Over the last week, thousands of words on the Internet have been dedicated to discussing the topic of marriage — specifically the ideal point in a woman’s life for her to marry, if there is one ideal point.
Princeton alum Susan Patton argued in a letter-to-the-editor published in The Daily Princetonian on March 29 that women (or at least Ivy League women) should be searching for husbands on their college campuses, which elicited a whole series of responses. And on April 1, Julia Shaw wrote an essay on Slate about her marriage at age 23. She argued:
“Sometimes people delay marriage because they are searching for the perfect soul mate. But that view has it backward. Your spouse becomes your soul mate after you’ve made those vows to each other in front of God and the people who matter to you. You don’t marry someone because he’s your soul mate; he becomes your soul mate because you married him.”
The HuffPost asked the female editors in the newsroom — some married, some single, one engaged — to weigh in on the question. Should women be getting married young? And is asking that question problematic to begin with?
Annemarie Dooling, Senior Community Editor, age 29:
At a bridal event in Manhattan, a smiling Sylvia Weinstock told me, “There is no perfect time to get married. You get married when you are in love.” That was five years ago, the weekend after I got engaged. Three years later, I finally tied the knot with the man I’ve been with since college. Why did it take me so long to finally set the date? Sylvia may have been right that there is no perfect time to get married, but there is a perfect time to make substantial life plans, and romance aside, there are a lot of logistics that go into creating a partnership in the new millennium.
I would have been content to play house for another eight years if not for family and peer pressure. The Slate article maintains the opinion that you need to walk down the aisle to have a life partner, and that just isn’t true, regardless of age, but it does take a certain amount of life experience to figure out how to be half of a whole.
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