Young People Should Date for Marriage

By the time we feel ready to commit, we’ve spent a decade practicing how not to.

Credit: Enya Kamadolli

The first time that I told my family that I only date for marriage, my father’s eyebrows flew up, my mother had to put her tea cup back down, and my brother’s mouth opened before mine closed. 

They all found that declaration rather worrying, and for good reason. 

I’m surprised someone like you would want something that traditional, ventured my father. He may not believe that women should ever pay for dinner, but he’s quietly proud that he’s raised a daughter who demands to, anyway. The little girl intent on conquering the world had grown up into an unabashedly liberated young woman, and dating for marriage seemed to betray the arc of my own becoming.  

You’re too young for that, admonished my mother. My mother and I are more alike than either of us would like to admit, and I saw in her eyes a longing to tell her younger self to stave off settling down for as long as possible. 

God, what sort of men are you attracting saying things like that? My brother Aeden looked like he wanted to sprinkle me with spiced kombucha and plaster feminist literature across my forehead to ward off the chino-clad, regular-at-church, trad men he was imagining. He’s holding out hope that one of these days I might actually date a woman. 

We often equate dating for marriage with a socially conservative outlook—one that upholds the family as the cornerstone of a virtuous life and disapproves of casual dating or sex. To be a social liberal is to have liberal amounts of flings and casual relationships during one’s twenties, apparently. 

But really there are plenty of young fellow social liberals that do hope to have a happy marriage someday. 

Anyone who considers marriage an eventual priority should start dating with that end in mind right now. In fact, the costs of not doing so are arguably higher for those of us who seek modern, egalitarian partnerships than for those pursuing more traditional ones. Without the templates of prescriptive gender roles or shared religious doctrines to guide us, identifying a truly compatible partner demands far more trial and error. 

Divorce rates scream a humbling truth: we’re often not skilled at finding the right person—or at staying right for them. The best way to build conviction that someone is your right choice and the best way to learn how to be their ideal life partner is to date—and date seriously—for several years. Even serious relationships that fail teach us so much about what it takes to live a successful partnered life and determine what we’re looking for (and what we’re hoping to avoid) in a life partner. 

One of my older cousins recently got married after an eight-year-long relationship. She and her husband have the sort of relationship that even atheists pray for. I asked her once why she had waited so long to walk down the aisle. If someone’s the right person for you, you don’t lose anything by waiting to get married. But if someone’s not the right person for you, there are huge costs to rushing. 

Wrapped up in all our worries about what we might lose when we commit to a serious relationship at the onset of young adulthood, we ignore the costs that we’re pushing onto our future selves—namely, the risk of committing to a marriage that we are ill-suited and underprepared for, one that is doomed to fail from the start. 

If you spend your twenties running around the world with people that you know you’re not going to marry, the likelihood that you rush to the altar into your thirties is much higher. If you start dating to marry only when you’re ready to tie the knot, it might be too late. You’re an individual who has yet to learn how to be a serious partner, searching—frantically, if you want to start a family by a certain age—without knowing what you’re hoping to find. 

It takes years to unlearn the individualistic reflexes that sabotage serious relationships. You can’t spend your twenties perfecting the art of self-prioritization and then expect to abandon self-interest the moment the right person appears. A successful marriage needs far more than two individuals—it needs two people who have learned how to make a union greater than the sum of its parts. 

Yet, the “flip-switch” mentality is everywhere. There are the people you date for fun in your early 20s—the lore will outlast their stay—and there are the people that you date when you want to start settling down, we’re told. In Privilege, an account of his Harvard undergraduate days, Ross Douthat recalls a college crush telling him “I'm sorry—I could see myself marrying you. I could. But I don't know if I could see us dating right now. Does that make any sense?” We’ve forgotten that the two pools (those you date in your twenties and those you marry) can and do overlap all the time—in fact, finding someone who falls in the middle of the Venn diagram should be the goal. 

My father and my best friend’s mother are more pessimistic. Even if you’re thinking about your future with someone right now, boys aren’t thinking that way, even if they think they are. While I was healing from my most recent heartbreak, my father advised me that men aren’t emotionally mature enough to have serious relationships until they’re 25, and that perhaps I should just swear off serious relationships until then. Similarly, every corner of the internet warns me that guys just marry whoever they’re with when they’re ready to get married. At least some of the men that I’ve dated are compelling evidence against the above parental wisdom, but many of them prove my father and my best friend’s mother right. 

What dating for marriage asks of you is hard, no matter your gender or emotional maturity. How do I know who my future self will want to marry when I don’t yet know my future self? 

We live in a world that increasingly pushes us to make predictions about our future selves earlier and earlier. Many of us try to create ordered lives that are older than we are, including in the romantic realm. When we’re young, serious relationships can look like playing house before we’re actually ready to run a household together. 

In this way, dating with the future in mind can be dangerous. The imagined idyllic family life ahead can become a mirage that keeps you trudging forward, and in perpetually looking forward, you forget to look down at the ground you’re standing on. The fantasy of a shared future might blind you to the reality of an unfulfilling present. 

Dating for marriage is not, and should not be understood as, dating for potential. We should not tolerate dissatisfaction in the present for the promise of an uncertain happy future—if only because our present happiness is predictive of the happiness of our future selves. 

To date for marriage, then, is to honor both your present self and your future self. A relationship worth pursuing is one that makes you happy in the present and holds the promise of happiness and fulfillment years down the line. Don’t waste your time dating people you know you’ll never marry, and don’t waste your time dating people who have promised you the future but can’t show up in the present. Date the middle of the Venn diagram.