Should You Marry Your Soulmate?

Wait for Mr. Right. Settle for Mr. Good Enough. Decades after feminists revolutionized marriage, everyone is still telling women what we should want.

Photo by Alejandra Quiroz on Unsplash

Are too many Americans holding out for a soulmate, decreasing their marriage prospects and advancing all the wrong lessons about lifelong partnership?

Or are too many people — women in particular — being told to settle for less-than-stellar men, setting them up for greater devastation down the road, or a lifetime of dissatisfaction?

These questions are on my mind as I both read the endless discourse and handwringing over the growing numbers of unmarried and childless adults, and as I enter my 40s surrounded by them. My social group is mostly comprised of bright, gorgeous, ambitious women, some married but many not, some parents but mostly not, and most (although not all) hoping for lifelong partnership, if not necessarily marriage. As we look at our own lives and relationships, and as we assess the lives and relationships of others around us, we circle back to the same questions: How do you know — really for sure know — if a person is right for you? Is it better to hold out for someone who feels like 100% of what you want, or is some fraction of that enough? Absent a deep inner desire one way or the other, how do you decide whether or not to have children? How much do (or should) the choices of those around us shape our own romantic and familial decisions?

I watch as our decisions influence and feed on each others’, whether we intend them to or not. Humans are all apes, not acting solely out of our own accord and desires, but seeing our actions and desires exist in reaction to what the other apes around us are doing. All around the country, there are little (and large) groups like mine: Women who didn’t marry, or married late, or didn’t have kids, or had kids late, sometimes simply because they didn’t find the right person at the right time, but maybe also because a new norm was taking hold, and we all kept finding ourselves on similar paths, not quite realizing we were subconsciously choosing to walk together.

My social universe is a pretty rarified one, mostly highly-educated feminist-minded women working white-collar jobs in big, dynamic cities. But the rise in unmarried women, the rise in women without children, and the attendant questions around marriage and family formation and desire and what makes for a good, connected life fan out much farther than any city’s limits. Social shifts around marriage and childbearing are now well-documented, but I’ve still been (pleasantly) surprised, a year after moving out of the city and into a very small town, at how resonant these conversations are well outside of the kind of large urban centers where the young and single tend to congregate.

Marry, don’t marry, have kids, don’t have kids, settle for what’s on offer, wait for what might come: Women across the US, and across the lines of race and place and education and class, are asking ourselves these questions. We’re asking them at older and older ages. We’re asking them in big cities and in small towns. And I suspect most of us are feeling pretty unsatisfied by the answers.