Should You Put Marriage Ahead of Your Career?

Your job won't love you back. But it might make you a better -- and more marriageable -- person.

Photo by Jovaughn Stephens on Unsplash

Married people tend to be happier than unmarried people. And so if you want to be happy, should you worry less about your career and focus more on getting married?

“Put marriage before career” is the latest (very retro) line from some familiar conservative men, all of whom have thriving careers (and at least one of whom is on his second much-younger wife, who he met at work). “Put marriage before career” can also be one takeaway from a complex body of research on life satisfaction. It’s also very bad advice.

The argument, most recently from New York Times columnist David Brooks, goes like this:

When I’m around young adults, I like to ask them how they are thinking about the big commitments in their lives: what career to go into, where to live, whom to marry. Most of them have thought a lot about their career plans. But my impression is that many have not thought a lot about how marriage will fit into their lives.

The common operating assumption seems to be that professional life is at the core of life and that marriage would be something nice to add on top sometime down the road.

…

My strong advice is to obsess less about your career and to think a lot more about marriage. Please respect the truism that if you have a great career and a crappy marriage you will be unhappy, but if you have a great marriage and a crappy career you will be happy.

My strong advice is the opposite: Think a lot more about becoming a person you want to be, and worry a lot less about finding a person you want to be with.

Become a person you want to be. Become a person who leans into their joys, embraces their weirdness, pursues meaning and purpose, builds and lives within a community of loved ones, forges and maintains strong ties to others, lives with integrity, sacrifices for others in need, learns how to balance discipline with pleasure, gives generously. That might also mean pursuing a career or taking jobs that either bring joy, meaning, and purpose, or that offer you the resources to achieve other things you want — the stability that allows for safety and growth, perhaps. “Focusing on career” actually means, for many people, focusing on becoming an adult person in the world. For many people, this means spending more years unmarried, in the community of other singles, getting to become a grown-up in a community of others who are growing and learning and screwing up right along with you as your young brain continues to develop. Frankly, more people should do it.

Focusing on your career and your own life is also, in my experience, a surer path to a good life than tethering yourself to the first person who’s willing to be tethered to you — or spending your time figuring out how to become someone who someone else wants, rather than becoming someone you want to be.

It is true that marriage rates are down. It is true that married people are, on average, happier than unmarried people. It is true that as marriage rates have declined, happiness has also declined.

But it is not true that marriage itself will definitely make you happier. It is not true that if the existing pool of unmarried people all married each other, they would all wind up happier. It is definitely not true that the core reason for declining marital rates is that people (and let’s be honest, we mean women) are too focused on their careers.

The truth is that marriage rates have declined for a few reasons, chief among them that women have higher standards, that women have greater independence, that marriage is less compulsory than ever before, and, perhaps most importantly, that a whole lot of people are unable to meet the milestones of adulthood that we largely understand to precede marriage — and specifically, that a lot of men are not people to whom women want to permanently tie themselves, now that women can make money and build families on our own.