Bear in mind that each part of the married couple will have decades of their own personal evolution occurring underneath the current of regular life. Opinions, beliefs, or attitudes that are strongly held at the time of marriage will change. Even if you meet the Perfect Mate (TM), no one stays static for long.
Marriage, like all family living, requires a great deal of mutual toleration and patience, and a considerable amount of individual flexibility and adaptation.
The Perfect Couple will fall apart in short order if they are not willing to dedicate serious effort to their relationship on a perpetual basis. Marital success has little to do with the starting material.
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For these reasons among others, I like the cultural ideal of arranged marriages. They make it clear that marriage is about the commitment itself more than it's about the personality on either side of the equation.
I also believe that most of the parents or grandparents in a position to make the arrangements would have better character judgment than the much-younger people trying to select a good spousal candidate on their own (as above, "good spousal candidate" is someone eager and happy to work for a strong marriage).
In some sense, it is irresponsible of the older and wiser generations to offload this duty into the hands of those who have great difficulty wielding it. And while I don't believe these arrangements should be compulsory, I think we'd all be better off if this was the common practice.
The idea of arranged marriages is abhorrent, very close to slavery in denying individual worth and choice.
But ideally there should be some flexibility and commitment, particularly if children are involved, yes.
How to find your ideal mate for lots of men? She'll have me!
I don't know what you're talking about. I said nothing about religion, and this whole paragraph is all over the map. I doubt that very many couplings, including obviously bad ones, result in desperation nearing that of "a homeless junkie" as a virtue of themselves.
>The idea of arranged marriages is abhorrent, very close to slavery in denying individual worth and choice.
I disagree. Please note I said the arrangement should not be compulsory. We have many social obligations that are enforced culturally (at this point, marriage itself could almost be considered among these); such customs can be flaunted at will, but there is social pressure not to do so.
Progenitors are strongly motivated to make good choices on behalf of their offspring because their offspring's interest is simultaneously their own self-interest. Parents and grandparents are much more experienced than your average 20-something and generally much better equipped to make reasonable choices in mate selection, themselves typically having had some experience in the matter.
>How to find your ideal mate for lots of men? She'll have me!
I agree, and how does this not support what I'm saying?
I remember a few years ago, I read somewhere that the best girl you should marry is the one who if she were a guy, she'd be your "best friend".
That happens because you find new, positive qualities in each place, and no place will ever have them all. In fact, over time any place will have proportionally fewer of the positive qualities you've found, and everywhere becomes less appealing the further you travel.
Similarly, I've now been in a relationship with ~6 people, by my late 20s. I don't want to wait until I'm 37 to settle on a life-partner, but I'm sure glad I didn't try to settle in my early 20s.
Each relationship has taught me more about my self and my needs and also given me perspective on what kinds of people are out there and how they work with me. There are some flaws that I might have thought were just part of life and I'd just have to put up with, until I dated other women who didn't have those flaws. Sure no one is perfect, but some flaws are more compatible or more destructive to a relationship than others.
Just my 2cents.
Perfect matches are perfect because people change, yield and adjust to each other's quirks. The older you are the less flex there is. It's really quite simple.
This also related to #1 - a prerequisite for making a good match is the willigness to change. However a large pool of choices entices one to search a bit more for a match that requires less change, making it hard/er to try and commit to what might be already in place.
I live in NYC and think the dating scene here is fantastic, at least for someone in their 20s. There's lots of opportunity to meet interesting people and have fun together. This is going to sound silly, but one of my strongest reasons for preferring NYC to SF is the better dating scene.
That certainly doesn't mean everyone finds the NYC dating scene bad. Plenty of people are at a stage in life where their preference is for shorter term relationships and I don't see anything wrong with that.
I disagree, this just means you are not optimizing properly. You should optimize based on desired characteristics. It is a binary search. Based on my, abet fairly limited set of anecdotal evidence ( including my own ), it works very well.
Dating is no machine learning where you need a large sample to get it right. It is rather taking the looking glass focussing on what fits for you.
Persumably you want to get married because you want to share your life with somebody else. If you don't start sharing until you're 40, you've already missed the opportunity to share what are almost certainly the most transformative and significant years of your life. Of course this doesn't mean a later marriage can't be happy and successful too... but it does involve missing out on things that some people care a lot about.
"If a person wants to get married, s/he wants to share his/her life with someone" is (more or less) true, and is the premise everyone is working under.
The converse of that proposition is "If a person wants to share his/her life with someone, s/he wants to get married." That is what you for some reason appear to believe is the premise we are working under. But it's not.
The social structure accepts and enforces the marital union, providing significant legal protection to itself, the children, and the married partners.
This grants a solid staying power, borne of the subconscious knowledge that no party can really "just leave" and be done with it. This staying power should not be underestimated; it is effective and real regardless of how little one believes they will need to rely on it.
In the US/UK, you don't have to preemptively deny it, but if people begin to assume you're married and you don't correct them... then you're married under common-law.
I have a dear friend who has been 'dating' his girlfriend for almost twenty years. Their eldest child is 14, and they own a home together. As far as sharing their lives together, they've done it without being married legally---but in the eyes of all their friends and their kids? Oh those two are so married.
Look at a city with a massive population of eligible young people, like say NYC.. and then listen to what people in NYC say about the dating scene there. It's not pretty. Having such a huge pool of potential mates discourages people from committing. In other words, it makes it harder to find a long term mate, and it makes you less satisfied with whoever you're seeing.
2. Biology isn't the only reason a person might want to get married before 40. There's something to be said for sharing your early adulthood with a person. Meeting your life partner at 37 will be a very different experience from meeting your life partner at 22. Not necessarily a bad experience, but not what everyone is looking for.