No, it wouldn’t have done the least bit of good, since 1) I’ve never met anyone who wanted to marry me, or, for that matter, anyone I really wanted to marry after the first rush of hormones wore off; and 2) if I had met someone who wanted to marry me, and whom I wanted to marry, I would have done it regardless of whether some third party advised me to or not. (And I say this as the sort of person who is theoretically the ideal target for this sort of advice, viz., a single professional woman in her late thirties who would have liked children if things had happened otherwise.) On what planet does anyone get to make decisions about marriage without actual, specific people involved?
I hope women don’t get married in their 20’s. It gives us older unmarried men with lots of weird issues a better chance to find someone who has lowered their standards 
That’s ridiculous. It seems like most of the world is saying to get married soon as possible, there’s hardly any reason for a woman to exist unless she has a man, and just a few places that say instead it’s okay not to get married immediately. There’s Sex and the City and a few other movies and TV shows and increasing numbers of feminists, compared to everywhere else.
Same here. Unsolicited advice like this means I’ll tend to avoid you.
I agree. If I was going to add up all the times I was told to hurry up and get married sooner rather than later, compared to the times I was told to wait, the hurry up is much more.
No. Because I never met anyone who I might even have considered marrying at that age.
There are quite a few things I wish I had been told or might have figured out myself sooner, but in no way do I regret not marrying in my 20s. I think any advice that might have been useful would have been about psychology, hangs up, confidence, when and how to move one etc. But nothing as “strategic” as at which age I ought to have married.
37 and single.
Oh yes. And I wanted to add, while I did get into this long term relationship at 21, there was no way I was ready for “real life”. If I had wanted to have kids, or buy a house, I would have screwed it up. I was not really mature until my late twenties at least, and I’m glad I at least had the sense to know that.
Plus I lucked out in that my partner is willing to grow and change with me, and that he hasn’t checked out of the relationship, and that he has also matured. Not everyone you hook up with at 2 has that!
During my twenties I was constantly warned that it was important to marry before I was 30. There was a lot of media folderol during that period about the odds of women over 30 ever marrying.
I also turned down a perfectly ridiculous number of proposals (mostly from men who liked my appearance) during that period. Looking back I can’t say I would have had a happier life had I been with any of them.
There is one man I dated in high school who has turned out to be a truly good and honorable man. He loves his wife and children, and I would probably have been happier if I had built my life with him. But at 16 we had no way of knowing that, or responsibly making that decision. And who’s to say whether honesty and love would have trumped our differences in intellect and interests over the long run? It would have been a crap shoot for both of us.
I think it’s maybe a good perspective to consider if a young woman feels that being married is the be-all end-all of her life. If her primary objective is a wealthy or high-earning husband who is high on the social scale (sorry to say I’ve known such!) then yes, she should probably address that early and act when she gets the opportunity.
But . . . ick.
I didn’t get specific advice about marriage, but it was always assumed that I’d marry, have kids, and be June Cleaver. That’s what you do when you’re born in the 50s, right? Except when you’re so shy that you don’t date in high school or in college…
As it happened, I married about a month before I turned 30 and it has been good. But despite what I know some relatives thought, I didn’t rush out to get married on a deadline. And I’d never advise anyone to marry based on any deadline. If you’re not ready to spend the rest of your life with that person, you’re better off single.
Or perhaps just rocks in their heads.
Does “you have three months to get pregnant” count?
It’s what my grandmother told me when I turned 27, that being the age at which my mother had me, the age at which grandma had my mother, and the age at which great-grandma had grandma.
My answer was “I’m not doing that without having someone who looks like he’ll be a decent father”. Substitute “husband” instead of “father” if the advice had been about getting married.
I’m 46, still not married, still not in any hurry to get married. One of my father’s uncles got married for the first time aged 55, to an also-newbie of 56; they evidently didn’t have children but they did have a 40-year long marriage, which is more than most last.
Oh, hell no- I was attracted to the dumbest guys when I was in my early twenties. Back then I favored skinny hipster boys with star tattoos who were in indie rock bands. I thought that men who always acted as if the world slightly bored them were profound and thoughtful. My tastes have changed a lot since then…
I wonder how much of this is a generational thing. My parents firmly believed that people should settle down by age 28 or 29. My brother didn’t marry until he was 42, which flabbergasted them. They really believed that it’s not a matter of waiting for “The One,” it’s a matter of settling down with someone who checks most of your boxes and making it work.
To me that seems like a recipe for disaster, but they were happily married for 45 years so what do I know. I was just too stupid in my 20s to even know what to look for in a lifelong partner.
Culturally, at least in the US, I think women ARE told they have to get married in their 20s. It’s not explicit, but the attitude is sure there. Once you’re 30 you’re “too old” and men will still be dating women in their 20s, leaving you out in the cold. cf. the “romantic interest” in nearly every Hollywood movie is a woman in her 20s. Older women are generally either already married, or bitter old hags (sometimes both).
For me personally, no, I met no one worth a lifetime commitment who was also interested in me when I was in my 20s. I mostly knew decent folks who had no romantic interest in me; and met a few who pursued me but eventually showed me they were selfish assholes. To this day I have no idea why they thought pursuing me was a good idea, since I was always very upfront about what I was looking for, yet inevitably seemed surprised when it turned out they couldn’t convince me otherwise.
…welll, yes. For most of history that has been exactly the case. The main role of women in society was to have babies, preferably a lot, and that was best done by marrying off the women early. A woman without a man was pathetic, either in desperate poverty or a whore or both (with a few, very few, exceptions).
It’s only recently (in history) and in some parts of the world that other options have become realistic for most women.
And thank og for that. My SIL and I like to say that if we’d been born in an earlier time we’d have been staked out on the hillside and left to be eaten by vultures. Probably so.
I think it is more of a sedentary agriculture thing (which admittedly is most of human history that we care about.) In more mobile societies, for example, you definitely don’t want to have a kid until your last kid is pretty good at walking, keeping the number of kids low. But farms need farmhands, and kids are cheap labor. But in societies where land is passed down through male children, that makes girls pretty expendable, and it’s cheaper to marry a girl off than to feed her.
I did get married in my 20s (albeit my late 20s), and I don’t have regrets about the way my life is turning out… also I hate being given advice. So no, I don’t wish that somebody had told me to marry in my 20s.
When I was about 24 my mom did ask me if I wasn’t interested in men. There was no eyeroll big enough.
Good lord, no. I was an idiot in my 20s. I wish someone had told me that I shouldn’t marry the guy I married when I was 26. I mean, louder, more emphatically and with more clarity than they did. Perhaps duct tape and ether should have been involved.
But I have no problem with people marrying in their 20s, or earlier, or later, if they find the right partner. I didn’t.
No one told me to get married in my twenties. I did anyway. It failed. Age was not a factor.
Get married because you’ve found the right person, not because you’ve had a particular number of birthdays.
I was in my mid-20s when it occurred to me that my desire for lifelong singlehood and unattachment was unusual. The idea that I could be asexual had been with me since high school, but it wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I started to accept it as a real thing, rather than me just being a silly confused girl.
My parents never asked me about my love life. My older sister did for a short while, until she realized I was never going to have any juice stories to tell. So all the people in the position to advise me (or express worry or concern) kept their mouths shut.
I am so grateful that my family let me “do” me. Self-acceptance would have never come if my parents (or anyone else) had tried to interject more “shoulds” into my mindset than what I was already putting in.
Sometimes I do wonder what would have happened if I had born 100 years ago and there were a lot fewer choices available. I most likely would have married because my folks likely would have sat my ass down and given me a serious talk about the economic/social realities of a young, unmarried woman. And because I would have wanted to please them and not be “shameful”, I probably would have allowed myself to be married off to the first young man who asked. I don’t know what kind of wife I would have made. I’m guessing horrible, but who knows? I’ve been able to do all kinds of stuff that I never thought I’d be able to do. Like, this weekend I made the best spaghetti casserole ever!
But that’s not really the point. I may have been happy as someone’s 25-year-old wife, but I know I’m happy now. And I don’t have any intention to change the way things are right now just so that I can meet someone else’s expectations.
No, except in the sense that receiving such advice would have let me know that this person who I trusted and respected really did not understand me or what I wanted out of life and that I should thus be careful about whatever other advice they gave me.
monstro mentioned women’s lack of opportunities in the past, and as it happens I am currently reading a book about the work of Jane Austen (What Matters in Jane Austen? by John Mullan) that has a chapter about the ages of her characters and what this does and doesn’t tell us about life in Austen’s time. All of Austen’s heroines marry between the ages of 17 and 27, and according to Mullan the average age at which English women married during the late 18th/early 19th century was 23 or 24. A few female supporting characters in Austen’s work marry after their 20s, such as Miss Taylor in Emma. Her age is unspecified, but she’s been a governess for 16 years and so must be in at least her early 30s. In Persuasion the plain-looking 27 year old heroine is considered basically an old maid by her family, but they’re a bunch of jerks anyway and she does marry by the end of the book. Her more attractive 29 year old sister is still seen as having a decent chance of finding Mr. Right within the next couple of years. In real life, two of Austen’s brothers got married in their 20s to women in their 30s. Austen herself never married, but received her only known marriage proposal at 27.
So about 200 years ago, when women had limited educational/professional opportunities, the risk of death in childbirth was much higher than it is today, and about 25% of children died before they reached the age of ten, most women married in their 20s…but it wasn’t considered particularly unusual for a woman to marry in her 30s. The average age at first marriage for American women is now 27, only 3-4 years older than in Austen’s time. That doesn’t seem like a big difference to me, especially considering how much the world has changed.