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April 11, 2023

In the current climate, saying something like: “People who love each other should get married,” will surely serve you one of the following labels: A silly little girl who hasn’t watched the movie Frozen, a demented 80-year-old who has escaped from his ward. or a Christian fundamentalist. 

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Think for a moment about everything you watched growing up, and the messaging was clear: men want a woman who is fun and free and who isn’t like the other girls. Not wanting to be the kind of girl others mock, posting #no drama, #nostrings, #easygoing has been all the rage, while dreaming of walking down the aisle the absolute faux pax.

With many more women in their 30s seeking to commit than men, there must be a misalignment of incentives that we don’t dare map out early enough. Fear of scaring away possible suitors leads to few women unapologetically voicing their desire, and timeline, for marriage and family. Which is unfair; men have a different biological timeframe than women and can afford to wait. They also suffer fewer consequences and have more to gain from having no strings attached.

When we enter a relationship. there is an unspoken negotiation where each party has leverage. That can be the physical desire for the other, the life you can offer. and what you can be for one other. In a woman’s’ case, youth is an important leverage; research shows features men find attractive are all signs of fertility and youth. So, finding yourself in a situation where you want more commitment than you’re receiving, it might be that somewhere along the way, you gave away more leverage than you should have. 

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Therein lies the crux of the issue. Driven by our biological call towards motherhood, most women inevitably want to settle down. Men on the other hand lack such adult initiation in our modern western culture; they need something pushing them like norms and expectations or a string pulling them. The problems arise when we purposefully deny the need for a string to pull. 

The modern woman objects to that; if I have to leverage a man into marrying me, then he isn’t “the one.”

As women, we have excelled at speaking the language of men to succeed in dominating the dating market – through the dating technology, women get the first dates they want – and thoroughly convinced that the same things fulfill men and women psychologically in the long term.

After the birth control pill removed the difference in the physical consequence of sexual intercourse, pop culture did everything in its power to convince girls that sex can be as animalistic for them as it is for men. This, of course, is a lie as great as “we have all the time in the world to have kids.” There is absolutely an emotional element different in woman than men due to the increased release of oxytocin.

Growing up believing that there are fewer differences between us than reality dictates, women realize only too late that they have that leverage. Then it follows that a man will, as we do, eventually desire to marry and have children. With the right man, all that is necessary is giving him time and space. Another lie, because if this was true, there would not be such a disparity between women and men willing to commit and plummeting birth rates.

Countless numbers of women find themselves trapped in the situation where they are pushed through their adult initiation, ready to build a family, but are stuck with a boyfriend whose silence on commitment is as deafening as the sound of the clock ticking in their ear. They have wasted their youth on him and desperately search for any string, any leverage, that would drag him along with them to marriage.