Personal observation: the best time to meet someone to marry is in your early to mid-20s. I even saw a TED talk where a woman will marry or meet the man she will marry before she is 30 in the vast majority of cases.
Yet I ran into amazing bias when I married right after college to a man I met in college. I was told by women in their 30s and 40s that I had to define myself, explore relationships (including sexually), establish my career - THEN I could get married. They outright told me I was too young to marry at 23.
The problem with their view is that it prevents women from committing to men and life paths at the ideal time to do so, and the marriage pool winnows immensely as good guy marry the girls with more traditional views OR get burned by “I want to commit and she won’t”, so he gets trained NOT to commit by the time feminism says she can consider settling down past 30.
Feminism tells women to spend their 20s being freewheeling free love creatures as men would like to be, pushing away men who would start a family and breaking their hearts as well as ruining their own instincts to fall in love with those with whom they have sex. By the time each side is 30, he’s skeptical because of the repeated breakups while she’s built up a habit of distance and backup plans.
The end result is fewer marriages, less commitment when people do marry and more men who see no point in marrying because he can get sex without commitment.
Were these women who, themselves, had taken that advice, held off marriage until their 30's, and then managed to find a good man to marry?
Or were they bitter, single feminists who wanted to create another bitter, single feminist to recruit to their ranks?
Bravo!
It’s as though they’ve no idea that they have only one lifetime...no second chances - their biological clock does not wait for bad decision making.
Everything you say is true for men also. I told my son, if you don’t think about marriage soon all the ‘good ones’ will be snapped up. Fortunately he listened, he married and she’s great.
There’s an epidemic in current generations of me-me-me, it is a selfish lifestyle that just leaves an empty hole - no legacy, nothing to show. IMO - this is from encouraging girls to behave like little princesses when they’re young, then being told that a career is all that is important - after all, the ‘new age’ ideas must be more ‘evolved’ than those ‘horrible’ social norms of the past.
If a guy hasn’t been able to find “the one” by the time they’re 30 they just give up, lose all respect for women and think of them as sex toys. After all, that’s how they’re behaving. The longer we go the less respect there is. I truly believe we’re biologically programmed to fall in love when we’re young, it creates a stronger bond. We should embrace it, yet we discourage it.
My wife and I got married in our mid-20s (to each other, yes) and have been married for over 20 years now.
My wife has been told, by two different women in my old college/post-college social circle, that they hate her because THEY intended to land me. But in our early 30s after they “had a little fun first”. Instead my wife unfairly landed me about five years early. By the time they got their itches scratched, the market for nice guys (I’m not perfect by any strech of the imagination, but I do try to be a decent and attentive husband, father and human being) had pretty much dried up.
Not that I would have allowed myself to be landed by them under such circumstances.
I used to teach the introductory course in Management at a university. One class session was devoted to managing your own career (if you don't manage it, someone else will and you may not like it). I used to tell the young ladies, imitate Margaret Thatcher and Indira Ghandi: have your children first, then become Prime Minister.