Despite the fact that 50% of your Facebook friends seemed to be either engaged or already married with a ton of kids, there really isn’t a right age to get married. Maybe you’re just not ready yet, or maybe marriage just isn’t a priority for you and something you don’t ever want to do. Whatever your reasons for not walking down the aisle just yet, you’ve got to stop worrying that you’re behind the curve. We’re all different, and life has a funny way of working things out. If you’re still not convinced, consider the following:
- Every generation has its own ideas about when you’re “marriage-ready”. If there’s anything that statistics can tell us about marriage, it’s that the average age for marriage fluctuates over time. What’s trending now will change later.
- It takes the right person. Maybe your master plan was to get engaged by 26, but doing so would have required settling for the wrong dude. A little patience generally pays out better in the long term.
- You might have met the right person in middle school. If you met the man of your dreams when you were 12, then who is anyone to say that getting married at 18 was a rushed choice? You were already six years deep into the relationship, which is more time than a lot of adults spend in the courtship phase.
- You can find the right person and still get divorced. Obviously most people are pretty big on the idea that marrying once for love is the ideal, but the fact remains that a lot of marriages end in divorce. That doesn’t mean, however, that a failed marriage is a loss, because it was probably right at the time. At least that seems to be an effective thing to tell ourselves so that we don’t go insane.
- Your career is important, too. Not all job paths are going to play a part in your decision to wed or not, but they sure as heck can. Some people have milestones that they want to hit before they want to settle down, while some people want a spouse to move with them for a job.
- There are some pretty conflicting statistics out there. Some studies say that couples who get married in their early 20s are happier than those who do later on, but other studies suggest that waiting can improve the quality of a marriage. Who knows?
- Other people’s opinions don’t mean too much. Ask five different hairstylists what they would do to your hair and you’re going to get five different answers. All of them are professionals in the given field, and their different opinions could produce vastly different results. Is one opinion right? Just yours.
- You need to have your finances in order. Some people want to wait to get married until they can afford the wedding of their dreams, while others are cool with a courthouse ceremony. It’s personal preference, just like timing.
- You want kids now. If baby-making is your plan, then getting hitched faster might be in the cards if you’re the traditional type. If you know that you found your ideal man and you’re ready to make your family official, you just know.
- You don’t ever want kids. Not wanting children at all is as good of a reason to marry stat as it is to never marry. Perhaps you don’t feel the need to make anything official, or maybe you do and plan to spend your coupledom traveling the world.
- You can stay engaged for as long as you’d like. Even if you’ve already found the man of your dreams and said yes when he popped the question, there aren’t any rules about how long the engagement should last.
- Being ready is a thing. No matter how “right” the time seems for anyone else, it takes two people being ready at the right time for a marriage to go well. If it took any more than two just imagine the chaos.
