For many people now, getting married is something that comes long after things like going to college, starting a career, and buying a home.
If you’ve ever read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, she talked about women going to college to meet a husband, but not necessarily for the sake of making out their own careers with their degrees.
In terms of finding a mate, maybe that works for a lot of people. You’ll go where you know you’ll find the kind of person you’re looking for, and it might just work out and you’ll be financially stable with that person, but the success should also be your own.
After all, you never know when you’ll need to stand on your own and take care of yourself.
So now that men and women have really changed their approach to marriage, is it still a necessary institution? After all, we’re all fully capable of supporting ourselves and buying our own homes and cars, etc, so should we put off marriage until after we’ve attained all these things for ourselves?
In the CNN.com article Is Marriage Becoming Obsolete by Stephanie Coontz, she shares:
According to a TIME/Pew research poll released last week, 40 percent of Americans believe that marriage is becoming obsolete, up from just 28 percent in 1978.
In that same poll, only one in four unmarried Americans say they do not want to get married. And among currently married men and women, 80 percent say their marriage is as close as or closer than their parents’ marriage.
Attitudes on marriage seem to have changed. We have the capacity now, more than we did before, to marry completely by choice and not by obligation or necessity.
Some would say that when you’re career-oriented, you’re too busy to think about marriage but that’s not necessarily true. Building on your future independently of a significant other doesn’t mean that you’ve shut out the idea of marriage. When you really want that in your life, you can totally have it. Some people just choose to not marry and it’s not a consequence of having a career.
The article goes on to say:
But as an institution that regulates people’s lives, marriage is no longer the social and economic necessity it once was. People can construct successful lives outside of marriage in ways that would have been very difficult to manage 50 years ago, and they have a far greater range of choices about whether to marry, when to marry, and how to organize their marriage.
This is a very positive outlook for marriage! It’s great to know that people feel getting married will augment their lives rather than taking anything from it. We can choose our spouses based on criteria that have to do with love more than necessity. If you’re looking to be matched, you can keep all of these things in mind when you’re listing the things you’d love in your significant other. It’s totally okay to ask that they be financially independent, especially if you’d like to make that one less thing to worry about when moving onto the commitment that comes with marriage.