The onslaught of megaselling relationship books like Elizabeth Gilbert's "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage," which sits at No. 9 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for the week of Feb 19, and Lori Gottlieb's "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough," which is at No. 18, might lead you to believe that female commitment-phobes and uberpicky daters are the modern obstacles to relationships and marriage.

Yet a 2007 poll by Meredith, a research and marketing company, found that 73% of women born between 1977 and 1989 place a high priority on marriage. That sounds right to me. It's an attitude that surfaced again and again in the interviews I conducted with young women for a book project on the long-term unmarried relationship. Unlike our boomer and hippie mothers who broke the rules of the '50s, my generation is marriage-minded. But society's messages to young women are so mixed that the path to that goal has been obscured and, at times, blocked. Those of us in our 20s and 30s know that dating—and getting into a relationship that leads to marriage—is at turns ambiguous, arduous, perplexing and often heartbreaking. ...

The more pressing dating issue for young women today is not that they are skeptical about marriage or too choosy, but that their potential spouses are in less of a hurry to tie the knot than they are. A 2005 poll, "Coming of Age in America," which surveyed 18- to 24-year-olds, found that women had the edge on eagerness: 55% said they would like to be married in the next five years, compared with only 42% of men.

Labels: committed relationships, culture, dating, gender differences, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, women

VOTE

<< Home