again why is it that when a man sees a hot woman he automatically and unconditionally wants to get down her pants? This also is not a sex-specific myth, it’s sex-specific reality.
Abe
WOMAN, n. An animal usually living in the vicinity of Man, and having a rudimentary susceptibility to domestication … The species is the most widely distributed of all beasts of prey, infesting all habitable parts of the globe, from Greenland’s spicy mountains to India’s moral strand. The popular name (wolf-man) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movements, especially the American variety (Felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be taught not to talk.
–Balthasar Pober, as quoted in The Devil’s Dictionary.
There is pressure, but it often seems to come from within. So far, the people I’ve known who seemed to be most eager to marry were women, and they were driving themselves crazy about it. Very few of them were getting any outside pressure. At least not in any deliberate sense-- I do know that a couple of them interpreted the marriages and pregnancies of in-laws, relatives and friends as signs that they themselves were lacking. The ones who were getting outside pressure were usually living together and facing disapproval from older relatives.
Most of my friends are women so I can’t really speak to the male equivalent; I haven’t yet met a guy who feared turning 30 without being married, though I’m sure they exist.
Hastur mentioned the stereotype of unattached folks being treated as lesser than the married ones. I do think, in the cases I’ve experienced, that that’s a factor in the self-pressuring. Some of the rarin’ to get married women I’ve known seemed to think that their relationships weren’t getting the respect they deserved because they weren’t “official.” These are the ones I was thinking of above, who actively resented other people for getting married first.
Myself, I feel no particular pressure to get married (and I’ll be 30 this summer, fwiw), though I’d like it to happend someday. I think a big reason for this is the children issue-- the one thing all my friends have in common is that they really, really want traditional families of their own and have, for a variety of reasons, put themselves on time tables to achieve it (even the ones who are years away from high-risk child bearing age). I’m not dying to reproduce just yet; as a result, I’m not fighting the infamous biological clock, or convincing myself that I “should” have kids before I’m <<insert age here>>. If I get married, I would like it to be because I and the guy in question are ready for it and really want it, not because we felt like we had to.
I’m getting married in 34 days, and I never felt pressured. As a matter of fact, many people I know are trying strongly to discourage me, claiming that it’ll ruin my life. From some of the negative feedback I’ve been getting, marriage seems to be the most horrible, inhumane institution ever created.
We sent 8 perfect days over there, and then just told everyone when we got back.