Pressure To Marry

103 thoughts on Pressure To Marry

1. I’ve never been pressured to get married–and that’s damned odd when you consider all the Mormons in my family. Then again, if there’s one thing I managed to get across to my family during my rebellious teen years, at about the same period that I left the Mormon church, it was that pressuring me to do (a) was a surefire way to get me to do anything BUT (a).

   The closest I have been to being pressured to marry was when a young guy I’d been corresponding with in email (tamely, not torridly) paid me a visit and brought a ring. I wasn’t expecting that, to say the least; the relationship had had absolutely no romantic overtones up to that point, or if it had, I had missed all the cues.

   Anyway, my mother told me I was getting too old to be particular (I was 28!) and that I should have said yes. That I BARELY KNEW HIM did not seem to register with her as a valid argument against it. Tres Mormon! Joseph Smith was proud of my mother that day, I’m sure.

   So I suppose that sort of counts, but then again, my mother is crazy.

   My parents are not pressuring me to marry the boyfriend because they don’t approve of him, and if we were to get engaged, they’d try to pressure me not to go through with it. Hey, maybe tell Chef to start misbehaving and watch that pressure disappear? It’s been working for me.

   As for pressure from the inside, do you mean from one of the parties in the relationship? I had some of that with the abusive ex, I guess, but by then I had gotten pretty good at ignoring his tantrums. It helped that by then I was also 1000 miles away from his beaterrific ass.

   I don’t want to get too much into internal pressure dynamics in my current relationship, for obvious reasons, but I can say that every so often, one or the other of us will get determined to marry the other. As this never happens to both of us at the same time, and as we are both poorly organized and bone lazy, and as we can’t agree on how to go about it (one of us favors elopement, the other one wants to stay in the will), it never really gets out of the talk-about-it stages.

   I think I’m old enough now that people just assume I will live in sin forever or die a spinster or somesuch. Occasionally I do feel guilty for the way I must have disappointed my grandmothers, both very religious, but those are their expectations and values, not mine. I think it would be much different if I were your age.

2. Weirdest experience: I was about 25, and travelled to Africa to visit my sister in the Peace Corps there. While I was talking with a woman in the village neighboring hers, having exchanged a few details about my life (age, whatever), I found the next question I was asked was, “So, you decided not to get married?” And I thought, wow, I decided that already?

   Still, even in the US, and with no man in my life at the time, and in northern California, of all places, I was already getting prodding suggestions from near strangers that I ought to expect to get married soon, back in my mid-twenties.

3. Nope, never did get any pressure to marry — not from my family, nor friends, nor particularly within the relationships. I did marry, remained married for 10 years, then divorced, and I have seen the general societal approval and such of married status and so on and so forth. Even worse was the whole social married-woman *role* I did fall into. There’s tremendous pressure on married women to fall in line with various expectations and I did not escape that.

   But I never experienced pressure to *marry* in the first place, which seems kind of odd to me, but there ya go. Should be interesting to see some of the other commentary.

4. I’m a het boy. I’ll answer. Yes, I’ve been under pressure twice.

   First time was actually likely to lead to marriage. I was 27, and met someone who seemed like a good match. We were in to each other, had a good time, like many of the same things, disagreed enough to be amusing, had the same tastes in things, etc. It failed after 2.5 years. Rather horribly, actually. We did committment rituals (horribly expensive rings, rituals with the family, other things I don’t want to talk about).

   My second is current. It has been running for almost 4 years. We run a company together. We’re talking about buying a house together, and likely will in the next little bit (we’re waiting for a market crash in a certain spot). We don’t ever talk about marriage or kids, except to be annoyed by the people around us who change because of one or both of them. (being annoyed by the new kids on the block, especially the one that pounds on my ceiling when this used to be a quiet building, is an example.)

   We like to say that we didn’t get married, we incorporated. And a lot of that is true. We’re bound more tightly than a marriage, in fact – the legal disentaglement would be much more damaging to both of us than a normal marriage between two working people. But to a greater extent, it seems a more humane way of handling our relationship, one that can work.

   We’re both very alpha. I hate that term, but as it is understood, that it sort-of where we both fall, in different ways. We run our own things. We fight, sometimes bitterly, over silly things, because it isn’t about the thing, it is about a dominance of one sort or another. Mostly, we prosper, get along, and love each other. (And the house scares me, but I’m looking forward to it.) Usually, we only have adversarial issues when we cross business issues, which usually only happens when someone fucked up, or we have a structural issue we didn’t notice previously. Fuckups, of course, are more common. Personal issues can be worse in terms of heat, but we usually manage to resovle those quickly.

   Anyway, I don’t expect this to be norm-affirming, or anything else, I thought I’d mention it as a different form of het-monogomy to consider.

5. Sorry, I got distracted with my own narrative. Pressure on the first one was largely based on economic input, and to a smaller extent sexual issues that I admit I never understood. Likely a failure of mine, but I think also a communications issue for the both of us.

   This second time, we don’t want to marry. We have problems, but everyone does. I’m optimistic.

6. Pressure to marry a specific person? No. Pressure to marry? Well, I’ve been divorced for going on five years now. (Was married for 15 years). I said after my divorce (which was extremely amicable) that I could not see myself getting married or even living with someone again. (Note, I didn’t say never).

   Upon hearing that statement, family and friends (with one exception) have gone out of their way to tell me not to be sad, that I’ll find someone else and get remarried.

   I have nothing against the idea of marriage (provided the parties involved sit down and talk about what they expect out of it before actually doing it). I just resent the suggestion that the only way I’ll be happy or whole or complete is if I actually do it.

   The upshot being of course, that even if I met the “right” person, no, I don’t think I’d marry again. Not because there’s something wrong with marriage, but because I don’t want to (and can’t see myself wanting to in the future) live in that paradigm again.

7. Funny enough, this isn’t such a heteronormative question any more. I’ve been with my partner for 4 years now, and when the whole gay marriage thing started, the questions started. My mom bought me Dan Savage’s book “The Commitment” for xmas, in which she wrote: “whatever you decide I’ll support you.” Now, we had not, at that point, discussed marriage. So, despite being beautiful and sweet and supportive, it was also passive aggressive in that way only moms can be. Then she started mentioning all the gay couples she knew traveling to Canada to tie the knot. Then she wanted to know who would buy the ring. Then my partner’s family started in: all the gay aunts (except the one’s who are anti-marriage) dropped subtle hints about us moving to Massachusetts. This, in my opinion, is the one true downside to gay marriage.

8. I’ve never been pressured to marry – then again, I was a serial monogamist by the age of 15, and I ended up finding my wonderful partner early and marrying at 22. (I know I’m a complete anomaly for my generation.) I think the reason I never got pressured was because I got married before it could start. 😉

   My friends, on the other hand… hoooooo boy. We’re all in our mid to late twenties now and I’ve been to a lot of weddings lately, and the good-natured ribbing of my single friends by their parents has become a little bit more serious and desperate. Oy.

9. Here’s a touching story for you:

   Over the weekend, it transpired that an Irish woman bequethed to the Edinburgh theatre festival 5 million euros, which is about 7 million dollars. The woman, who was in her late 70s when she died, was a very successful PR agent, and the money came from her PR business and from the property that she owned in central Dublin. The festival organizers are overwhelmed: she’d said something about remembering them in her will, but they had no idea they were going to get that much money.

   The headline in the London Times said “Spinster Leaves Fortune to Theatre Festival.”

   Because when push comes to shove, what was important about this woman was not that she made savvy property investments or ran a successful business or was a patron of the arts while she was living as well as after she died. It’s that she failed to find a spouse.

   I haven’t personally encountered a lot of direct pressure to get married. But I do think there’s massive social pressure.

10. As a member of The Gays, I’ve not (yet) even come across a family friend or relative asking if I have a boyfriend. (Though not out to all of my extended family, most of them seem to have some idea.)

    My poor brother, on the other hand, was given the full treatment from a new family friend. He and his girlfriend have been dating for something like three years, living together for most of that, and it’s clear they’re pretty serious, but my parents and the rest of our family haven’t ever asked him (publicly, anyway) more than how she is. At dinner with some of my parents’ new friends (they moved two years ago, from one rural area to an even more rural one) one of them looked right at him and asked when they were going to get married.

    Then she said she expected an answer by Christmas.

11. I have definitely experienced pressure to marry, coming both from the expected quarters (my parents, especially my mom) but also from friends that I never previously thought were that fussed about the issue. Funnily, all the marriage pressure we get from friends nowadays — teasing, for the most part, but ongoing and persistent — comes from those that are themselves already married. My partner and I have known each other since 1999 and been together since the end of 2001. However, from 2001 until early 2004 we were in a long-distance (transatlantic, actually) relationship. In 2004 we both found jobs in the same city — which happens to be the city he was born and grew up in, namely Oslo — so he relocated from Britain and I relocated from DC, and we moved in together (and after a couple of years of saving, have just purchased a flat). Before I moved, I faced a LOT of questions and outright pressure/ “concern” from friends and family. It wasn’t that I was changing jobs and moving overseas that bugged them — it was that I was changing jobs and moving overseas without a ring on my finger. As if a ring had the magical power to ensure the success of the relationship, and without it I was automatically committing myself to a terrible, terrible mistake. I explained to people that, yes, we were sure about this, but no, we didn’t think it was a great idea to get engaged beforehand because we had never lived together for more than 3 months at a time before (he is an academic so used to be able to spend his summers in DC), and we didn’t feel compelled to do everything at once. It was also the assumption behind their concern that bugged me: that I was a dupe for disrupting my life like this WITH NOTHING TO SHOW FOR IT (i.e. a big fat diamond) — whereas if I had the big fat diamond, it would not at all be a matter of concern (and would in fact, be expected) that I was moving across an ocean so that we could be together.

    Anyway, that time eventually passed, and now most of the pressure we face comes from people who seemingly think that we’re offending some natural law by being together for so long without being married. Like I said, the most nudging we get comes from friends who are married — my partner thinks they need validation for their own choices, and that the only way to get that is to make sure that everyone else does what they do! Even in Norway, where pressure to marry is low compared to the States (it is very common for couples to live together, have one or 2 kids, and then decide to tie the knot and have the kids involved in the ceremony), we get crap from people. Strangely, however, living an ocean and 9 time zones away from us seems to have chilled my mom out — she hardly ever brings it up anymore. I think she’s close to conceding defeat . . . and now that my parents are retired, they’re afraid of pushing for a wedding lest they get stuck paying for it!

    As for why we’re not married — well, saving to buy a flat (because no, I’m not sticking my parents with the bill), combined with laziness, combined with logistical challenges of families and friends on 3 continents, combined with my brother serving tours in Iraq that can be unpredictable in terms of duration and timing — it’s just too much hassle right now. Maybe at some point — but only on our terms.

12. My bf and I have been together for a little over 2 years, and the only people who have peppered him with questions about us tying the knot have been those who don’t know about the 18 year age difference. Our families have assiduously avoided the subject, perhaps in the hopes that the idea hasn’t occurred to us yet and that there will be no embarrassing need for any public announcements.

    I’m firmly on record with him as not seeing any particular need for us to marry, but if it were something he really wanted, I’d give it consideration. I’m perfectly happy with things the way they are, so I’m hoping he won’t wish to change the status quo, even though it means buying two sets of Simpsons Season 8 DVDs.

13. Yes I’ve been pressured to marry – both when I’m in relationships and even now when I’m single. And the pressure comes mainly from my own parents (!!!). They are so “WORRIED” that I’ll never never find someone…and TIME IS RUNNING OUT!!!

    btw…I’m 30 🙂

14. All your relationships are belong to us!

    (sorry…couldn’t help myself)

    I got serious pressure to marry when I was in my early-to-mid twenties from my family, bowed to it, and was heartily sorry afterwards. Pushing 40 now, and nobody even asks anymore. I’m in a relationship that seems enough like marriage to everyone already, seperate residences notwithstanding; maybe that’s it.

15. the only pressure I ever got to marry (and breed – yech) was from an abusive ex.

    when we broke up, my parents were relieved.

    an older female relative told me once when I was young (about 15) that she wished she had had the chances that women have nowadays. That, if she could do it all again, she would never have gotten married, and never had children. That gave me a different perspective on the whole thing — that getting married doesn’t automatically make you happy and whole, and that it’s not for everyone.

16. My family – especially my aunts and uncles – used to tease me when I was younger about when I’d get married. But I never had all that many boyfriends, and after I moved far away on a shoestring budget, I guess they realized I was determined to live my life the way I wanted to, and that it was going to be different from what they were used to seeing people do. I think they respect that – at least one of them has said so outright, and nobody’s bothered me about getting married in quite some time.

17. I felt no pressure; however, as with the commenter above I believe it was because I married very young (22). My husband was great, but I was completely unprepared for the societal expectations that came along with my new role. I divorced him ten years later not because I hated him, but because I hated being The Wife.

    There is something inherently bothersome (to me) about being defined by my supposed function. Women are household, administrative, and sexual support systems so that men may go off and conquer whatever without having to deal with the minutae of daily life. Furthermore, we’re supposed to like our jobs as glorified domestic servants.

    Men can certainly be oppressed by the provider role, no doubt. I’ve never been a man, so I have no idea if the (sole) provider role is equally oppressive. I rather doubt it, because at least married men are still granted Individual Status while women are expected to give up ……. mmmmmmm……. pretty much everything for the sake of the family unit, even if she works full time and has let her husband off the sole provider hook.

18. When I became engaged, by far the most annoying response was when family members would imply that, by getting married, I was now “getting my life together,” or worse, that she was “getting my life together.”

    I thought then, and think now, that that sort of talk represents a unhealthy and unrealistic view of partnership.

19. My husband and I lived together for 5 years before we got married. The pressure to get married was intense for years. Then we waited almost 5 more years before having kids and my mother started interrogating our friends about our reproductive plans. I found this ironic since she and both of my grandmothers were past 30 when they had their first child.

20. What Anotherlynne said. I was divorced three years ago after almost twelve years of marriage, and can’t see myself getting married or cohabiting with somebody again.

    I have a current steady, solid relationship, and the only pressure I’m feeling on the marriage front is from my partner. Yeah, occasionally I’ll get the offhand comment from somebody at work (“When’s the wedding?”), but mostly my friends and associates know that I’m not in any rush.

    I think the pressure to marry is lessened if you’ve been married before–I’ve not felt pressure to date/marry prior to some social expiration date. Especially if you’ve divorced a real loser, as I did.

21. I did not get any pressure to get married, like Commenter #8, because I got married at 23 and have remained that way for the past couple of years. When we decided to get married, my parents were excited, and I think his thought we were too young (he was 24). Neither set was particularly inclined to pressure us into marriage, however. There are a lot of weird things that go along with being the first couple of your friends to get married, but pressure to actually get married wasn’t one of them for us.

    However, I will say that I think there’s another kind of pressure to getting married early, which I think is complementary to the expectations for certain societal roles. For me, the resentment and societal expectations for behavior – like sending me letters addressed to Mrs. My-Husbands-Name – are weird and unwelcome, but the granting of power and benevolence are also really bizarre. In some ways, I feel like this poster child for right-wing awesomenes, which my politics certainly don’t support, but my living situation does. I (occasionally) read people’s tirades on marriage, usually in conjunction with discussions about LGBT marriage, and what strikes me as so odd is how much _my_ living situation is valorized and celebrated, even though I didn’t do anything to deserve it. There’s a type of privilege that goes along with having made the “right” decision that I feel like it’s extraordinarily important to be cognizant of, because it’s one of the places from which this slippery slope into forcing uniformity comes.

22. I don’t get any pressure from family or friends—they already know I’ve been through some bad times, and most of ’em figure I’ve just “given up”. (which is probably pretty telling in itself—that if I’m not currently dating someone, that I must have “sworn off” or “given up” on ever having a relationship).

    But from acquaintances? Oh yeah. Once they know I’m a single mother—big time. People who only casually, or even barely, know me, will express concern about my daughter not having a father figure in her life—as if I’m living in a female separatist commune. Her grandfather doesn’t “count” apparently, but if I had a boyfriend of say, three months—that would. What’s wrong with these people?

    I know a lot of single (custodial) fathers, and they only get the pressure to marry after they’ve been in an actual relationship for some time. Otherwise, the advice given them on relationships is the polar opposite than the typical advice given to single mothers—they get “take it slow, there’s plenty of time, you don’t want a rushed relationship to give your kid psychological problems—stepfamilies have struggles”. We get “hurry up! you’re wasting time! You’re not going to look like that forever! And besides—you don’t want to screw your kid up psychologically by not having a husband!” Single fathers I’ve talked about this with tell me they never get the line about how important it is for their child to learn proper sex roles, or needing a woman around to teach what the “opposite” gender is like. I’ve gotten that though—about how my daughter isn’t learning what is “proper” for men and women, and that she won’t know what men are like.

    Sigh.

23. Yes, pressure from both family and friends. When I was 35 I was visiting my Grandmother. She asked if I was dating anyone and I answered yes. She asked if we were “serious” and I told her we had not discussed it. She took my hand between hers and told me not to be concerned about what anyone else thought I had plenty of time. She was 95 at the time and I knew she was right.

24. One of the things I find so interesting about this phenomenon is that the feelings that result from the pressure are not only norm-affirming and strikingly “traditional,” but also largely gendered. The straight men I know balk at the implied expectation that they must become big man commitment provider, and the women I’ve talked to express the fear of having their freedoms limited or being expected to start having babies directly after the honeymoon.

    Hi Lauren,

    All the fricking time, since I was about 19. When I was single and dating a guy during college, EVEYR SINGLE TIME I saw my grandmother, she was like, “No engagement ring?”

    At my graduation dinner, she actually sat me and The Ex down and said, “Marian is graduating. This means I expect a wedding within six months or else I’ll be very, very upset.” She then went off on how when a woman doesn’t marry, she doesn’t “grow.” The man will go off to his career (in this case medicine) and grow by leaps and bounds, while the woman will be The Single and will stagnate. Did she ever consider that I might go to work too after graduation, or grad school? Nope.

    A year after the Ex and I broke up, I met my husband. I’m married now so the pressure to marry is off, but we definitely got the “When are the babies coming,” basically immediately if not before the wedding. My mother-in-law made “kidding” remarks about how “The wedding’s in June, so…June, July, august….da da da….I can expect a baby by next May?” On Mother’s day, she said, “Next year I expect to wish you a happy one too.” My grandmother asked me after FIVE MONTHS of marriage “I thought you’d come home with a puffy belly! The Bible says be fruitful and multiply!”

    And so on and so forth. My sister went through the same thing. Interesting though how the guys don’t get it, huh? My husband’s brother is 31 and is only now getting pressure ot marry, and only because of culture (I think–they’re Indian and still marry in their 20’s generally). As far as the American side, my husband gets *more* pressure to marry and have kids after he’s 35, and people ask why he did it so young. Whereas I get, “You should have done this at 21.”

    My cousin-in-law married at 19 and is a super-traditional wife (Going to college, but won’t work after graduation; wants babies young, etc.). I pray that she won’t have one before me–selfishly–because I know I’ll hear, “Look how young she is, and she’s having babies. Where are yours?”

    Fun being a woman ain’t it? 😛

    I have to disagree slightly on the interracial thing though–it doesn’t always not work. My husband is Indian-American (as in born here, but parents born there), and his family did accept me. That doesn’t mean you should have married your son’s dad–certainly not!–but just saying that it doesn’t always get you disowned. His family is exceptionally lenient though–a lot of other Indian families wouldn’t feel so positive.

25. I get pressure from my aunts. My mother is totally cool about it and just wants me to be happy. She’s more pushy about me moving upward career-wise than she is about finding a man. I think it’s because my father died of a heart attack at the age of 47 and left her widowed at 41. She then had to continue raising two kids on a secretary’s income. She and I both worked our asses off to put me through college–I’m the first one in my family to get a four year degree. In the end my mom is practical before she’s romantic. She wanted me to be independent and never get left in the lurch like she was. And because my brother is the only one left in the family to pass on our surname, most of the pressure is off me. How’s that for heteronormative? He and his wife are going to get all kinds of hell (again from the aunts) until they have a boy. I’m in the clear, and free to use the term “spinster” with joy in my heart.

26. Since I’m not a regular commenter, lemme start this by revealing that despite the name, I’m a man. Late 30s. This October, I will have been married for ten years, the majority of it happily. But when I was in my (very) early 20s (22-23), I was dated a woman seriously (lived with her for quite a while), and during that time, she got pregnant. We were a statistic of the sponge. Hooray for fallible birth control.

    We probably went through a not-atypical range of emotions and ideas regarding what we each wanted to do individually, and ultimately, what we wanted to do together (if anything). In the end, the decision that seemed best for us – she was even younger than I was – was to put the baby up for adoption. That’s a whole other story for another time, the whole adoption process. Let’s just suffice it to say that when you are putting up a healthy, white infant for adoption who is born of two non-addicted parents who are obviously fairly intelligent, there are (or at least there were, at that time) about 250 couples who wanted to adopt your baby. That was the ratio: 250:1.

    Anyway, we of course got all sorts of advice, from all over the spectrum regarding what this did or should mean for our relationship. And very little of it, sadly, was of the “concerned friend” type: the sort of person who takes you aside and says “wow, fuck, this is gonna be a huge deal for you both no matter what you decide – is there anything I can do to help?” Instead, virtually all of it was of the “here’s what you need to do” variety, though the reasons varied for people thinking they a) had the right to tell us what we should do and b) thought they actually KNEW what was the best thing to do, despite never having been in a similar situation themselves.

    My father (yes, I had a cliché dad – still do, somewhere) offered the sage advice that “in my day, son, when that happened, you married the girl.” And, while there was another sizeable contingent that believed, equally fervently, that the only sane solution was abortion, there were a surprising number of people who, though they would probably be horrified to find themselves lumped in with the cartoon morality of my father, expressed varying degrees of the same “you need to get married” sentiment, just concealed better or wrapped in fancier and more enlightened terminology. It came disguised as everything from squishy, New-Age Zen-ish sentiments like “things always happen for a reason; this might just be the universe’s way of telling you that your path is to start a family now” (which I suppose didn’t necessarily have to mean marriage, but trust me, I was there, and that was definitely the implication) to the neo-practical: “well, having children at a young age is advantageous in terms of not being too tired to keep up with them, or forcing your kids to have a seventy-year old dad when they’re 18.” But the underlying implication was always that some sort of relationship – of the permanent kind (marriage) was part of their advice which was purportedly about the potential child primarily. I think we’d have noticed if anyone had suggested that we HAVE the baby but split up or try to raise him separately.

    I dunno if this is what you were searching for, since the addition of the pregnancy sort of skews the experiment, if you will….but this is my only experience with it. In the end, as I said, we put the boy up for adoption. It was an open adoption process; I’m still in contact with the parents, and will make myself available to the boy if he ever wants to do so or if his parents decide they need me to straighten out some “my REAL parents would let me _______” The major reason we chose that option was becasue we simply weren’t that confident either of our abilities (or our desires) to be parents, and also on some level, of our relationship, either. And, in the end, though it took almost two years after that, the entire pregnancy was one of the major factors in our breakup. We drifted apart, as people often will: after such a raw set of shared experiences, what is there to say? But I can only imagine what might have happened if we’d thrown the tiny pink hand-grenade of a child into our relationship at that time. Sure, maaaaaybe the experience would have forged new bonds of togetherness out of the crucible of crisis blah blah blah….but far more likely, we’d have ended up on the scrap-heap of failed relationships even sooner….and with a kid that we’d have to then split time raising and probably both wind up resenting. Not the environment you want a child – any child – to be raised in. In the end, we were both wise enough (there’s a phrase I don’t often say about myself, LOL) to recognize that we weren’t ready – either of us – for a child OR for marriage. And though a part of me still wonders sometimes whether we might have been able to continue on if we’d gone the abortion route, I think that’s far from sure, too. Not a happy situation….but we’re far from the only one’s who’ve been in it. And hey, at least in our case, there’s a bright, seemingly happy boy that came out of it, raised by great parents who couldn’t have one of their own, and who love him dearly. How many people can say that they attended one of the reunion shows of the Avengers in San Francisco with the adoptive dad of their biological son? He’s eighteen years older than me, and saw the Avengers open for the Sex Pistols at Winterland in SF, the very last show the Pistols ever played. And nearly 20 years later, we saw the Avengers together.

27. The older I get, the more I think I married yooooouuuunng (at 24), although not necessarily too young. I had very little pressure from parents, and the questions that were there came from my mother, who really just wanted the chance to plan a giant wedding since my elder sister’s was a shotgun wedding thrown together in a month. My dad was back on his heels the whole time, and asked me only once, “Is he the one?” to which I replied, “Yeah, I think so, Dad.” and that was it. But spouse and me, we started dating when I’d just turned 21, and started talking about marriage within a week, and moved in together in 6 months. I think both of us just thought being married was hip, and I think we still do. Both of us had spent years setting up our families for behavioral oddities and breaking molds and whatnot, so I think they’ve always taken a very hands-off approach toward our relationship like they never expected either of us to find a mate. Which is awesome since they still don’t expect much of the conventionial from us.
    Another anecdote about the shotgun-wedding sister. She got pregnant at 18 and insisted on marrying her boyfriend, who was 27 or so, in spite of the pleas of my parents (and me). They were recently divorced, mostly because she grew up and he had already grown up into the man that thinks the Wife is supposed to do everything but wipe his ass.

28. I’m married. Happily. I met him when I was eighteen and he was 28. We both knew about four weeks in that This Was It. Now, it took us about five years to actually get round to making it legal, but for us there was never any question of doing so.

    But being in a committed relationship takes work, and in a way it takes a lot of work to be married because once you go home together the societal frames and expectations crash down on you, particularly if you have kids. Our first couple years were filled with a lot of renegotiating and working out how we two people were going to live together, not doing things because “wives do this” or “husbands take care of that”, but because the person involved either cares more about that or is better at it. And, yes, this is obvious, but it’s work, because there is a very definite pressure just to put on the role and go with its dictates. I think, though, that if we’d done that, we’d be divorced now.

    Do I think the option should be available for everyone? yes. But I would no sooner dream of asking someone if they’re going to marry the person they’re seeing/living with/whatever than ask them whether they fold or wad the toilet paper when they wipe. It’s not my business.

29. I’ve never been married, and I’ve never felt pressured to marry. No one has ever asked me when me and a partner are going to get married, even after I dated the last one for 5 years. oddly enough, I had been in a relationship with one guy for about a year when he revealed to me that he thought we were going to get married one day. I was stunned. I had no inkling from his behavior that he thought of the relationship that way. so – was I unpressured or just clueless? neither of my parents ever asked me or any of their children when we are going to get married or have children, although my father did once comment that I was going to end up like Ruth Ginsburg, to which I wish I had replied, “oh, you mean I might be attorney general?”

30. My partner and I have been through the whole life cycle of pressure to marry, having been living together now for over a decade. The good news is that eventually people wear themselves out asking and leave you alone. The bad news is that it takes them a hell of a long time, even with gentle and not-so-gentle requests to back off (which are often met with the “but I only want you to be happeeeeeeee” whine). We got the pressure to marry for several years, and then when everyone figured out that we weren’t making things up when we said we didn’t plan to and were exceedingly happy “as is,” then they decided we were stable enough to start reproducing. Everytime I called my sister with the announced intent of sharing news she would exclaim “You’re PREGNANT!” [insert eye roll here]

    The best ever (not really) came from our next door neighbors. We live in a college town, and hosted a foreign exchange grad student for awhile. She had another international student friend who came to visit her, and somehow bungled the address to our house, so asked our neighbors if she was in the right block. She explained that she was lost and needed help finding an international student who lived on the street, who was staying with a couple who were both college professors and had some dogs. The neighbor looked at her and said: “Oh, they’re not really a couple. They aren’t married.”

31. Interestingly, this is no longer a heteronormative question for me. My parents are members of PFLAG and Dignity (glbtq catholic organization), and are very supportive of me/my life overall. I’ve received a little marriage or commitment ceremony pressure now and then, but I got a huge-unto-sickening dose of it recently.

    My partner and I have been together for over six years, and look to be making a long haul of it. We’re committed to eachother, but we’ve had no civil nor religious ceremonies, as neither are available to us, and besides we’re not religious. My mother, however, is very religious, and really wishes we could have some kind of marriage ceremony in a church. Regarding my past girlfriends, my mom has hinted at hoping that so-and-so is/will be “the one,”, but now it’s obvious who “the one” is, and mum wants to make it official in some way that’s valid to her and her religious tradition. Nevermind that I’ve never expressed and inkling of an inclination to have anything resembling a ceremony.

    This past weekend, I flew out to Indy for a family reunion and stayed at/with my parents. My partner stayed home to visit with a friend and spend time hiking, for which I can’t blame and rather envy her. Anyway, it’s the first time I’ve been “home” without her in the time we’ve been together, so my mom took advantage of the opportunity to corner me and deliver the big speech on how important it is to have that ceremony, to be witnessed by one’s whole family and friends, to receive their acknowledgement and support, and so forth.

    My younger brother got engaged not long ago, and will be having his wedding next spring. My mom’s involved in the planning, but of course as tradition dictates, more of the planning and decision making lies in the hands of the bridal family. I don’t doubt that some part of my mother’s wish for me to have a wedding is so that she can glory in being the mother of the bride, in throwing a huge formal party, and so forth. She said it would mean so much to her.

    My mother isn’t overt in her pressure–it’s just constant, little things. She often leverages GLBTQ-support organization ideologies, remixed with some modern activist catholicism. Sometimes, the children question comes up too, to which I reply that I’m 31 and still no mothering instinct has arisen.

    I support same-sex-marriage and all that, and I certainly wish the Catholic church would do the same (as well as ordain women priests, and other things), and I believe in civil ceremonies that bring together family and friends for the recognition and acknowledgement of committed relationship. But I don’t want the ceremony. My partner too is skeptical of the whole enterprise, and would rather spend our scarce vacation time doing something for us, rather than putting on a dog-and-pony-show for the sake of revitalizing tradition.

    On one hand, I cannot complain of the support from my mom, but on the other hand, I like to live a quiet life and don’t like to get up in front of crowds to declare my most intimate reality. I adore my partner and I so enjoy our relationship and growth together. I don’t need the acknowledgement of my family to continue what we committed to privately years ago.

    I guess the marriage pressure is better than homophobia…but both have an underlying assumption that I should be and act in a manner that is expected of me from some external source of judgment.

32. whoops – age related memory deterioration. it was Reno my father compared me to, not Ginsburg. duh.

33. I’ve never been pressured to marry, in fact, I think if I ever do marry some of my family members may die of shock. (I’m already “damaged goods” at 24 heh)

    But a couple that I am friends with just got married, after dating for 8 years. And up until a week before the wedding their entire mission in life was to not get pregnant. Their family was insane about it, so worried that they were having sex, and that she might get pregnant, and oh god, they aren’t married.

    2 days after the honeymoon her mother in law asked when she was going to have kids.

    Spare me.

34. hahahhahaha, this comes at a great time for me! hahahahha

    yes!!!!!!! parents, when, when, when…or when are you going to break up…no in between. we live together and it’s just funny at this point. and, the more they ask, the less likely i am to actually get married, the pressure pisses me off to a degree that i fight even harder…even though i already have a dress!!! hahahahhaha

    i am seriously thinking of using this beautiful silk beaded dress for halloween…or cleaning the house…or grocery shopping. idk, i just don’t want to any more. i don’t see the need. i resent the implications, that i HAVE to have this piece of paper to make my relationship “real” or “comitted”….

    don’t even get started on secret looks when talking about “babies” omg!!!!!! i am reallt at this point, not interested in having children…at least not from my own body. adoption, maybe. but damn, get the hell out of our relationship, ya know?

    hahahhahahahahh, this is funny….hhhahahahahahahhahahha, but they are learning…the more they ask…the worse answers they get…like, idk, maybe we just won’t…SHOCK…GASP….ahhahaahahhahahhahaaaha

    and i have had friends with rough divorces, i like the option of walking away, without lawyers and months if not years of nastiness and paperwork…

35. I recently got engaged and the closest I’ve had to pressure to marry was a comment from my fiance’s mother about three months after we’d been dating. (I think we largely missed out on the pressure because our families were somewhat surprised that we’d gotten engaged. Excited, but surprised.)

    T’s mother: So, what’s new?
    T: I’ve started seeing this great woman, E.
    T’s mother: What does she do?
    T: She’s a law student.
    T’s M: Oh.
    T: Oh?
    T’s M: Well, I guess that means she won’t want kids any time soon.

    We still laugh about it.

    Of course, my twin sister, who’s been with her boyfriend for the past six years, gets comments *all the time*. Oddly enough, they’re not aimed at her specifically, but at them as a couple. J, her boyfriend, is delighted that T and I are getting married, if for no other reason than that the pressure is off them while we plan my wedding.

36. I’ve never personally had pressure to marry, but G has had a lot of pressure to marry from his mom.

37. I married in 78, and there was indeed a lot of societal pressure (most of my classmates were married before they turned 20).

    Not only was there pressure to marry, but there was pressure to marry a particular sort of man, which in my case was the wrong sort of man but I married him anyway, instead of the goofy and fun ugly guy with no prospects whom I still think about sometimes in that might-have-been way…but my parents actively discouraged me because in their opinion, “he wouldn’t have been able to take care of me”. Well, after many years, the clue train finally arrived and I learned the only person who needs to take care of me is me.

    Now I’ve been divorced for 10 years and the pressure to marry again is only just now easing off (now people mostly think I’m too old to get married again; I’m in my 50s). What do I want? I really don’t know. It changes from day to day, and it’s very hard to sort out societal expectations from what would make me happy.

    So…societal pressure, quite a lot from media, as well as things like invitations to functions in which I’m supposed to bring someone (and most everyone else there is married), big parties for others’ weddings and engagements, couples who only like to associate with other couples (my recently widowed mother’s friends have completely changed; now she runs with the widows and single women instead of the couple friends she and Dad were friends with for 30 years), the pressure to belong to someone else (MY husband, MY wife sort of thing). Then there’s the pressure against living together, at least in this state; it’s something you just don’t tell people (especially people who emply you) in case they’re religious and object to “living in sin”…and if you want someone there living with you other than a roommate or a dog, then there’s more pressure to get married.

38. I’ve been with my “boyfriend” for ten years now–have lived with him for six–and I haven’t gotten any pressure to marry. None at all. That’s probably because I made it clear up front that our relationship makes me very happy and neither of us see any reason to change it. Plus I think my family understands by now that I can’t be talked into doing anything I don’t want to do. It helps that they’re all lovely people who support my decisions…

    At a recent family reunion I mentioned something about not planning on having kids, and one of my aunts looked at me and said drily, “Yeah, we kinda figured that out.”

39. I was in a relationship with a man for 10 years, and never felt much pressure to marry from family or friends that were around at the time – maybe because, as it turned out, most of them didn’t really like the guy, or didn’t think we seemed very compatible. The only thing I remember is hearing from one family member that my mother had talked to other relations with some concern over the fact that this guy and I weren’t married yet (even though we were, technically, engaged for a portion of our time together) and that I didn’t seem to care about that enough or at all.

    By far the most annoying things that happened involved acquaintances (or relative strangers) who knew we were a couple or that I was in a longterm relationship but who IMO had no business asking about or commenting on my/our “status” in the first place – like the woman from my bf’s church who was a client where I worked and took of advantage of our contact there to grill me about my age, his age, how long we’d been together, and to point out the fact that she was younger than me and already married with children, and why couldn’t I get my man to make a commitment? Fact was, getting engaged was his idea, and he was the only one who ever talked about getting married at all; I really couldn’t have cared less whether I ever got married or not, to him or anybody. So why would I invest any time and energy into making it happen?

    I was, for a while, wearing an engagement ring, and the annoying episodes all seemed to happen during that period – I wonder if wearing what is obviously (or assumed to be) an engagement ring is something similar to being obviously pregnant, in that it seems to make a whole lot of people feel like they have a right to question you about, comment on, and offer unsolicited advice regarding something that really is none of their damn business. 🙂

    I’m in a great relationship now, with a wonderful man. We’re both in our 40s and neither of us has ever been married, although we’re both veterans of longterm, committed relationships. We’ve known each other for, oh, going on six months now, and been romantically involved for the better part of that. And there are already some people – not family, yet, but friends and acquaintances – that I simply cannot have a discussion with involving any mention of him or our relationship that doesn’t elicit the almost immediate question, do I hear wedding bells in the near future? *nudge nudge* or some such. It usually comes from the same people who start every conversation with some variation on how’s your love life? anyway, so I guess that’s to be expected since it’s their #1 topic of interest to begin with.

40. I never felt any particular pressure to marry. This could be because 1. my mother was vehemently opposed to pressuring me about marriage and glared all the other relatives into silence, 2. I’m too aspergish to notice the pressure, 3. my relatives gave up on me acting normal long ago, or 4. all of the above. However, once I got pregnant, everyone in my extended family suddenly went from referring to my partner as my boyfriend to referring to him as my husband. Maybe they figure that if you have a baby and the man doesn’t run away it means you’re married. Or something. But they didn’t ever pressure me to go and have a ceremony or get a license or anything.

41. The health insurance made us do it. Interestingly, my now husband and I decided that at 30 buying a house was more important than paying for a wedding and I decided when I wanted to be pregnant. As a graduate student this was stratigic–turned in last paper before I went to the hospital. Alas, this all came before marriage which received some glances from some but I could give a shit. Ended up the pressure came from the state insurance plan which stated we had to be married or I wasn’t covered for maternity services and the university didn’t offer that coverage either. Another social force in place to reward heteronormative behavior.

42. I was married at 21 and divorced at 24. Despite this and two serious relationships aftwards that ended badly I still like the idea of marriage, or at least my idea of it. In my case, I’ve always been encouranged to not marry, both before and after my marriage. I’m so confused I don’t know what the fuck to do. Yesterday I almost bought My Best Friend’s Wedding, one of my favorite movies. I wonder if it’s because I could see myself being Julia Robert’s character or because I could also see myself as Dermot Mulroney’s character. Or hell, I could even end up being Cameron Diaz, except I’m WAY better at karaoke.

43. My family always assumed that no man would ever want me because of my weight, so there was no pressure to marry. And because I resented that assumption, I have been very tight-lipped about my romantic habits since it turned out that, in fact, there were men out there who wanted me.

    However, when I was 29, I got the identical question — “Why aren’t you married?” three times in a month — from a cab driver, a pretzel vendor, and an old guy trying to chat me up on a ferry in Bermuda.

44. Phenobarbarella, I don’t know about you, but actually, I prefer “in my day, son, when that happened, you married the girl” to “things always happen for a reason; this might just be the universe’s way of telling you that your path is to start a family now.”

    Come to think of it, it occurs to me that some of the most vocal opinions that I should get married soon when I was in my mid-twenties (I’ve now been with my husband 19 years, counting the year of engagement along with the years of marriage) came from men under the influence of alcohol.

45. My ex and I married too young (while in college) – both of my parents expressed some reservations, due to our age. From my dad, it was only, “Are you sure you want to do this?” but my mom, a number of times, expressed some concern based on some statistic about how people who get married young end up divorced. When we split up 7 or 8 years later, they were both supportive (not in being glad, mind, but supportive in the “If you need any help, let me know” way). A few years into the marriage, my mom gave me a book with the strong caveat, “This is NOT meant to pressure you one way or the other, but if you’re thinking about it, this might be useful;” the book was all about how to prepare for pregnancy in terms of nutrition, etc.

    I have no desire to get married again (nor does my ex), but it’s not because I feel burned by being divorced, I just don’t want the social baggage that comes with Being Married. Some of it’s the gender roles, some of it’s the sense I get that people expect a married couple to act as a unit, rather than two individuals. I don’t want a ring (I did back in college), I don’t want a ceremony, I don’t want to be introduced to anyone as so-and-so’s wife, I NEVER want to get mail addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Lastname again, etc.

    I’m also worried – and this is the case whether a long term relationship ever leads to a marriage license or not – about falling into role expection. Not so much in terms of gender roles, I think I can pretty easily avoid those, but in terms of, “I’m your partner, therefore, this must be the right way to act, and you should be doing thusly as well.” I can’t think of specific examples off the top of my head, which is part of the concern; I worry that I have expectations that I’m not aware of, and they will cause problems.

    I’m currently involved with two people (yes, they know about each other), one of whom has the same feelings about the institution that I do, and who I am pretty sure I will end up cohabiting with eventually (in other words, marriage without the marriage baggage). Unfortunately, the other one desires to be married – really Be Married – one day, and I only fully realized my opposition to being married after we’d been seeing each other for a couple years. We’ve had a major blow-up disagreement about this, and I’m honestly not sure why we’re still together, other than denial and avoidance of the pain of a breakup.

    I could see myself signing a marriage license with someone someday – but only after some years of successful cohabitation, and should that happen, I intend to keep it between us and the state (and employers, etc.). Fortunately, my greater social circle is full of people in all manner of non-traditional relationships, so if I see any pressure in the future to get married, I expect it will come from coworkers and casual acquaintances.

46. I have had different experiences at different points in my life. When I was in my early 20s (22-25), I put myself under enormous pressure to get married. To the point that I stayed with a guy who treated me like crap because I thought I *had* to be married before I hit my mid 20s.

    In my mid 20s, the internal pressure dropped, though I found myself still basing my idea of self-worth on guys or my singledom. My (paternal) grandmother, however, was convinced I was going to die a spinster.

    When I hit my late 20s (around 28), I realized my dating behavior was springing from a very unhealthy place, so I stopped dating. It was kind of based on the idea that a person recuperating from an addiction should wait at least a year before dating … and I went from there. And to my surprise, this choice not only solidified and grew my self-respect, but it gave me a much needed perspective – there is more to life than being part of a couple.

    After the year passed, I … well. Stayed dateless. I did have people look at me odd when I could say, truthfully, I wasn’t looking to date or marry. It had become a non-priority. And that more than anything else seemed to fuck up people’s ideas of what was ‘normal’. If I was a) single, b) 30 (oh noes!) and c) not particularly bothered with looking for a mate, there had to be something wrong, something missing. I shrugged it off, but it also bothered me. How was I worse off for being 30 and single by choice than I was when I was 25 and dating out of desperation?

    Even my mom, who normally didn’t say a thing to me about being single, mentioned she thought I was being too difficult and too picky when I would stop seeing someone after a couple of dates. But, by then I had filters and priorities, and knew when there wasn’t going to be a fit. And I didn’t have a problem telling my dates that. It took me a long time to learn that just because the relationship potential isn’t there, it doesn’t mean either party is a bad person. Anymore than it means the jeans I try on that don’t fit are faulty.

    When I later met my current partner, it was clear to me that he was someone with relationship potential after a few dates. And I was right. We fit well together. He respects my space, I respect his, and we work well together. I think it’s because I took that time off to be single, which forced me to learn to respect myself, cherish my space, and strengthen my own self-worth.

    I haven’t yet run (too much) into the pressure to be a mom, now that I’m in my 30s and partnered up. His parents are a little more vocal about “wanting those grandkids”, but they also live 10 hours away, so the pressure is at least from a distance. My family, though I know they’d love to see us have kids, respect our private life enough to not say anything to us about it. Which, in comparison to some of friends, is rare.

47. I never felt pressured to get married, not even from my Roman Catholic grandmother. I did get threatened with the possibility of never getting married, however, from grandmother if I didn’t learn how to cook, stopped acting like a boy, didn’t start dressing more feminine, kept being sarcastic, etc…

    But now that I am married I feel the pressure of “children”. As in when will The Hubby and I be having any. I get really annoyed with the different types of looks that receive when I tell people that we don’t want children. Of course The Hubby doesn’t get those looks, only I do. Because it doesn’t make any sense for a woman not to want childresn, right?

48. I’ve been in a 26 year relationship with my same gender partner and I CAN”T GET MARRIED. Sorry I don’t feel bad for any heteros here.
    Old dyke

49. I was single for a long time before I married. I did not get too much pressure to marry, a little from a sister and her husband. At times I was concerned that my parents never mentioned it. I was pretty depressed through most of my 20s-early 30s so I tended to interpret things in the worst possible light. My parents just accepted me as I was and didn’t want to pressure me in any way. My friend’s mom was horrible about it. Asked all the time and often I wasn’t even dating anyone. She assumed she knew better what would make me happy.

    I knew I was going to marry within a couple weeks of meeting my wife. I had her meet my mom & sisters soon afterward, where they all “interviewed” her and gave their approval: “We talked about it and we all agree she is perfect for you.” We never got any pressure though, she got pregnant much more quickly than we intended. So we planned for a wedding and a baby. We were married 11 months after our first date and had the kid 13 months after that date. If we’d decided to wait, my parents would have been fine with it, but at least one of my sisters (and her husband) would have applied the pressure. They are both very sweet, but they are also religious and have 5 kids, so you know a little about their priorities.

50. There’s not only pressure for singles to marry but also married people who went the JP route to get “really married” in a church. A close friend was going to have a backyard wedding but was so worn down fighting with her mother over priest, dress, etc she just went to the JP. Now over a year later they are still arguing b/c to her mother she’s not married. Katie doesn’t care if her mother ever considers her “really married” at this point just wants to stop hearing about it. Next month is a wedding celebration but she’s still arguing w/her mom about the situation.

51. When in my small home town in south Louisiana I am often asked if I am married, when I will get married, or why am I not married.

    People here get out of high school and settle down and get married.

    I think that it is a crock of S%$#

52. Let’s see. My boyfriend of 2.5 years (with whom I live) recently got about $2500 from an old savings account that he’d forgotten about. His mother’s response (keep in mind I’ve only met this woman once): “You know, $2500 could buy a lovely ring…” Oy. From my side of the family, my mother (I love her so much) would probably prefer I not marry until all my professional ducks are in a row, and my dad seems to care less about marriage than about grandchildren, a subject he seems to bring up with more and more frequency these days. I’m 26!!! Jeez!

53. Would it be hard to believe that I’m seventeen and experiencing pressure from friends to marry someone I’ve never even dated?

    And that this is no joking matter?

    heh.

    And my mother thinks that if I can’t lead one sort of ‘normal’ life (four years of college, 9-5 job), then obviously, I must become a housewife. Well, she already thinks I’m not going to be able to lead that life, so she’s been telling me for a few months now that if I find someone to marry, she’ll sign all the emancipation papers. And my grandmother’s been asking me all the time since I was 11 if I had a boyfriend. And I know that especially now, the question would follow with ‘are you going to marry him?’ if I said yes.

    *headdesk*

    Maybe it’s just because my family is weird and Old Country (Romanian)…

54. I am often asked if I am married, when I will get married, or why am I not married.

    Ah, yes, that too. Most people think I look 20 (and I’m not saying this to flatter myself, this is quite the consensus lol), which isn’t even old, and I get the ‘so, are you married?’ thing a lot when meeting new people. Ughhhh.

55. I got married young ( not quite 22, he was 29), so I didn’t really get any of the general, ‘you’re getting older and no one will want you’ kind of pressure.

    However, because my husband is Sri Lankan and very dark, I did get some of the ‘Are you sure? Think of your children–they won’t be white’ comments from my aunts when we got engaged. That really pissed me off, because I didn’t really expect it from that branch of the family. I’d always expected my very conservative, Southern Baptist, fire and brimstone grandparents to be that way, not my mom’s generally very cool Irish Catholic bunch. But my grandparents were wonderful about the whole thing.

    His family was a bit ambivalent about it. He’d been getting pressure to get married, but his mother wanted him to let her arrange a marriage for him. So she was happy that he was finally ‘settling down’ and that I was so young, because I think that she thought I would be easily ‘trained’ and also submissive (to both her and him, especially her) because of my age. But she really wanted her only son to marry a nice Tamil girl that she picked out. She also didn’t like the fact that I turned out to be opinionated and not at all submissive after the marriage. But we’ve mostly made peace, alhough I hate the way she tries to spoil my sons into believing that she and I are their servants whenever she visits. And no matter how many talks the husband and I have had with her about this, she still does it.

    After we got married, I really had some trouble adjusting to the expectations everyone around us had because I am ‘the wife.’ I am somewhat traditional about some things, and having addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Lastname doesn’t really bother me too much, but all the personal secretary and functioning as a unit stuff really does get to me–he doesn’t expect that of me (he knows I’d just laugh and go about my own business anyway), but everyone else still does. We’ve managed to mostly find our own path through that and we’ve been married 8 years now and I’m really happy with him and our lives together.

56. Andrew and I have been together for 10 years. Living together for 9 and married for two months. We obviously waited a long time and got a shit-pile of pressure from various members of his family and friends (who were all married, the single ones didn’t care we weren’t married or planning on it). And I don’t regret waiting a long time to do it. In fact if it had been solely up to me we would have waited until marriage was no longer het only. But after realizing how much that reasoning was hurting his feelings I aquiesced and don’t regret it. Nothing’s changed between us. I still say partner instead of husband. Filing taxes is going to be a bigger pain. He’ll be able to go on my health insurance and collect my social security if I die. But our relationship hasn’t changed a bit. And so I suggest that if you’re in doubt about it, wait until you’re sure that your relationship won’t change. And a very firm “nunya business” may or may not help, but at least you’ll know that you tried and you won’t have to wonder if you did it because of the pressure.

    Oh and we eloped, which my family and some friends expected, many of his family didn’t care, but his mother and father have been such stinky arses since then. But we had what WE wanted and that is what is important since we’re the ones who will live together for the rest of our lives.

57. I live in the bizarro universe or something. 🙂

    I’m married and got married at a fairly young age for my social group. I was 23. My wife was 25. We didn’t feel any pressure to marry, and in fact, postponed telling anybody that she’d proposed (and I accepted) for something like six months after the fact because we were mostly were worried that people would feel it was too soon. The only comment about our marriage timing that I’ve ever received was that we got married *so young* and occasionally people even opinion that they have wondered at times if we didn’t get married too young — not because of any problem in our marriage that they perceive, but because marriage in your mid twenties just feels so *early* to people these days.

    Of our peer circle, probably half are married now. Many are in long-term relationships with shared property and so on but are not married, and are in their mid or even late 30s. I have some peers who are in their mid 60s and are in solid, long-term relationships but have never married and probably won’t. Of those who are married, they almost entirely did so in their 30s. I think it might be possible that one couple we know also married in their 20s, but in their very late 20s.

    The biggest societal pressure I feel about being marriage is among queer circles where sometimes I find that people are critical of anybody in a heterosexual marriage because of the associated priviledge. (Homosexual marriage is legal here, but it would be fairly easy to put forth an argument that there are still societal priviledges accorded to heterosexual marriages: For example, you don’t have to worry about how it will affect your career when you bring your heterosexual spouse to the company party.)

58. I’ve never had any pressure put on me to get married. I think when I was younger some of it was because I was considered fat and unattractive by my family (I can totally relate to zuzu’s comment above). This worked in their favor for a long time because they’re also very old-world traditional, and most families in their circle have a spinster daughter who stays home with her parents and takes care of them in their old age. I’ve never told them about the few relationships I’ve had, and have never brought anyone home to meet them. (Honestly, I tell them almost nothing about my life, and they don’t ask.)

    Funnily enough, it’s my spinster aunts who still live in the “old world” who have been the coolest to talk to about my life. They tell me how great it is that I have the option of not having to take care of a partner or my parents.

59. Hi, Ole Blue, I grew up in Louisiana too. Something else, isn’t it, the weight of those expectations on you? It’s the biggest reason why I feel so fortunate that my own family seems to accept my slightly different than “normal” life choices.

60. I’m too young to have felt that pressure yet, but my poor brother did. He was in a serious relationship with a girl throughout most of college, and they both graduated this past spring. Now, they would have no had qualms about simply living together while they found jobs or continued their schooling or what-have-you, but both my mother and my sister-in-law’s mother are old-school enough to be horrified at the thought of them “living in sin,” and late last year began dropping such subtle hints as “Boy, this summer would be a good one to married…”

    They are married now, and they’re both fine with it, but having to worry about a wedding was the last thing either of them needed. Oh well.

61. Pressure to marry is one of the things that drove me out of my home town in Florida to live in San Francisco. I would not have gotten married if I’d stayed in Florida, but living in SF has meant I have been able to avoid all the questions and nonsense about when and why I would marry

    Some of my friends here in San Francisco are married, but most who are in relationships are not married; many of my friends have never been married, are divorced, or still married but tell me they wish they had not got married and I had the right idea when I didn’t.

    In other words, despite the social pressure in favor of marriage, there is also support to be found support if you don’t want to.

62. Possibly a pathetic-sounding confession: we quietly collapsed under pressure from my then bf’s mother. She – an extremely lovely woman, ex-teacher, four kids – nevertheless had a stubbornly old-fashioned view of marriage as a legally desirable prerequisite for “a baby coming” – and a baby coming was our situation. Her pressure was very low-key but, yup, relentless. When we decided, privately, that our many, many objections to getting married were not as profound as her genuine, quiet distress if we did not – the stress was alleviated enormously. And – thankfully – there was no nonsense about tasteful or otherwise limos. It was just the ceremony she wanted for us. Still married (with kids) – 20 years in September.

    (To be truthful, it also royally pissed my mother off that I should listen to my bf’s mother at all. Which pleased me – for the usual dysfunctional family reasons!).

    And to be fair to my – now late – mother-in-law, she was quite remarkably liberal and non-interfering in every other important respect. Our concession didn’t open any further unwanted areas of negotiation and she had no hang ups about couples divorcing. It really was “just” the bit of paper.

63. I have a combination of progressive parents, progressive friends, and youth on my side (22 on Saturday). I’d venture that pressure to get married is much more powerful when you’re the oldest sibling. My brother is 10 years older than me, and while I don’t remember any particular pressure on him or my sis-in-law to get married, I was young at the time. They had been dating for seven years, after which they got married, waited four years, and then had kids. I now have a beautiful niece and nephew, my parents are the most enthusiastic grandparents in the world, and everyone is happy.

    Quite the contrary, my mother begs me NOT to marry and NOT to get serious, and has ever since high school. She got married very young, and while she and my dad have always been extremely happy, truly soulmates, she realizes what that decision did to her choices and freedoms (at my age, she had my brother!) She has always worried that I will up and marry and give up my dreams of college, of graduate school, of work in academia, which has always been slightly aggravating to me. I’ve been dating the same person for nearly four years, and while we have no plans to get married in the near future, I resent the implication that marriage would brainwash me and erase my ambitions. I just moved 6,000 miles to attend grad school, and he and I are (successfully, it seems) doing the long-distance thing for the time being. What we want out of life aligns very well, so it’s not unreasonable to think that we eventually will get married. My mom is finally coming around to the idea that having a serious relationship doesn’t prevent me from pursuing my ambitions and career – she’s finally glad that we’re dating, and even open to the idea of him spending Christmas with us this year. (I dunno, maybe she’s relieved that the distance pretty much ensures that we won’t get married for a few more years!)

    The “don’t commit to someone, you’ll never have your dream career” pressure is very different than the pressure to get married and crank out babies, but it’s no less gendered. My brother never got a similar warning, and I’ve never heard guys worry that marrying will derail their plans for their careers – their freedom to goof off with their buddies, yes, but their life plans, no. It’s nice to be slowly getting recognition that I’m a competent person who can nurture multiple aspects of her life, rather than a silly girl who is in constant danger of letting an all-powerful male ruin her plans.

    My partner, on the other hand, is the oldest sibling. His mom is a bit more traditional – for years she’s commented that I’d make a “lovely daughter in law” (a little scary, but hey, it’s sweet), and also bugs his sister about whether or not she’s dating (she asked her a year ago, very caring and concerned, if she was a lesbian, since at the ripe old age of 19 she hadn’t yet brought a boy home. Which he and I found hilarious since I was actually the bisexual one in the room). I think she was concerned that I wasn’t going to graduate school near him, but she’s very supportive of our continued relationship.

    Most of my friends are similar to me – Ph.D. now, marry later. So there’s little pressure from most of them. However, one pair of friends, also our age, is engaged, although not planning to get married for another couple years. It is these friends who are most curious about when we’ll get married – they’ll ask if we’ve talked about it, when it will happen, and how on Earth my crazy move to somewhere far away will affect our eventual and inevitable marriage. Since it’s sweet-natured and I’ve never had much trouble ignoring pressure, it can’t bother me too much, but I find it interesting that the already-engaged/married couples are the ones most anxious to see their friends tie the knot.

    Anyhow, that’s my $0.02. I’d like to get married at some point. I’ve never seen it as compulsory in life, but it’s something I’ve decided I’d like to do if it feels right, and hopefully when the time eventually comes it’ll be with the right balance of concerns and pressures from family and friends alike!

64. I’m 24, and my partner’s 22. We’ve talked marriage since about a few weeks into our now 2.5-year time together, and should it come in handy, we can claim to be engaged. However, as I told my mom, we aren’t signing the paperwork until the insurance benefits cancel out the tax disadvantage.

    My fundie grandma is very uncomfortable with the fact that we live together (and have for all but maybe a month or two at the beginning), but I tell her that we made our commitment before God, and that the law just doesn’t know about it yet. It’s as true as any religious reference is for us, and it settled her down a bit. (Didn’t hurt that she never forgave my ex for not being there when I had appendicitis. My partner took care of me when I was sick with mono and couldn’t walk or get food for myself, so she takes him more seriously.)

    My non-fundie grandma was there (sort of) when we got ‘engaged’, so she wonders when we’ll finish it off, but doesn’t ask or seem to be worried. And my mom keeps her eyes out for nice wedding spots, but knows that it’ll be a long time.

    My parents (I don’t know about his) would like to have grandchildren someday, but I’ve got a brother, and mainly it’s that my cousins are crazy and live far away, so they don’t play with their kids. They like having a grandkitten, though 🙂

    Their main advice was, “don’t move and get married in the same year. We did it, and it’s stressful.”

    You know, the only pressure we get around here, other than feeling silly calling him my boyfriend, is from his 14-year-old sister, who is all “omg! i want to be a wedding planner when i grow up! and Cousin Jen is letting me plan her wedding [no she isn’t]! now you guys need to get married so i can plan it all for you, and be your maid of honor, and you can have all my friends as your bridesmaids!”

    but she’s like that about everything. she’s a little teenybopper trendwhore. “omg louis vuitton bag!!” ugh. nice kid. a little nuts.

65. No, thank god. I got married when I was only 24, though we had been together since we were 20. It ended when I was 31. I refused to date through the separation (about 6 months) and I didn’t date anyone seriously for about a year after everything was final. Everyone I knew was supportive of my decision.

    Now, I’ve been with the same wonderful man for just over 2 years, and he moved in with me about 6 months ago. No one asks us when we’re going to get married, not friends, not relatives, not our parents, not even my very traditional Catholic grandmother. Both of us assume we eventually will get married, but neither of us is in any hurry. I think it will happen eventually more for financial security reasons than any other – I own the house we live in, and he currently has no legal claim to it. Given how badly my ex screwed me financially, though, it’s going to be a huge leap for me to give someone else a share in the property I worked so hard (by myself) to be able to buy. My parents understand this and his parents understand this, and, thus, no pressure.

66. I think Lord Byron may have said it best…
    I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.

    -Lord Byron

67. I used to get a lot of pressure to marry from my rural extended family and parents, and I got lots of comments from my father in particular about making babies/providing grandchildren to spoil.

    Once I got into an interracial relationship those comments came to a DEAD STOP. No more questions about marriage or babies. I’m glad not to have to hear it anymore but that silence sure is deafening…

68. Oh man, did I ever get pressure to get married. I slept with my husband when I was 18 (he was just a good friend at that point, although we started dating right afterwards) and unexpectedly found myself pregnant. It ended in miscarriage, I went into depression and dropped out of college and moved in with the boyfriend. I grew up in an extremely religous family, so this was unacceptable to my parents. I wasn’t allowed to come to the house, my sisters weren’t allowed to come to my house. My mom wouldn’t step foot in my apartment at all. When I went back to college, the college insisted on using my parents income, despite the fact that I was not living with them or using their income at all, so my financial aid was awful. It was a horrible, horrible situation. My mother reminded that I should get married everytime I talked to her, because “if I was going to continue living with him I might as well” and took every chance she could to make me feel like a huge slut. Then they promised to help pay for a wedding, but after we decided to get married changed their mind. Today I would feel much more comfortable telling them to get over themselves, but at 19, I really had a hard time telling them to mind their own business and I really internalized a lot of my mom’s warnings about what a slut I had become, so I in turn pressured my boyfriend to marry me and get my mom off my back. We got married after living together for a year and a half, and have now been married for five years. We never heard much about kids though, as I was in school for the first couple years we were married and I got pregnant a month after graduating college. Looking back, we should’ve waited until we were getting married because we wanted to, but I doubt it would’ve ended up much differently as we’re still together.

69. Me and the bf have been together for 10 years. We considered getting married (and thus got engaged, whatever that is) during our last year of college; I don’t quite know what happened, but I think we got swept up in the whole ‘married after college’ thing, which seemed really big in our context, growing up and going to school in Indiana. I don’t really remember receiving much pressure beforehand, though I remember my mom asking about it, and hinting that she wanted a wedding while my grandparents were still around.

    After getting engaged, though, the pressure was huge. We’re both Catholic, and we attempted to go the Catholic route, which was big with both families, but during the marriage prep period (I can’t remember what it’s called, pre-cannon, or something) we encoutered some heavy obstacles, like, um, faith. I appreciated the opportunity to talk through some things at the bar over Scotch, but during the talks, we also had the opportunity to ask ourselves what we were doing, and why, and where this pressure was coming from. We decided to postpone the whole thing indefinitely, in order to have some time for some reflection and because what seemed before like a given now seemed like a monstrous and exhausting mess with no clear reward.

    In the four years since, the pressure has only just begun to slack off, but it was a big problem in my relationship with my mom, who I think felt cheated out of something, not least of all the chance to host a big wedding (a big deal with teh Catholics, esp. the Irish ones) before my grandparents died. My bf claims that his mother treats me *way* better since getting engaged.

    We still don’t get it. We have both appreciated letting our identities and our relationship evolve, and I think we both feel that this would be less possible, or restricted, within a marriage. From some of the things I’ve read here, this fear isn’t unfounded; it seems that many of us have internalized these roles or the drive to fill them despite ourselves. Our feelings about marriage as an institution have changed as well in relation to our solidarity with gay/lesbian or queer folks, so I can see where Old dyke is coming from. This has made me consider getting rid of the ring, as I don’t necessarily or always read as het or femme without it, and I don’t want to flaunt my het privilege (and I feel way guilty the few times I’ve used it to get skeevy dudes to leave me alone). Anymore, though, we see it as something that has to be done in the future, for tax or health insurance reasons, and which we’ll just give in to, which isn’t at all satisfying.

    My question is (not to denigrate the choices that folks here have already, or are in the process of, making), is marriage a sufficiently alterable institution to keep around? Of course we can choose to define and re-define the roles within it, and this has been done for centuries. But too often these roles are given, and we are faced with a certain pressure to conform to them, and while marriage might mean something different to us, it will have a social meaning (and a privilege) that we can’t do that much to change, at least without some serious political work. Is it even worth getting into?

70. I don’t think there’s ever been a crushing pressure to marry, but there’s been a semi-subtle one from my mom. Sometimes I think she’s given up on the marriage part now and will settle for me finding someone to date at this point. Particularly when she says stuff like “You can’t find a man at Weight Watchers.” For the longest time, when she said “meet people”, she meant “meet a man.” 😉

    Five years ago when I was in my last serious relationship, before I appear to have given up dating by accident, she had the chance to jump on board with his scheming mother but instead she came and told me that he and his mother already were planning our wedding and she didn’t think I ever wanted to get married — so I guess some of the stuff I tell her gets through. 😉

    But the guy before that one was the one I almost married or rather I would have if we would have stayed together and that would have been a big mistake for both of us…but she would have loved it, I think.

    Still, I have to say that she and I have had the “you know, your father and I will still love you if…” talk a few times where she thought I might be a lesbian because I wasn’t dating. I’m not sure she doesn’t think that now. Someone suggested once in my 20s once that I should just tell her I was gay to get her to stop bugging me about the getting married thing, but I honestly thought she’d try to fix me up with some lesbian friends if I did that. 😉

    I love my mom, but she’s crazy.

    Now, my dad told me last year, “You know, your aunt didn’t meet the right man until her 40’s and then they fell in love.” (Of course, he’s conveniently forgotten her first 3 marriages, but what the heck. Still, I think that means that he’s not going to start pressuring me for another 15 years.

    The thing is that I’m not interested in getting married. However, I would in fact like a companion person. You know, a male person to spent time with, dine with, go to plays and movies and events with. It’s true I haven’t found him at Weight Watchers. 😉 He doesn’t seem to be hanging out at the pet store, the book store, the grocery store, Panera, the walking trail, or my blog…in fact, most of the men I meet these days are either married or part of a couple. At least, I guess, I’m meeting people.

71. I have never gotten ANY pressure to marry. It might help that I have 5 older siblings (ALL married!), but even so my folks are just not the type of people to care about that sort of thing. To them, my relationships and lifestyle have always been my own business. Plus, they respect and appreciate that I’m different from their other kids.

    Anyway, I’m currently engaged. My boyfriend and I have one of those cheeesy “our eyes met across the room” stories… We basically started dating the night we met and moved in together a year later. Bear in mind that before meeting him (I was 27 at the time) I had never had a long-term relationship or given much thought to “finding a man.” My feeling was always that I’d probably get married one day but that marriage was just the sort of thing that happened… I certainly didn’t put any effort, CONCERN or much thought into it. I dated casually and/or had sex casually for years and never felt unfulfilled by that lifestyle. Being single was fun; I don’t miss it but I certainly wasn’t unhappy BEING single.

    My boyfriend (I hate the word fiance) has always had a positive attitude about marriage; my feelings are much more complex/conflicted. I grappled with the idea for at least a year before being comfortable enough to discuss it seriously. Although my boyfriend was not directly pressuring me, I sensed that my reticence was hurting his feelings. Of course none of my reservations about marriage had anything to do with HIM… just general distrust/distaste for the institution in general.

    We are close friends with a lesbian couple (our age, early 30’s)who have been together for almost 11 years now. They would very much like to get MARRIED (with dresses, flowers, rings, the whole nine yards…) and could not understand why I would NOT want to. Yet they have been the MOST supportive and helpful of all our friends, in terms of helping me plan, talk out my issues, etc.

    My boyfriend and I are a mixed couple (black and white) but so far no one in either of our families has had the audacity to suggest that this should stop us from marrying. (what is the terrible hardship about being lightskinned anyway?!) I think I might punch someone in the face if they dared suggest he and I would be creating some sort of child-abomination.

72. Eh, my mum asks me occasionally, but I think that’s more her way of asking “Are you monogamous yet?” (“So is he The One — And Only?”) than actually wanting to know whether there’s a big fancy expensive event looming in her financial future.

73. The only real example I can think of was from my daughter’s father. He thought he’d better remove himself completely from our lives so he didn’t get in the way of the husband he was sure I would find one day. I explained to him at great length that I wasn’t in the market for a husband and therefore he had better stick around for my daughter’s sake, and there followed a series of increasingly unpleasant conversations in which he tried to convince me that finding a husband (common-law or official, he didn’t mind which) was the best thing I could possibly imagine doing and I opted for rationally explaining why it would be a mistake rather than writing him off as an abusive jerk.

74. I’ve never gotten any pressure to marry, per se. To find a True Love and settle down, sure. It’s just my mom’s way of telling me she wants me to be happy and loved. When I came out to her as bi, she just added the second gender to her occasional nudging.

    I think in large part it’s because my parents moved in together after a week and didn’t get married for years. And the actual ceremonial part was mainly to satisfy my grandmothers and to get the legal benefits. Mom says they’d happily have stayed unmarried forever. So if I end up living in sin till I’m dead, that’s cool. I love having dirty hippie parents.

75. I was the longest-engaged person I know. We got married after nearly 11 years of engagement and after app. 13 yrs of living together. Lots of various things contributed to the wait and the ultimate wedding (which was just the 2 of us on a beach in Maui, at sunset — perfect).
    I continue to be surprised at the amount of pressure to marry from people at work (many comments and “jokes”). You’d think peer pressure would be outgrown at some point, but, no. I now hear about why we’d better get busy with a baby.

    *rant* I sometimes wonder if the people pressuring us are doing so because misery loves company. I’d love to tell most of them to, straight out, mind their own ****ing business, but usually shrug it off with a joke. But really. What do they care? If I never get married or have a baby, what is it to them? They are “work-friends,” more proximity-friends than I-really-get-you friends. Why are people so &!@#$ nosy?! *rant*

76. Jennifer and I are both in our 30s, and while single (before meeting each other) largely avoided the pressure. She told her parents that she was bi and they gave up on her; my few forays into dating life never lasted long, so Dad gave up on me.

    When we got together, it wasn’t our parents who bugged us about marriage– it was our friends. As early as the second date! Very annoying. Later, when Grandpa met her, she became “my wife”– about half the time in the beginning and constantly now that we’re living together.

    We were both reluctant, though with different emphasis. I was hesitant about marriage, but was happy to move in together. She was very worried about moving in together– afraid that she was too strange to work well with anyone. Once we successfully lived together, she was faster to think marriage– her big fear had been conquered. While I took our original conversation and the “forever” of marriage very seriously. (Plus, we’re the age where our friends are all getting divorced, which certainly applies the brakes– when all the good marriages struggle and fail, it seems like hubris to claim ours is different…)

    Meeting families was lopsided– hers are scattered around the country in ones and twos, while mine are local. Last year was “meet her dads” year, while this spring we got engaged and I met her mom and current step-dad. This Thanksgiving I’m supposed to meet her grandparents…

    So far, the pressure is most from grandparents and (weakly) from friends– our parents are all divorcees, so they haven’t encouraged us to rush.

77. heh, i just remembered that my mom actually recommended we wait to get married until my fundie grandma passes – “all she’ll do is bitch the whole time, especially if you don’t have a church wedding, so if you’re waiting anyway, you know, she’s old…”

    the sad thing is that that’s her mother. i know she’ll miss her when she’s gone, but i don’t think she’ll wish she hadn’t left.

78. Ha ha ha! My mom married outside her faith, and my aunt said, “All the ol’ ladies were furious, but they got over it eventually. Or died.”

79. my partner and i have been married just over eight years, after about five years of dating the issue had come up a couple of times, though i don’t remember either of us being pressured by friends or family (both have small families), instead we both felt that it was time. i cannot begin to imagine now how we thought like that. at the time we did have problems with the idea of marriage and thought that we would change the institution from the inside.

    we are both bi and poly, in an open marriage that most of our friends and family know about. we have talked about divorcing a few times, and remaining together, as our married status does sometimes put additional stress on other partners. we were in a trouple for almost three years and the issue often enough came up that she felt like the outsider.

    still very torn on the issue of marriage, though it seems to me that our being open about our polyamory has caused a lot of people to think about the issue of relationships in a very different way. what it comes down to, and why we decided to be open, is that sex is otherwise given too much power and the partner is more considered property than an individual with distinct desires. i don’t get jealous when my partner has stiumulating intellectual discussions with others, a fun night on the town, or shares a deep and honest friendship, so why should i if she wants to have sex with someone else? of course, it isn’t that easy, and requires a great deal of communication and honesty. it seems that the issues that come up through other partners always come back to something that is fundamental to how we relate, so these other relationships are always keeping us alert about our relationship.

    on a different note. we have friends that claim to be married for tax and insurance issues with the govt, but otherwise don’t really consider themselves married, although they did have a ceremony outside of the U.S. – i think this is a pretty good option.

80. Great post. I’m enjoying this thread; I love to hear about how different individuals dealt with a very common social pressure. I dealt with this topic on my blog a few months back.

81. I’ve been with my SO for 21 years this December. I am 35, he’s 39 and we have a 14 y.o. daughter so I was about her age when we got together. We dated the first 6 years or so and then moved in together when we got pregnant.

    We’ve never received a lot of pressure to get married except when I was pregnant and that was more from friends than family. My father couldn’t understand why we didn’t get married and really was confused once he learned *I* was the one who wouldn’t get married (his words: ALL women want to get married). About 12 years ago my mom pressured me to get married just not to my SO (???!, never quite figured where she came up with that one). At this point I think she feels it would be easier legally and financially if we were married but has finally given up. I think the pressure from my dad was gender based because he never pressured my brother the same way though he did pressure him too, it was more like “don’t let THAT one get away”.

    Occasionally someone will ask we why don’t get legally married but not many. I put it down to the fact that since we are a M/F couple most people just assume we are legally married anyway since we “appear” married. I think the SO, who is way more romantic and sentimental than I am, would like to get legally married mainly for the celebration. My response is if you want a celebration, have one, we don’t need a wedding. He believes the quality of gifts will suffer if you aren’t having a *real* wedding. I point out that the quality of gifts will suffer because we never send anyone else wedding presents or at least, nothing they ever register for.

82. I realize this is a largely heteronormative question but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.

    Indeed. Gays too get pressured to marry. Spend any time in a gay-friendly religious community committed to the idea of marriage (e.g. the Reform or Reconstructionist Jewish communities) and you’ll see gays getting the same pressure to marry as straights.

    *

    I always felt odd in school that I wasn’t on a track toward marriage as all the other kids were. My parents, who got married young and feel they should have waited to mature a bit more before marriage and who also got married at a time where the median age of first marriage was increasing rapidly, thought this concern (based largely on an identification of marriage with adulthood) of mine was odd. They also thought it was odd that in the late 1990s (when I was in college) so many kids were marrying straight out of undergrad: they thought that people were remaining single for longer.

    My parents did want me to get married eventually in order that they would have grandkids (they can be somewhat “traditional” in that regard). But now, they just want grandkids (desparately) and I think would care less if I get married, shack up with someone or just get some random person knocked-up. They are quite happy I’m dating someone who already has a kid (and the kid looks like she could be my mother’s grand-daughter). They are not pressuring us to marry, though: but they are hinting they want (more) grandkids. My gf is getting pressure to marry from her family, though.

83. Human,

    Hello fellow Louisianaian. The saddest was when I dated a woman with two kids. We had not dated in a month and my Mom was telling people that she may become an instant Grandma.

84. This is a really interesting topic and an interesting discussion. I didn’t really feel pressure to marry from my close family (as in, if you don’t marry by a certain age and start popping out grandkids we’ll be disappointed), but I certainly felt pressure not to cohabit without being married.

    My partner and determined pretty quickly that we intended our relationship to be permanent, and considered our bond with one another to be as binding as any marriage, and so absent any consideration, getting married would have been more about insurance and mundane stuff like that (which, as others have noted, is a mundane consideration not afforded to gays and lesbians). But this would have caused a HUGE fracass in my family and would have been a source of some concern in my husband’s family as well. We were living in different states when we decided to get married, and when we were finally able to live in the same city, we even maintained separate apartments for a few months before we got married, just to allow our families plausible deniability of the fact that we were actually living together. We had to consider whether it was worth the turmoil it would have caused to buck the expectations of our families.

    The funny thing is that I don’t think any of them think that people who cohabit are going to hell or anything, and there are certainly gendered aspects to the expectations, in my family in particular. I can’t imagine that my parents were under the impression that I was a virgin when I married, or even when I started dating my husband, so that’s not what it’s all about. But there was certainly an expectation that I wouldn’t give them much reason to think too hard about the issue. Where my brother is concerned, on the other hand, my dad jokes about him not having any kids that we know of, though I think he’d also get into hot water for living openly with someone without getting married, too. I think it’s partly about religion and partly about propriety in a traditional Southern family.

85. Oh, and another hello to Human and Ole Blue, from another Louisiana native.

86. At my cousin’s (Cathoic) wedding, the priest went on and on about how my cousin and his fiancee had treated the sacrament of marriage with “the proper respect” by not living together before tying the knot. That was infuriating to my sister and her fiance, who have been living together for two years and just got engaged. Hell, it’s infuriating full stop. I’ve seen lots of disrespect within traditional marriages. People treat marriage with respect by talking to each other honestly about their expectations before walking down the aisle. Whether or not you live together beforehand has nothing to do with it.

    Besides, what are happily cohabitating people doing – disrespecting each other? Um, no…not if they treat each other with kindness. They’re not even disrespecting the tradition that they refuse to partake in. They’re just not partaking.

87. Um, “Catholic”. Duh.

88. Yes, tonnes of pressure.

    My husband and I dated and lived together for almost 6 years before getting married. We talked about it and what it meant to us, and the reasons for and against marriage. Both of us are children from divorced parents who married way too young and we discussed, at great lengths, how this made us feel about marriage, for us, in general, within society, and within our family structures.

    Our opinions didn’t really matter, apparently.

    His family is extremely religious/conservative. I love them all, but they honestly didn’t care about our feelings in the least when it came to the issue of marriage. They wanted us to get married [we were common-law, but they never considered it “official”], in a Catholic church [they’re strict Roman Catholics, it needed to be “Under the Eyes of God”], and have a big, traditionally Catholic wedding that would have put us out a huge amount of money.

    Part of it was age-based. When we moved in to our new house two years ago, we invited his mother over for dinner. The very first comment she made after we sat down to eat, was “I hope you guys have a baby soon, he’s getting so old!”]. He was 26 at the time. [Apparently, that’s “getting too old to have a baby”!] Now we’re under this tremendous amount of pressure to have a baby now, because “that’s what married couples do”. It’s a constant talking point at family dinners. A few years ago, no one would stop asking us when we would get married. Now, it’s “When are you having kids? Are you pregnant yet?” [I should start responding “Well, we were planning on having sex later tonight. So, who knows! Check back with me in a few months.”]

    Although it was amusing to note that while our families were harassing us to get married because “we were getting too old”, at our wedding social, a distant friend of older family generation remarked, rather disgustedly – “What is with these kids getting married so YOUNG these days?”. Apparently he thought we were both under 20…]

89. Married at 20 and divorced at 21. Like foresmac I was encourages not to marry. Lets face it I even knew it was a bad idea to get married to this particular person. My track record of picking boyfriends always left something to be desired, they were usually: #1 Unemployed 95% of the year or, #2 a complete and total pothead, which lets face it, was ultimately the reason for #1. So my parents and friends weren’t really pressuring me to marry them. However, now that I am in a stable relationship with a person who actually has steady employment, owns his own home, and treats me with respect, my mother is foaming at the mouth. We had only been seeing each other for 3 weeks when my mom informed me she, “had a feeling about this one”. It’s been 2 years, but still with every phone call it’s always the same, “When are you two getting married, and when am I going to be a grandmother?” (this may be why I let it go straight to voicemail when she calls) My boyfriend and I have discussed getting married, I mean I love him, besides I could really use the insurance, and discount on tuition at Purdue:)

90. Great thread. 🙂

    Am I the only one who’s had the opposite pressure? My fiance and I met while we were in college, six years ago, started living together before the year was out, and have lived together ever since. Almost immediately, both sets of parents started to advocate that we not marry. My (bitterly divorced) parents swore that eventually we would find out we didn’t like each other. And his (happily married and very traditional) parents, when they found out that I planned on attending graduate school and becoming an academic (read: moving a lot), warned him that he would spend his entire life “tagging along” and never “fully develop.”

    I wouldn’t say that this pressure influenced our decision to marry next September, exactly–we’ve always known we would eventually, and there are many factors that cemented our decision. But I also can’t say that there’s not an element of “we’ll show them” , either. That perverse enjoyment of bucking people’s expectations works both ways, I suppose.

91. Surprisingly, since my family is big on marriage, I don’t feel any pressure. I think they’re frankly scared to say anything to me due to my reputation as what you might call a bit sharp-tongued.

    Friends? Not in the slightest. Austin’s like San Francisco. People here wouldn’t dare. I know couples that have been together over a decade and haven’t yet bothered and no one asks.

92. Yeah, I get no pressure from friends, mostly because a lot of them never got married until they hit their 40s. It’s also pretty much taken for granted that New York is a terrible place to find a spouse, because being single is so much fun.

    Yet the people I know from college who stayed in the suburbs are all married with kids and minivans.

93. Have you ever been under considerable pressure to marry?

    I’m under pressure right now. The bf and I have been together for nearly three years, and my relatives, who are into spontaneity and irresponsibility, cannot understand why we want to wait until are careers are off the ground.

    This is definitely a Ukrainian thing. People in our culture marry and divorce a lot, and they like to start young. Not to mention the fact that at 22, I am already nearing my “expiration date” by their standards.

94. I always felt odd in school that I wasn’t on a track toward marriage as all the other kids were. My parents, who got married young and feel they should have waited to mature a bit more before marriage and who also got married at a time where the median age of first marriage was increasing rapidly, thought this concern (based largely on an identification of marriage with adulthood) of mine was odd. They also thought it was odd that in the late 1990s (when I was in college) so many kids were marrying straight out of undergrad: they thought that people were remaining single for longer.

    This was true in 2001 also, at University of Wisconsin where I went. You could look to either side and see all the sparkly rings under the gown sleeves at graduation, and yes I got questions about why I didn’t have one, even though I had a boyfriend of 4 years. I think it’s still true. But then I came to NYU and was shocked by the number of engagment rings I DIDN’T see, although according to Facebook, there are a fair number of married and engaged sophomores and juniors there.

    Part of it was age-based. When we moved in to our new house two years ago, we invited his mother over for dinner. The very first comment she made after we sat down to eat, was “I hope you guys have a baby soon, he’s getting so old!”]. He was 26 at the time. [Apparently, that’s “getting too old to have a baby”!]

    I’ve had the “You lose your fertility by age 27” pushed at me a few times. It was some study out of the UK whose results have been twisted and misrepresented to make women feel like you’ll instantly conceive between 18 and 26, but take super-long after 26. Someone even told me that on a message board once. Her son was an “accident” when she was 19, but now she’s 29 and having fertility issues. She attributes that to her age rather than things like secondary infertility, as if she were 39 or 49. She told me that because I’m 27, it might take me a year to conceive instead of the month it would have taken last year.

    The above is not a joke.

95. Hehe, this is an enjoyable topic to hear all your opinions on, and one that I, too, had a bit of a go at on my blog. On there I write about reasons why I don’t want to get married to my partner. As for pressure to marry? Well, my Mum doesn’t care one whit (woot!), and as far as I can tell neither does the rest of my family, despite Nana being a Catholic. She seems pretty cool about us ‘living in sin’, bwahahaha.

    I think the most, but subtle, pressure comes from my partner’s Mum (also a Catholic). It’s funny as she doesn’t actually seem to see that no matter if we did ‘make it legal’ – god I hate that term! – we wouldn’t be having a religious ceremony anyway! I know my partner was relatively more concerned initially about making his parents happy, but I had seen way too many couples bow to pressure and do it, when it really didn’t mean that much to them other than a way to placate their family, friends or that wider social expectation. Sometimes they didn’t have the ‘wedding’ they wanted because of family/friend interference. I can appreciate that some people have cultural or religious pressures that will guide their decisions, though.

    I had to correct a married friend the other day (very much a feminist, very independent, very opinionated) that she would be helping me plan a wedding and baby stuff one day. I said ‘probably’ to the babies but ‘sorry, no go’ for the wedding. She seemed a little surprised but I sort of come to expect that when I tell folks Partner and I have no intention of getting married. Once someone is married there seems to be this ‘club’ of married folk that really want you to join, too, and have difficulty understanding why you might not want to be part of it.

    I loooooooove my partner and we have our committment sorted, that’s all that matters to me right now. Tell you what, I love going to weddings though! They can be pretty fun 😀

96. I too wrote a blog post about this topic a little while ago. Up until 2004, I would have been singing the same song as you, Old Dyke. However, due to the intelligent forethought of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, same sex couples now have the right to marry in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, this put us in a difficult situation. We were kind of forced into it by my partner’s employers, who insisted that people who could HAD to marry in order to keep their health insurance options. Yep, we married for Health Insurance. Happily, as we are both in our very early 50’s, there’s no more pressure to produce progeny (been there, done that), but it’s hard to be a poster child for same-sex marriage in the eyes of family and heterosexual friends. Pressure, too much pressure!

97. My dad’s side aunt and uncle have been nagging me to get married off since I was legal. Because they are from Montana and That’s What You Do In 1950’s Montana. Ironically, only one of their kids got married young (at 19- the others waited until early and late 30’s), and the one that was the most happily married was the one that waited the longest. However, that still doesn’t stop them from telling me that I’ll get too old to live with a partner if I don’t get married nownownow, or asking if I’m pregnant. Especially bad given that said aunt and uncle HAD to get married, but god forbid you bring that up.. They didn’t even LIKE my last ex, and made that clear, but I still should marry him because I’m too old to get married…this was when I was 23.

    I also felt some pressure on myself because my dad has a degenerative disease, and it became pretty clear that I’d have to get married when I was young if I wanted my dad to be able to attend the wedding At All- walking me down the aisle went by the time I was 20. So I got engaged at 23 (didn’t tell the evil aunt and uncle because “it doesn’t count without a big diamond” and I didn’t have one) and breaking the news to my parents…well, Dad sobbed hysterically for an hour and Mom to this day has ignored the whole e-word. To her, it didn’t happen…or again, it doesn’t count without a diamond. I’m glad I didn’t marry him, but I do feel guilt that I didn’t get married before Dad died. Yeah, like I could help this…

    Though to be fair, my parents and Mom’s side of the family have never nagged me about it.

98. The only pressure I’m under from my family is to date other Jews– my parents have said, more than once, that if I’m dating a Jewish guy, they never want to meet him, and that applies no matter how serious it is. But I’m only 20– I imagine my older cousin is going to start feeling the pressure soon.

99. ack! My parents have, of course, told me that if I date a *non*-Jew they’ll be up set, rather than the reverse. Boy, there’s a typo that messes up the whole sentence.

100. No, I’ve never been pressured to marry, but I’m Swedish. My parents married when I was nine, and only because of a law change regarding inheritance. My brother has two children with his fiancee, and no intentions to marry until they can afford his dream wedding in Vegas. (Yes, my brother is silly.)

     When I called my mother in 2003, and told her that me and my then live in boyfriend of over a year just had gotten engaged, and that we’d marry in just over a year, she was shocked. She said I was too young to marry. (I then reminded her I’d be a year younger than she was when she had me, which made her see it from a different perspective.)

101. The opposite pressure thing is funny too… my mom and dad shoved marriage down my throat as fast as they could. My MIL, on the other hand, thought it would be best if we waited because I was so young. So on one hand we have my parents yelling about how we need to get married, and on the other hand we have my MIL telling us to slow down, live together for a few years and wait until I’m older. That was a very frustrating time period.

102. We were living in different states when we decided to get married, and when we were finally able to live in the same city, we even maintained separate apartments for a few months before we got married, just to allow our families plausible deniability of the fact that we were actually living together. We had to consider whether it was worth the turmoil it would have caused to buck the expectations of our families.

     My husband, before I met him, lived with someone for almost 5 years. Whenever his mother visited from the UK, he would sleep on the couch and give his mom “his” room. As far as she was concerned, they were just roommates. I think that was part of the reason she didn’t really like me at first–I wouldn’t let her keep her ridiculous illusions about her adult son. When I first met her we weren’t living together yet (I was in college in a different state), but I was with him for the holidays and wouldn’t sleep in the bedroom with her, instead I insisted on sleeping in the living room with him. And she had to face the fact that her adult, 28 year old son was acting as such.

103. Hell yeah. First was my family worrying when I moved in with my boyfriend without getting engaged first. No one else in the family has ever done it; heck, my dad proposed to my mother on their fourth date! Happily, they’ve since stopped bugging me about it.

     Much more annoying was when _his_ mother started bugging _me_ about us not being married. This is even though _I’m_ the one who’s been ready to be married for the last few years (while he’s still figuring it out), and even though _she’s_ the one who raised him to think living together without getting married was perfectly fine. (This is a regular thing in his family — lots of people have lived without getting married, to no disapproval, some for decades.) Apparently now it’s MY job to haul him into couple’s counseling so I can learn how to browbeat him into it (since if we’re not married it must be because we’re unable to communicate effectively), and to the gynecologist, so that the doctor can convince him about time running out since I’m not able to.

     To HIM, she says nothing.

     I have a friend who had the same experience; she wanted to get married, he was reluctant, and yet it was his mother badgering her to make it happen somehow. And I’ve seen similar things occuring with other women, especially when the mothers get wound up about their sons’ girlfriends’ biological clocks running out, no matter that it’s not the woman’s fault alone that no grandchild has miraculously appeared.

     That’s just all shades of fucked up, and it’s definitely a gendered thing.

     Meanwhile, here in Small Red State Town, people inevitably “mishear” me when I describe him as either my partner or my boyfriend (ditto for him) – somehow, without the intervention of either church or state, he’s become my “husband” to nearly everyone here. It gets tiring trying to decide whether correcting them is worth the effort (or social disapproval).

     On the other hand, when we went to a big family (his) wedding on the East Coast, I was demoted back to “the girlfriend” again, with little or no verbal recognition that we’ve been together seven years now, unless it was to bug us about when _we_ were going to tie the knot. Also tiring!

     How hard it it to just let two people figure out _for themselves_ whether they want to get married?

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