Do We Need to Get Married? 9 Reasons to Take Marriage Off Our Adult To-Do List
Society puts so much pressure on people to get married especially by a certain age, but why is there so much importance placed on marriage?
Here at she. we like to question a lot of society and culture’s teachings and influences, and one of those traditional teachings is the goal to get married.
We’re going to outline some issues we found within this tradition and why we as a society should step away from the expectation that everyone will and should tie the knot.
If you’d prefer to listen to this discussion, we have an entire podcast episode titled, marriage: I do vs I don’t.
1. The Expectation of Traditional Gender Roles
Not everyone believes in traditional gender roles. There are plenty of non-traditional people who see marriage as a union between two equal people who share responsibilities, but oftentimes marriage prompts us to adhere to societal expectations and gender stereotypical roles.
Many people feel pressure to fall into traditional marriage roles that may not actually fit their beliefs. This causes many individuals within marriages to become unhappy in the long run.
For example, take the traditional roles of breadwinner and homemaker. Too often, it is assumed that the role of the homemaker will be occupied by the woman. However, in today’s society, we see women working just as much as their male counterparts.
So why is it still assumed that the woman will take on the role of homemaker in addition to working?
We’ve seen many cases where one spouse makes more of an income than the other and in turn, subconsciously oppresses the other into the role of caretaker of the home.
More often than not though, the woman is usually the default homemaker which stems from harmful outdated gender roles that creep into modern relationships.
If you’re a fan of traditional gender roles within marriage, that’s your own business. However, many women find these assumed roles to be oppressive and exhausting.
This is why it’s important to set your own standards and roles in the marriage before you actually tie the knot.
2. The Romanticization of Weddings Over the Actual Marriage
The wedding industry is a billion-dollar business and there’s a reason why. In society, we tend to place more excitement on a couple’s wedding plans instead of their plans to be together long-term.
Sure, weddings are a celebration of love but when society glamorizes the wedding more than the actual marriage, then that’s a problem. Weddings often create a fantasy ideal that the actual marriage sometimes cannot live up to.
We have to wonder, would people still want to get married even if they couldn’t have a big fancy wedding? Do some people get blind-sided by the wedding and forget about the actual marriage that follows?
It’s interesting though how you often hear more hype about the wedding than the actual marriage itself. We can’t help but think of that episode of Friends, the one after the wedding. Monica and Chandler had just got married and Monica is upset that her wedding day is over saying, “I’m no longer a bride. I’ll never be a bride again. Now I’m just someone’s wife.” Even here we see Hollywood highlighting this idea of weddings being more stimulating than the marriage.
If you’re getting married for the wedding, it’s safe to say you’re getting married for the wrong reasons. Would you take that job if you’re iffy about it? Would you get married if you’re iffy about it?
Moreover, another interesting concept that we’ve seen portrayed in film, TV, and in life is people proposing without ever talking about marriage with their partner first. Shouldn’t this be something you both discuss and decide on together? Isn’t it important to ensure that both of you are on the same page? Are you saying yes because you weren’t able to say no? Are you saying yes because you were swept away by the proposal?
Marriage shouldn’t be this scary topic of conversation but instead, a mature chat where you get to know what each other wants in life. Play with the idea of marriage with your partner, instead of shocking the hell out of them on the kiss cam at a baseball game!
3. Not Every Couple Is Compatible
Why isn’t compatibility discussed when talking about marriage? Do people tend to marry because they are actually compatible with their partner or marry because they “should” get married?
Compatibility is far too “under-discussed” and can sometimes be prioritized by the availability of a partner. What we mean by this is, some relationships develop because both parties are single, wanting a relationship, marriage, and kids but tend to overlook genuine compatibility and instead end up settling because they’re both available.
They say love is blind, sure! But compatibility is obvious from the get-go. Compatibility in a relationship is basically two like-minded people existing together without problems or capable of resolving a problem together.
Compatibility in a relationship is where both people flow well together and learn from each other. A relationship that feels easy, fun, where you both feel heard, seen, and are equal.
We’re talking about genuine physical, personality, and lifestyle compatibility. A relationship where you can build a strong partnership and be on the same team.
In addition, it’s a common mistake for people to confuse real compatibility with the narrative they’ve created about someone and thus, fall in love with the perception of who they think their partner is.
Compatibility comes down to authentic communication and honesty between partners. There will always be areas to improve on, but if you both have the same vision for your lives, that’s a good starting point.
There are an ample amount of couples who fail to communicate their life goals until they are actually married. Shocking, we know.
For example, many couples avoid the conversation of children until they are already married and suddenly realize that they are not compatible at all. If one person strongly desires parenthood and the other doesn’t at all, now what? We unfairly expect one of them to cave?
These are conversations worth discussing sooner rather than later to avoid disappointment.
4. Unrealistic Expectations of Marriage
When a couple gets married, society has taught them that this marriage will fulfill every part of them. The expectation for marriage to be successful is set so high, that the reality falls short for many.
It’s unrealistic to expect a marriage to fulfill every single one of your needs. We like to think of ourselves in our relationship as two complete individuals, dedicated to improving ourselves first outside of our relationship.
After all, we are separate beings and work on our own self-development and self-actualization before anything else. Only then can we come together as a team and support one another.
In many cases, couples can expect a marriage to last forever without being fully committed to living up to that. So why get married if you’re not really certain how you feel about it or the person?
Of course, changing your mind about someone is totally acceptable. People and their values change and that’s ok. However, being committed to a partner through and through is oftentimes overlooked when a couple actually decides to get married.
Perhaps another example of feeling the societal pressure to tick this goal off our adult to-do list without really thinking about the concept and the action of marriage at all.
Even couples who are compatible will go through difficulties in their marriage but most couples who are compatible will say that they face these obstacles together, as a team.
Marriage is supposed to be a big deal, right? It symbolizes the union of two people, on a journey through adulthood together, a bond of companionship, fulfillment, and love.
However, marriage represents itself in society as a mandatory adult course of action. Not everybody suits marriage. Not everybody believes or respects its significance, but we go ahead with it anyway.
Shouldn’t marriage be something you only consider if and when you find someone that you want to share these values with? Even then, marriage is not mandatory but something you want to do in life.
We can guess that if we did live in a world like this, society would make all the married people symbols of a successful relationship, the goal if you will. While all the single people would look at themselves in sorrow as they realize how they failed in the dating department and that they are not as successful as all the married people. Oh, wait!
So it’s up to us to shift the meaning of marriage as mandatory. Maybe then, fewer people would allow themselves to feel the societal pressure to get married while others accept the fact that they are not.
5. Marriage Doesn’t Equal Automatic Happiness and Success
People in society often perceive marriage as a public marker for their successful union. Matrimony is seen as a goal on an achievement list to be ticked off. While we understand that many do consider marriage as a goal in life, it doesn’t have to be THE goal.
Having a healthy, fun, loving relationship in the first place should take precedent over saying “I do.” However, we get wrapped up in this obsession with finding happiness through a relationship so much so that we depend on someone else providing us with that bliss.
Subsequently, your dependency on another person is already evolved way before you even meet your potential partner because you relied on your source of happiness to come from a separate authority, and not your own.
We’re reminded of the character Lucy from the film, How to Be Single who gives all her attention to finding happiness from the man she intends to marry, who she hasn’t met yet. She spends the whole movie haunted over the fact that she is single and gives in to the pressure that she is not a complete adult until she has married. She is even depicted as having a breakdown while reading a children’s story to a bunch of kids at a bookstore because her fairytale seems to be taking a back seat.
Or there’s poor old Gigi from He’s Just Not That into You. This woman obsesses with meeting “the one” so much so that she forgets to live. Throughout the whole film, it becomes apparent that her standards for men are also lowered because, well, a man = a man, and that’s all she’s looking for!
Gigi is so dependent on the person who she hasn’t even met yet, rather than feel good on her own first. Too often, we forget this important step. How about removing “Find boyfriend/husband” on your adult to-do list and replace it with “Be happy.” Luckily, Gigi realized her own worth at the end of the movie which painted a slightly empowering message for women watching.
It’s so much more empowering when a person is successful and happy in their own realm. Work on you first, then focus on building a healthy relationship.
We need to unlearn this societal expectation of ourselves. It’s mentally exhausting to live up to your already planned out life while competing with others in the race to achieve it.
6. Chasing Marriage May Lower Your Self-Esteem
There are a lot of people out there who would say that they’d love to get married. Yes, it’s great to be with someone, to have a loving relationship and a companion if that’s what you want.
However, part of shifting your experience as a woman means shifting the mentality surrounding what’s expected from us. Wanting to get married is not the same as getting married because that’s what adults do. The two are not interchangeable.
Consider shifting your idea of marriage by a certain age as the goal to relieve some pressure off yourself. There is no correct universal route to take in life, everyone’s reality is different and it’s not required of you to do as everyone else your age is doing.
If you are someone who constantly fantasizes about marriage and chases it as the optimal goal, eventually your self-esteem will take a hit. Just watch How to Be Single or He’s Just Not That into You to understand how much “the chase” affects your overall well-being and self-respect.
If marriage hasn’t happened for you yet and that’s all you’re focused on, you’re setting yourself up for constant stress. The main reason why it feels awful to not have what you want is because you are not happy where you are.
You think that by having the thing that you want will change you and bring this overwhelming happiness. The truth is, there’s always going to be something else that you desire, and the same feelings of sorrow will always creep in if you don’t find your own source of happiness by yourself.
Start by looking at the now and accepting it. Shift the mentality that says everyone else has it all figured out and that you are lost. This is unhealthy. This is exactly how society molds our own thoughts about ourselves.
7. Not Everyone Desires Marriage
Not every single person desires marriage. You may be in a relationship that you plan on being in for life, and still have no interest in getting married. However, you may also still feel the societal pressure to do just that.
Society expects everyone to crave unionship, when in reality some folks may not have that itch. You can still have a successful relationship without a legally binding contract, but this is mind-boggling for a lot of people to understand!
We as a society need to stop asking people why they aren’t married yet. Just like when people in society ask married women with no kids why they haven’t had any children yet — it’s none of anyone’s business, it’s not a requirement, and everyone’s life path is different. Period!
Those who know this will already understand that the pressure and expectations society has of us are set in place to govern us. Anyone who goes against societal norms immediately has a place in society as “different.” If you are someone who has never felt the matrimonial itch but agrees that it’s highly probable you will go along with it, why not embrace your own expectation of yourself? Who are you doing it for?
People also change their minds about marriage which is completely normal, but we need to ask ourselves if that’s what we want and not what our partner, family, or society wants. Propose to yourself first, and see what your answer is. Maybe meeting a certain person can change all of that for you, but check in with yourself first.
How interesting is it to think of we as women changing our culture and society by shifting our own experience of marriage first. Shifting the way we view marriage as something that is not a necessity or a milestone in life but instead, as something that you independently decide to do with your partner at whatever age and not because of societal pressure.
Ask yourself what does marriage mean to you. What values does it hold for you as an individual?
We’ve mentioned before on our podcast that before we met, we didn’t want to get married. We didn’t put pressure on ourselves to marry and growing up, we never fantasized about the white dress. That was just us personally. Many young girls do and that’s fine.
However, when we met, we loved the idea of marrying each other. The concept of marriage changed for us. Now, that we’re engaged, we actually still don’t fantasize about our wedding too much. We fantasize more about our life together, and that’s our experience.
8. Societal Expectations and the Exclusion of LGBTQ+ People
Marriage is a heavy expectation for most adults in society. However, it hasn’t always been an option for people in the LGBTQ+ community, and in some countries, it’s still not an option.
On the topic of marriage and its importance for some people, we wanted to address how society weighs a lot of pressure on couples to become a union, but not every couple is included in this.
In society, a couple is taken more seriously when they’re hitched, right? Banks are more favorable towards you when applying for a mortgage rather than an unmarried couple, your parents are delighted to not have a rejected child, and people you meet are content knowing that they don’t have to have an awkward conversation with an unmarried 40-something-year-old woman!
Society is responsible for putting married couples on this winning pedestal. What society doesn’t take accountability for though, is LGBTQ+ people who are excluded from this “prize.”
If you are a part of the LGBTQ+ community, you may have grown up in a location where same-sex marriage wasn’t legal yet or still isn’t.
For reference, same-sex marriage was only legalized in the United States in 2015. Both of our countries, Ireland and Canada, have also rightly legalized same-sex marriages, Ireland in 2015 and Canada in 2005 (those progressive Canadians!)
However, in many other countries around the world, same-sex marriage is not only illegal but homosexuality is still punishable by prison, stoning, and death.
Even if gay marriage is legal where you live, oftentimes the option to marry someone of the same-sex isn’t always accepted. This causes LGBTQ+ people to feel excluded from the idea of marriage.
In this case, the importance of marriage gets called into question. Society’s definition of marriage seems less about love and more about convenience, causing us to constantly question traditional values and the origins of marriage in the first place. Is it really about love?
So, it’s our mission to not only shift our mentality of traditional practices but change the definition of them. We find it’s important as we self-actualize and develop as individuals based on our experiences to also re-define marriage as well. Re-define its values and its significance.
Let’s shift the meaning of marriage as strictly a formal union, a social and legal contract between two individuals that gives legitimacy to sexual relations with the intent to procreate. Many modern, non-traditional couples have created their own meaning of marriage. We even see Carrie and Big in SATC make their own rules when it comes to marriage.
In terms of the LGBTQ+ community’s meaning of marriage and commitment, many queer people have grown up thinking marriage wasn’t even attainable or realistic. Many people never saw marriage as something that would happen in their life because it literally wasn’t legal, it was never an option in the first place. In this case, marriage has a unique meaning.
There are so many LGBTQ+ people who only recently are opening up to the idea of marriage because more and more countries are making same-sex marriages legal.
So marriage, just like commitment, is a different experience for everyone and it’s up to individual couples to create their own definition of that.
9. Societal Pressure on Women to Be Married by a Certain Age
Finally, our last and one of the most important reasons to take marriage off our adult to-do list refers to women and societal expectations of marriage.
Women are taught from a young age that marriage is a critical goal in life. When in reality, not everyone actually desires marriage. But not just that, when we influence young girls that the mission is marriage, something very harmful starts to happen.
Women end up narrowing the acceptance of their own life, where it is now in the present because they are fixated on what they should have by the time they are a certain age: career, healthy savings account, their own house or apartment, a car, marriage, kids. Nobody’s life trajectory is the same. So when did it become ok to teach that it is?
When we teach young girls that the source of their happiness will be meeting a nice man who will fulfill all their needs, we influence women to idealize marriage and discredit their current status in life. Eventually, the majority of women will end up feeling pressured to be married and by a certain age.
When women pass the “ideal age to be a bride” they begin to believe this learned mentality that we’ve all been taught which is that the target is to be a wife and a mother. So when a woman reaches a certain age and is not those two things, society judges her. Society doubts her. Society is confused by her.
Marriage is often viewed as the obvious route to take in life, almost like this mandatory thing that adults just do. Little do we actually decide to do it at a time that feels right to us and when we actually want to do it. Why is it abnormal or uncommon to get married for the first time at 60, if it feels right and with someone who you absolutely love?
More importantly, there is this outdated, unspoken rule in society that a woman’s worth depends on if she is married. If she’s over the age of 40, unmarried, no kids, the chances are she is being asked personal questions regarding her lifestyle, quizzed about her choices, and judged for why she is on her own (she must be angry, hard to live with, bitter, too career-focused).
Or maybe she’s getting the uncomfortable response from her old (happily married) college roommate who she bumps into on the street who tells her not to worry, that the right man is around the corner and she shouldn’t give up hope!
Since when is it bad news to be on your own? Yes, there are people who desire the life of marriage and kids and want someone special in their life, but when they don’t have what they want it can feel as if they’re losing out. But we need to take a step back from this mindset and shift this unhealthy mentality that some of us are slower to the race than others, or that they are missing out on something that represents the benchmark for ultimate happiness.
The truth is, nobody is slow to any race. We’re all living different lives and it’s unjustifiable for society to judge certain people for not living within the idealized societal norms. Nor is it ok to create a checklist for people’s own reality. We are all in control of the reality we desire and create. Society does not have that power over us.
Life is diverse, but we tend to think of it as uniform for everybody. There are people out there who are in loving relationships that don’t want to get married. There are people who are single and don’t want to get married. There are also people out there who are not in relationships but would really love to be married.
We need to stop categorizing that one is better than the other. We need to stop implementing a societal time-bomb on when a woman should be married by.
Final Thoughts
There is this underlying social expectation when it comes to marriage. However, regardless of who you are, your cultural context, your gender, or sexual orientation, our experiences regarding the concept of marriage differ. Our perception of what marriage means is not the same for everyone.
For some, marriage may mean building a partnership or forming a union. For others, marriage may represent a societal benchmark for people who reach a certain age.
Marriage should be this personal experience between you and the person you’re marrying, not an item on an adult to-do list that needs to be checked off. It’s a different experience for everyone. Why bring society into the mix?
For more discussions, check out our podcast, shifting her experience (she.) on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We release new episodes every Tuesday.
For more posts like this, check out our article titled, the problem with labels in sexuality and society.
Tiana & Sophie from
shifting her experience.
