Many if not most dating couples seem to believe that getting married is the natural course of life. You grow up, graduate high school, go to college or get a job, meet and fall in love with Mr. or Ms. Right, get engaged, get married, start a family. Just like that, botta bing botta boom. Even if only one partner wants to get married, the pressure is on to get married anyway and start having babies because well, it just seems to be the natural next step in life. Right?

One of the most alarming questions I have ever received was from a young woman in her mid-twenties asking me to give her advice on how to make her boyfriend propose and marry her, because “he won’t commit”. After I declined to give her a list of things she could do to get a proposal from her boyfriend, she decided the best thing for her to do was to get pregnant on purpose and then propose to her boyfriend.

There are sites on the web that tell women of all ages a whole variety of underhanded ways to get their boyfriend to propose marriage, even when the poor guy has clearly stated his reasons for not wanting to get married quite yet or ever. Some girls want to get married for very strange and immature reasons (the wrong reasons), and will go to great lengths to figure out how to get him to propose anyway.

My advice is for the men who don’t want or plan to get married anytime soon, but their girlfriend is pressuring them into getting married. Don’t have sex, use protection or, better yet, Run! Feeling trapped into marriage is not a place you guys want to be, so if you’re dating a girl and feel you’re too young to get married or you’re not using condoms to protect against pregnancy, you’re setting yourself up for heartache.

Should You Get Married?

Before you marry, or before you even consider the idea of proposing marriage to your girlfriend or boyfriend regardless of age and level of maturity, the most important question dating or engaged couples should ask themselves is, Why get married or, Why should we get married? Are you ready for marriage at this stage in your life? Are you planning a marriage or just a wedding? Are you too young to get married? Do you know the reasons why you should or shouldn’t get married? Do you know the right and wrong reasons to get married? How do you know for sure that he or she is “the one” you want to spend the rest of your life being married to?

Any married person, including parents, grandparents, friends, coworkers and family that tells you that being married doesn’t change anything is absolutely out of their mind. Marriage changes a lot. There is a reason why wedding ceremonies include the words “for better or worse” right before the marrying couple share their momentous kiss, thus sending the happy newly married couple into what is supposed to be wedded bliss to “live happily ever after”.

Marriage Preparation Courses

If you decide you are ready and willing to get married to your significant other, one of the most important things both of you should do together during the wedding planning activities is premarital counseling. If you are planning to be married by a minister or clergyman, or you are planning to have your wedding in a church, synagogue, mosque or temple, the questions premarital counselors ask engaged couples will help ensure a successful marriage that lasts a lifetime. Or, you may be helped to realize you are planning to marry the wrong person and need to break off the engagement, cancel the wedding and/or run for your life.

Premarital counseling by an officiating minister, or marriage preparation courses for Christian couples (Catholic, Lutheran, Methodist, Protestant, Non-Denominational etc) who are planning a wedding in the near future should put pre-marriage counseling at the top of your To-Do list.

There are hundreds of verrry personal questions couples who are seriously dating or are already engaged need to ask themselves and each other before the wedding day arrives, not just 10 or 20 questions. Marriage is a serious commitment, so it is vitally important that you take your time thinking about and answering the counselors questions about marriage and your relationship.

Be sure to take the Myers Briggs Personality Test, commonly referred to as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, which tests 16 different personality types for compatibility in marriage and family relationships. If your minister or counselor doesn’t suggest the Myers-Briggs test, be sure to ask that arrangements be made where both of you are given the quiz at the beginning of your counseling sessions. The Myers/Briggs test results can be a real eye-opener, helping couples learn things about their husband or wife-to-be that may surprise/shock you.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of books, premarital workbooks and workshops couples can do together, along with completing questionnaires and quizzes that help determine your readiness for marriage. Pre-marriage books are especially helpful if you’re not having a minister officiate your wedding, but are planning to get married by a judge or justice of the peace.

In order to make sure couples don’t regret getting married after the engagement parties, wedding and reception are all over with, dating and engaged couples must understand that getting married for the wrong reasons can quickly lead to an unhappy marriage full of resentment, disappointment and ultimately divorce. Couples who do not prepare for marriage properly, or are simply too young and immature to get married, often learn the hard way that getting married, being married and being happily married for a lifetime are entirely different from what they imagined marriage to be like.

Books on Marriage

You can find many before marriage questions in the book 1001 Questions to Ask Before You Get Married by Monica Leahy. Other books with similar questions to consider are The Hard Questions:100 Essential Questions to Ask Before You Say “I Do” by Susan Piver and 101 Questions to Ask Before You Get Engaged by Norm H. Wright.

Three more books to consider are There Goes the Bride: Making Up Your Mind, Calling it Off and Moving On by Rachel Safier, A Handbook for Engaged Couples by Alice and Robert Fryling, as well as the essential Getting Ready for Marriage Workbook by Jerry Hardin and Dianne Sloan.

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• Do Men Want To Get Married? Top Ten Reasons Why Men Don’t Want To Get Married

Do men want to get married, or not? “Do Men Really Want to Get Married” is the question being discussed in a CNN article about whether the stereotypical belief that men are dragged off to the altar to get married kicking and screaming is true or not. CNN reporter, Alex Wallen, claims to have interviewed dozens of men on how they approached marriage, where these men admitted that they had “fantasized about popping the question, getting married, even having a wedding.”

Wallen reports that numerous men reported having a “light-switch” moment when they decided they should get married to their significant other. Examples given include a life-altering event, such as one man who suddenly realized his love for his girlfriend when she helped him deal with the death of his father; or it might be something as simple as having so much fun playing arcade games together that you can’t imagine yourself having this much fun with anyone else. One man decided it was time to get married when he became angry and balled-up his fists when another man made a pass at his then-girlfriend.

“Real men are perceived as committing “till death do us part” for the wrong reasons — they marry out of convenience or under duress, and they acquiesce, kicking and screaming all the way to the altar”, according to the article. If recent statistics are correct, men are choosing to marry later in life, with the average age being 28 before experiencing their “ah ha” moment, which is a good thing. Nevertheless, there are still many young men and women getting married too young, and far too many couples get married for the wrong reasons and end up regretting it later.

According to one survey claiming men DO want to get married, married men reported positive feelings about being married, with 94% saying they were happier married than single, and 73% reported their sex lives were better. Of the single men included in the study, 53 percent said they were not interested in getting married anytime soon, saying “at this stage in my life I want fun and freedom”, while 47 percent said they wouldn’t get married until they could afford to own a home.

“Of the 1,010 men aged 25-34 who were surveyed, 569 were married. Of that group, 81 percent said they got married “because it was the right time to settle down.” The desire to have children was a major factor for 35 percent; only 15 percent said they married sooner than they wished because of pressure from their partner.”

Why Men Don’t Want To Get Married

Another study was conducted by the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University of 60 single, heterosexual men of different backgrounds, between the ages of 25-33. The project results revealed the top ten reasons why men won’t commit, or don’t want to get married.

1. They can get sex without marriage more easily than in times past.
2. They can enjoy the benefits of having a wife by cohabitating rather than marrying.
3. They want to avoid divorce and its financial risks.
4. They want to wait until they are older to have children.
5. They fear that marriage will require too many changes and compromises.
6. They are waiting for the perfect soul mate and she hasn’t appeared yet.
7. They face few social pressures to marry.
8. They are reluctant to marry a woman who already has children.
9. They want to own a house before they get a wife.
10. They want to enjoy single life for as long as possible.

These findings may not be what women want to hear or believe, but relationship experts agree with the results of the study. Audrey Chapman, author of Getting Good Loving and Man Sharing, agrees with the study’s detailed findings that the sexual revolution hasn’t exactly helped women wanting to get married in their search for finding a husband.

• “All that stuff that grandma said about `Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?’ is true. Women are making it too easy for men. They’re giving sex away.”

• “Now that there’s more competition, women think that sex is the ticket to get a man when in fact it’s a sure fire way not to get him at all,” Chapman reveals.

• “When men get lonely, all they have to do is call up one of their many women. And they call the one that they’re going to be able to spend the night with.”

• “She says that nowadays it is common for many men to have a variety of women to cater to their various needs, including sex, companionship, conversation and even meals. “Men can get all the comforts they need without making it legal.”

It’s interesting that Steve Harvey’s book, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, says much the same thing but it’s not what women interested in planning their wedding want to hear. It’s not about getting someone to marry you; love and marriage is not a game. It’s about finding the right person, at the right time and under the right circumstances so the marriage will be lifelong. Maybe some men don’t want to get married, now or ever. I would venture to say that there are women who also don’t want to get married and never will.

Wilmington, DE, psychologist Dr. Alvin L. Turner says, “As children, men don’t fantasize about being married–girls do. It takes a while for us to begin to appreciate that marriage is valuable for us and not just for women. It’s easy to see that marriage happens when you fall in love with someone, but even then many men will marry because they want to keep the woman from marrying someone else. So it becomes a way of protecting their investment basically rather than looking at it as something that’s valuable for themselves.”

William July II, author of “Understanding the Tin Man: Why So Many Men Avoid Intimacy” says this to women: “I can’t emphasize enough how important it is for women to accept the point at which a man says he currently is in his life because that determines his entire outlook on everything. If he’s ready, marriage sounds great. If he’s not, it sounds like a prison sentence. It’s better to couple with a man who feels ready than to try to ‘make ready’ a man.”

What about you? If you are a married man, what was your “ah ha” moment where you knew you wanted to get married to your girlfriend? If you are a single man, what are your thoughts on marriage? Ladies, what do you think about the idea that men really don’t want to get married but feel pressured in various ways to tie the knot?

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