This matches my experience. Most of my male friends in their 20s, even if they do want to get married some day, do not want to get married any time soon. The women they’ve dated would just need to hang on and trust they’d get there eventually.
some flaws with this genre of cultural criticism
The major flaw with this genre of culture criticism is it places the blame of women not settling down or marrying solely on women, without any recognition that in order for a marriage to happen, there needs to be an agreement between two people.
As someone who encountered a lot of men who were openly ambivalent about marriage in their 20s, I'm just not convinced that the time delays we are seeing for average age of first marriage is entirely down to women.
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That and putting the blame on birth control. Yikes. There are other health-related reasons women take it, not just to avoid pregnancy having all the casual sex they want...
I must be an alien to these people because I have absolutely no interest in romance or marriage, and I am honestly living my best life. Sorry for enjoying the act of making art and stories instead of babies, I guess.
I felt this way until about 32, and then all of a sudden everyone around me started having babies. It was crazy and it seemed like every single woman within 5 years of me was pregnant. I got FOMO and I was obsessed with having like 5 kids for about 2 years, not because I really liked the idea of having a baby or even being married, but because I didn't want to not experience what everyone else was doing. At one point I even considered going it alone and visiting a sperm bank.
Luckily that settled down before I was able to do anything too stupid, but it was a very bizarre thing to experience.
It kind of goes with the "taxi cab theory" from sex and the city, where the idea is a man will wake up one day and decide he wants to marry and he just marries whoever he meets next.
That's wild! Besides my aversion to the idea of getting pregnant, the sheer thought of having a kid around almost 24/7 is enough to exhaust me. I don't envy parents, haha.
Yeah I am super introverted and honestly don't know if I have the patience or mental bandwidth to be a good parent. There are a lot of things that would have to align for me to pursue it. I am getting past the point of being a "geriatric pregnancy" so most likely time will be making that decision for me.