I got with my girlfriend when I was 17, and she moved in with me just a few months after we met. We have been with each other for four years and she has been asking for me to pop the question. I have never cheated, nor do I see myself with anyone else. But for some reason, I am against getting married.
She is a few years older than me. She wants to get married before she hits 25. I am 21 and she wants me to be a married man! It’s not like I don’t see a future with her, because I do. I just fear marriage at my age. Am I right to feel this way?
Eleanor says: As you think about getting married you’ll encounter a lot of rules: people will line up to tell you the “right” answer about when to do it, who to do it with, how to do it.
All these rules are ultimately breakable. You can get married at 18 if that’s right for you, or at 90. You can get married to your best friend, or to someone you just met. You can get married in a cathedral with a thousand people or in a council office with the minimum number of witnesses. There’s only one rule about marriage you should never break: don’t get married unless you really want to.
That’s it.
You’re clear that you don’t want to be married right now. You asked whether you were right to feel that way – don’t get suckered into thinking like this, or into having fights about whose feelings are correct. If you want permission you can have mine, but desires like “I don’t want to be married” just don’t fit very well into our frameworks of correctness. The only room for incorrectness is in how we act once we have them.
The costs of error are very high on getting married. It is expensive, heartbreaking and legally complicated to get unmarried. It is expensive in a different way to stay married when you don’t want to. This is not a decision to say “yes” to with anything less than certainty.
Some people will tell you otherwise. They will say things like, “It’s never a good time.” You’ll say you thought you were meant to feel more love and certainty than you do and they’ll tell you that’s a Disney dream for kids – they’ll say that in adulthood no one loves their person so much that all alternatives seem pale, and we just have to make big decisions on the assurance that someday we’ll develop the feelings you thought you were supposed to have before you decided. These people are wrong. They are talking to themselves more than they are talking to you, trying to make it true that there’s no such thing as certainty, so that it’s less frightening that they don’t have it. You don’t want to get married – that’s the end of the conversation about whether you should.
You need to be straight with your girlfriend about this. If being married by 25 is important to her, don’t waste her time. Tell her kindly that that isn’t going to happen with you, then let her decide. And I do mean decide – you should both put significant effort into making it intelligible to her that she does not have to be with you. She can choose to be, but it should be a choice. It is too easy to make big life decisions because they’re the path of least resistance. Put some resistance on both of your paths; force yourselves to be active in the future you really want.
If you want her but you don’t want to be married, and she wants to be married more than she wants you, it’s time for both of you to put aside the future you can imagine with each other. I promise you it’s not the last future that either of you will be able to see.
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