I turned 30 last week. In the midst of the many friends who came to
My story fits into general pattern. Age at marriage is up in the US and Europe. In
As an economist, I would say that this makes sense. As women become more educated, the “opportunity costs” of getting married and having kids are really high. In other words, the costs of foregone earnings and foregone independence are so high that women find it best to delay marriage and childbearing for later on in life. But this explanation has an obvious problem. The opportunity costs are lower early in a career rather than later. For example, for women who go to graduate school, it makes sense to have kids in grad school, when you have no income, rather than when you have the “dream job”! This is specially true for women who have supportive families and husbands, who can presumably help them with the responsibilities of raising a child.
As I think back on why I didn’t get married younger and have kids earlier, a rather long list of excuses comes to mind. In college it was too early to think of marriage. I hadn’t “found myself” yet. After college, I went to graduate school at Yale. It is hard to meet people when you are working as hard as I was. And when you are stressed out, you meet the wrong people. My relationships between college and the time that I met my husband were terrible and it is a blessing that they never led to marriage! I met my husband in my fifth year of my PhD. Two years into knowing him, I had to pack my bags and move to
My list of explanations seems unique to me, but most of my friends have similar stories. They were working really hard or studying really hard, they were in the “wrong relationships” for a long time, they had to move from city or country to another for work and the relationship could not last, and so on…… At the heart of all these stories is not only a similarity about "high opportunity cost", but also a more subtle pattern: We have taken a long time to grow up. For nearly a decade after college, most of us are still growing and leaning, trying to build character, build credentials, find the “perfect” job, the “perfect” man, etc. In this age of internships, study abroad, volunteering for a year, then grad school, law school, business school or medical school, we somehow wait a long time to take on real responsibilities. We stay financially dependent on our parents well into our late 20s and postpone real life. A certain “arrogance of youth” sets in when we convince ourselves that there will be plenty of time for marriage, family, etc later on in life.
The biggest challenge for me and all those women out there who marry late is whether after a spending a decade completely focused on ourselves, our accomplishments, our careers and our needs, we even have the qualities we need to set up a home and be good wives, mothers and care-takers more generally? For most of us, certain dreams---like that of being a young parent---may be kind of over, but there are others (like having a happy home, a happy marriage and so on) that can still be attained. Making those dreams work out will take qualities like patience, tolerance and the ability to make sacrifices that we never really learned when we were in school, volunteering, studying abroad, traveling abroad, and making interesting friends and working hard on the careers that we thought would define our lives. I hope we can either learn new skills quickly! If we can pull it off, we will be amazingly high-achieving women who also have happy homes, and that is an enormous accomplishment that would make us and our parents proud. Not sharing our 30th birthdays with our future children would likely be a sacrifice that is worth it. If we can't pull this off, I am unsure of where we would have ended up. I for one will wonder whether I messed up somewhere and whether my parents, who never had any of the opportunities I had, are better off than I am.
