It seems everyone around my age (early 20s) is getting married right now. Almost every other week, I hear about someone I know who just got engaged or is already married.
99% of these marriages I do not agree with. Why?
Because 99% of these people are not ready for marriage. Why?
Because they do not know themselves.
I was dating this girl “Giselle” a while ago. When we were dating, I would have honestly told you that I could have married Giselle later on. I felt something with her that I never had with anyone else. Now, I can honestly tell you that I could never marry her.
Was I just lying before? No, I honestly thought I could marry her.
So what changed? She didn’t. I did.
I learned more about myself. By doing so, I also learned about her and what I wanted and needed out of a relationship. I was not getting it and she was too stubborn to change. I thought I knew, but I didn’t. I was almost ready to make the biggest decision in life and though I was 100% confident in my decision, it was still the wrong decision. I was only able to make that better decision for myself because I learned about myself.
Similarly, people tend to think they know the best for themselves in their lives without knowing themselves. The truth is you can’t. You can rationalize your decisions by saying how right they feel or how much logical sense they make, but you simply just can’t know without knowing yourself.
Most of these people have been in school their entire lives and never lived in the real world where you can really learn about yourself. With classes and work dominating their time, most don’t even have the free time to take a breathe let alone work on themselves. Over the years they do get a little more mature, but only in the sense that they are not as bad as they were in high school.
Unless you consciously make the decision to know yourself, you often just get caught up in the busyness of life and never do. People who go on to intensive graduate programs like law school and med school have it even worse because they are continuing the same unhealthy behavior of not having time to work on themselves. Serial daters (people always in a relationship) are also bad because they’ve never learned to grow by themselves outside of the crutch of a relationship. The worst people to marry at this age are serials daters in graduate programs. They have never had the time to know themselves and have never lived life by themselves. It’s the ultimate double whammy.
Who you marry is quite literally the biggest decision of your life. When you get married, you choose someone to spend the rest of your life with. It no longer becomes “my life” but “our life”. You and that other person come together to become one. Everything you owned is now only 50% yours. On top of that, marriage brings children, your legacy on this Earth and the only thing that will remain when you are gone.
When a marriage ends, half your life goes away. Your money, your possessions, your children, everything you put into it comes undone. No other decision do you have such control over, yet still has such power in your life.
So then, if people are not really ready, why do they get married or stay in relationships/marriages?
It’s predictable irrationality at its basic: the classic case of escalation of commitment.
Business, politics, economics, psychology, and philosophy scholars all study it. Escalation of commitment is a term used to describe a common judgment error that occurs with people. It is when you justify an increased investment in something because you have already invested so much even though the additional investment may be not be beneficial at all.
Essentially, your commitment continues to escalate even though it logically should not. Your previous investment skews your judgment. Not wanting to lose it, you continue to invest even though you shouldn’t. You’re just “throwing good money after bad”.
Sadly, this is what most marriages come from, especially at younger ages. Two people have been together for a while and instead of endings things because it is the right thing to do they get married because it is that “next logical step”. It’s that next investment they must make to stop from losing everything they’ve put into the relationship.
I don’t agree with that way of thinking. I don’t believe you should ever marry someone because you feel that you have to, that it’s “just the next step” or because you are simply afraid to lose what you’ve already put into that relationship. You should marry someone when you realize they complete your life. But how can you know they do that if you do not know yourself enough to know what completes you?
So when do you marry? When you realize you deserve better, are in the perfect relationship and the stars align (ie: locations, jobs, money, etc…).
