It might have more to do with your young age then anything else. I wouldn’t encouraged anyone who was 18 or 19 to get married. Let’s face it when you’re that age you’re more prone ot making stupid decisions. On the other hand my mother had already married and had me by the time she was 19 and my parents stayed together till death.
Marc
FTR, I fit into the former category, to say nothing of the latter. And yes, I’m a guy.
The pressure to get married is a mere trifle compared to the bathyspheric Abyss of pressure to have children.
According to a news article at http://www.msnbc.com/news/573365.asp, the 2000 U.S. census results show that, since the time of the 1990 census, there’s been a higher percentage increase in unmarried, co-habitating couples than in married couples.
So maybe the pressure to marry is easing a little.
I’m sure no one wants to hear this but… The theory is that Women have a stake in marriage (because they have to invest in the child’s growth, unlike the Man), while men don’t really have as strong a stake in marriage because it doesn’t cost them much to screw around. So it would seem that Women might want marriage more than men.
However, Biology certainly isn’t everything, Women don’t have to worry about marriage, but they may be predisposed to worry about it. Also, men do have a genetic stake in marriage, they just don’t have as stong of a committment
Actually, evolutionary behavior theory does predict a predilection toward monogamy (or at least serial monogamy) in human males. See, it takes so much time and energy to raise a child to the age where (s)he can take care of him/herself that the mother doesn’t have much of a chance of doing it on her own. She can’t look after her kids back at the cave and go on a hunting expedition at the same time. And if she starves to death or gets eaten by leopards before her children are old enough to take care of themselves, her children are going to die, too.
And half of those childrens’ genes come from their father.
So a man can increase the chances that his offspring will survive (at least long enough to grow up) by sharing his resources with his children. And sharing his resources with the children’s mother, who takes care of them when he’s out hunting bison. And the most straightforward way to facilitate the sharing of resources with one female, to the exclusion of others who would otherwise dilute his resource pool, is good old-fashioned pair bonding. Also known as monogamy.
tracer,
I have some single women here that are hungry for some “Bison”.
Interested?
Is that what you kids are calling it these days!
– tracer, who wouldn’t mind some wooly mammoth right now, if you catch his drift
ok, now I’ve gotta get some windex.
that was just a spit-take on my monitor.
the whole image of a “wooly mammoth”!!!
oh man, I remember her…
wait, this is great debates…
yeah… uh, marriage sucks.