It's True — Men Don't Marry For Love, They Marry The Woman In Front Of Them (& It's A Good Thing)
Women do it, too, you know.
Yuri Cazac / shutterstock Earlier today, I was told about a popular TikTok in which a young woman rants about the fact that men only get married because of timing.
I watched it twice. She was so indignant that she had learned this ‘fact’ that she worked herself, and I am sure her viewers, up into a frenzy.
My reaction? This young woman is talking about something that she knows nothing about.
I was married when I was 28 and my husband was 29. We had been together for 5 years and marriage was the logical next step.
I loved him, he was wicked smart, we had a lot of fun together and I really wanted redheaded babies. When he asked me to marry him, I did so without hesitation.
We had a legendary wedding — as weddings were back in the day when they were all about the booze and the music — and I was ridiculously happy. He was too. We rode off into the sunset — showered in birdseed — to start our lives together.
We honeymooned in Bermuda. We drank rum and had sex and drove mopeds around the island. It was a wonderful break after the chaos of the wedding planning and the wedding itself.
One afternoon, I turned to my husband and asked him how we found each other. His response was — “It’s all about the timing.”
In the retelling of this story, I have often stated, for effect, that I should have known at that moment that our marriage wouldn’t last. I mean, how unromantic.
Now, I know differently. Now I know that I got married because of timing, too, and that it wasn't a bad thing.
I was married for 20 years. We had 2 kids, raising them in Maine, Tokyo, and Boulder. We celebrated Christmases, birthdays, and anniversaries. We took vacations with our kids and without them. We had a very fulfilling marriage and a wonderful family and we were happy.
Our marriage did run its course, for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here, and we did divorce but one thing that I know, definitively, is that WE, meaning both of us, got married because of timing.
The other thing that I know, definitively, is that just because we got married because of timing it doesn’t mean that we didn’t love each other and that our courtship or marriage or the family we built should be devalued in any way.
I remember before I was married. I thought I knew everything there was to know about relationships and marriages and parenting. Honestly, I had no idea.
I had to experience it all to learn it and I made many mistakes along the way.
It does worry me that people who haven’t actually been married are condemning people, namely men, in broad strokes for some idea that is bopping around the internet.
This plants ideas in the minds of idealistic young women who will now be forever fearful of why a man might be choosing to marry them.
I am not the only one in my circle who got married because of timing.
In fact, most of my friends, men, and women alike got married because other people were getting married. They also wanted to have babies, and not so much because theirs was the greatest love story of all time.
And, to be honest, many of those people are divorced but more of them are still married, happily married.
Just because they got married because the time was right it doesn’t mean that they didn’t get their happily ever after.
So, don’t be influenced by people who judge others for why they might choose to get married, and don’t distrust the motivations of your man. People get married for different reasons, including timing, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a whole lot of love and hope for the future, no matter what the reason might be.
Mitzi Bockmann is a certified life and relationship coach. She has over ten years of experience in helping people find happiness in life and love.