Despite the rapid (and fortunate) diminishment of traditional gender roles in today’s young relationships and dating scene, many of us women, regardless of sexual orientation, still have “traditional” dreams of getting married. Certainly, there is nothing wrong with hoping for an intimate, committed relationship between two equals.
Yet, I do not think those of us who wish to someday be married should go about fulfilling this dream the way we ambitiously go after so much else. Our love lives do not belong in the color-coded world of our planners (except in the very pragmatic sense of penciling down a scheduled date if one wishes to do so). We should not check off relationship “milestones” like first dates, anniversaries, and even engagements with marriage as some final end goal. That is to say, I do not think we should “date to marry.”
There are many reasons I believe this. Probably the most simple reason I have is dating to marry places vastly unfair and unreachable expectations on potential partners and on oneself. No one, especially young college students, should ever feel as though they are auditioning to be someone’s husband or wife. Furthermore, no one needs to be stressing themselves out wondering if every person they date will someday be waiting for him or her at the end of the aisle.
Relatedly, dating to marry is highly unrealistic. I have heard questions posed such as, “Well, can you see him as a husband or father?” In regards to all the guys I have dated or talked to in college, I can almost always answer no to this question. This is not because I do not believe some of these guys will someday make wonderful husbands to other women.
Rather, this is because they are college boys right now. Like almost all students, they study, party, and laugh at ridiculous memes. The idea of them as husbands simply does not fit into my current calculus. However, sometimes my imagination, of course, goes a little rogue in this regard (surely this happens to many other people) and I do have to remind myself such thinking is not healthy for anyone involved. I hardly doubt guys are going around sizing up myself and my female classmates, judging whether or not we are “wifey” material.
Dating to marry, I think, also severely threatens to take the fun out of dating. Indeed, if one only dates people they think are “marriage material,” he or she misses out on some serious learning opportunities. I think many of us find ourselves liking people we know with almost certainty we will never marry. Even still, we may go for it. This is not because we are stupid or naïve. It is because that person is who we want to be with at the time even if we do not want to be with them for all of time. Dating does not always need to have some teleological goal.
Maybe our experiences with these “wrong” people (wrong for us — no person is “wrong” in of him or herself) will end with embarrassment. Maybe they will end with hurt. Maybe they will end with a good laugh and an even better story. All of these outcomes can lend themselves to great learning opportunities.
This is a frequently made point, but I do agree dating the “wrong” people, for lack of a better word, can help a person learn what they like and do not like. I used to have the image of my “ideal man” but this image has been challenged so many times as I have met more guys and learned more about myself. Standards are a good thing. Checklists, not based on experience but rather expectations, are limiting.
There is simply too much uncertainty in life and dating to definitively date to marry. There was a guy I was seeing my sophomore year. My friend at the time asked me if I saw myself having any future with him. When I told her I did not think so, she asked what the point was. In my opinion, however, there didn’t need to be a point. Just because I hadn’t seen a future with him didn’t mean I, with certainty, had no future with him. It didn’t mean he wasn’t worth a chance.
Certainly, there is the time in many serious relationships where both people realize they are with the person they want to marry (or so I have heard — this is not something I know from personal experience). Reaching this point, however, is rarely, if ever, planned. Dating should be about meeting interesting new people and not about some final object that involves a ring.
We should not be trying so hard to avoid the “wrong” people. After all, they could end up being the “right” people, if only for a certain time.
One can obviously hope to marry but this is something I believe should come naturally. The journey to finding the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, if that is indeed something you want out of life, will most likely entail some unexpected paths. Thus, I would say we should simply date to date and enjoy these unexpected paths for what they are.
