You have to also take into account that, with the exception of countries where there is little separation between religion and state and where people are particularly devout, divorce rates are often higher than 50%.
It's a gamble and the odds are stacked against you.
Falling in love is a potent drug and the first few years may indeed be blissful, but sooner than later that passion will fade. Then marriage becomes work. You have to work on being patient while compromising every day. Living with and sharing a bed with the same person for years leads to taking each other for granted. You may even find yourself irritated with every little thing your partner does. Falling in love is like a crazy funfair ride and it moves at the speed of light. Falling out of love is a longer process and you may waste many precious years holding on because of platonic attachment, fear of being alone and putting off the horror show that is divorce.
I got married at 22. I was divorced by 27. I am much older now and have never even considered it again. Not because I got burnt, but because it left me with some insight and I've looked at every marriage of everyone I know from every possible angle.
Here are my observations:
-People who married in their late 30's and beyond are doing the best. You know yourself and where you will and will not compromise. I'd say that 38 is the cut-off point for having a child if you're a woman.
-Once baby makes three, a woman's focus and priorities are obviously going to shift to the child. This is often where they lose romantic interest in their husbands and the marriage becomes a child-focused partnership where there had better be a foundation of great mutual respect and maturity in order to keep things together.
-Once the passion had faded, it is natural that at some stage you will start finding other people attractive. They say that a man has a roving eye, but we are not that different and women have the same desires. They just hide it better. Cheating is BS, so you may find yourself is a sexless prison.
-Prepare for a lifetime of fights about nothing really, simply out of the frustration of being chained to someone once the flame is out. I hypothesize that many fights are picked in order to elicit at least some emotion and passion, albeit negative. Anything is better than not talking to each other.
-40 is the new 30. Really. My 30s were the best years of my life. Youthful enough to give life horns, but with maturity that hadn't yet turned into slowing down and mellowing out too much.
-If you can't bear the thought of growing old alone, you can always marry at 50. People actually still have great sex and have lots of fun well into their 60s, as gross as that may sound. I always thought that I'd never find older women attractive, but it's been years now since I switched from perving on the daughters to drooling over the moms.
Enjoy your 20s and 30s, please! To hell with people who want you to limit your options by 90% by means of marriage and kids. They mostly can't stand the fact that you are free while they are not.
Do whatever the hell you want. You have one life and there are no specific ages to be doing or having achieved anything.
Interesting perspective and thank you for sharing it here. I guess your points are referring to marriage alone? Are long-term relationships not the same? By that I mean don't they experience the same up and downs that marriages do? Interested to hear your take on that!
I am of course speaking completely subjectively and offer nothing but my personal observations and thoughts. Not every marriage is like this, but most are.
Quick answer: There is a huge difference between long term relationships and being married. Of course long term relationships can exhibit the same symptoms as a shaky marriage, but it's easy enough to move on from once you've had enough.
I'm going to edit out the part where I lump long term relationships in with marriage. I was thinking of couples who were together for six or eight years and already fought all the time with clearly visible cracks in the relationship. And then they marry because 8 years is a long time and they're falling apart. An official marriage makes it very hard to break up. Something I've often heard was "we've been together for too long to ever be apart". Emotional codependency. Strong platonic attachment. No one wants to be known as a divorcee, a frightful badge of dishonor and it really comes with a stigma.
People change once it becomes official. Without fail. Everybody I know, myself included. I suppose I should've made that a point but I've never tried to figure out why.
Maybe it's the official legal contract? You are now bound together by your government. You are bound to each other by the banks and corporations. This is another level of trust forced upon you. You already have to trust your partner to not cheat on you or lie to you. You have to blindly trust on an emotional level when in a partnership. Now you also have to trust that person to not wreck your life financially.
Maybe it's the expectations born from cultural reinforcement. You have to be a good husband or a good wife. TV sure as hell taught us well. Then there are friends and family with the brainwashed mindset, often miserable in their own relationships, who want to put pressure on you to conform to their standards.
Without knowing, people start to "act like married people". Most pack on pounds during the first year or so. You see them less. Where you could phone them at any time before, you quickly learn when not to bother them. They start hanging out with other couples more than their with their old friends. Just some things I have seen happen to almost every marriage that I was close to.
I know people who have been in very long term relationships, some 20 years plus. They are doing the best. They still have fun together and are way more affectionate to each other than married couples.
So my problem is with marriage. It's a bad thing, still based in medieval religion and traditions.
Some people make it work beautifully until they are are bags of wrinkles, but the world has changed or more accurately, is changing every day.
Millennials should start to let it go. It's just an industry binding its customers like cigarette companies do with their producs.
It's outdated. It was designed with the man in absolute control over the household with women being submissive. It only "works" under those conditions. Which of course is ridiculous in 2018.
Again, some interesting points. I do agree with some parts of this, but I also think it's really hard to generalise since every marriage is different so I guess it's tough to identify what 'works' in marriage. I do this marriage is outdated, but also I really do understand why some people want to marry.
Our views come down to the lives we've lived. Perspective, a strange and wonderful thing.
Yep, we're all products of our environment. This is just where it took me.