The Pivotal Age To Get Married
When should people expect to be married? We asked YourTango readers.
Joaquín Corbalán | Canva / yasinemir | Getty Images Signature When's the best time to get married? Are twenties too young? Are forties too old?
Nothing makes you feel more unmarried than when people insinuate that you're too old to be alone.
Being single's normal, even advisable, when you're in your early twenties; find a job, play the field, travel the world, but once you hit a certain age, it's time to magically stop being selfish so that you can commit your life to another person.
But what can another person give you that you can't give yourself? There is such a societal norm to have your life look a certain way and milestones you have to reach by an exact age that when people don't hit those milestones, they start to feel like a failure and tend to look for the next best thing.
The question is, just when is this pivotal age? Plenty of women who intend on raising a sizeable family name age 24 to 27 as their ideal.
Other people point out that it depends on whether you're a man or a woman; the former should wait until they're after 30, while the latter need to hurry up before their biological clock stops ticking.
According to our Facebook fans, who answered this question for us, the best age to get married is either 30-ish or never.
Never?
Don't let this get you down if you find yourself reaching that age with no prospect in sight, people can get married at any age, and love stories don't have a time limit on them.
The best thing to do while waiting for the right one is to work on yourself and build a life with a great foundation so that when someone comes around you'll already have all the tools you need to have a healthy relationship, and if it doesn't work out you'll have the security of knowing that you have some great stuff to fall back onto.
Meanwhile, we know quite a few women who got engaged during their senior year of college (M.R.S. Degree holders, reveal yourselves!). With a college degree and a husband, you can get the best of both worlds. But, what about the people who don't get married by a certain age, or at all? Did they feel the pressure from society and the people around them to get married?
What do you think? When is the best age to get married? Should there be a limit to when people should get married? Would you judge someone if they were a certain age and unmarried?
Denise Ngo is a freelance web writer and editor specializing in love, dating, and relationships. She is the Managing Editor of Loverish and a writer for PopSci.