Personal aspirations and marriage later - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... Or, people might be marrying later because marriage has become too important for them to do so haphazardly (Regnerus & Uecker, 2011), especially considering the expenses of having children and maintaining a middle class status at the very least. Another little explored reason, nevertheless, is that people are marrying later, not only because they want to wait for their “perfect” match or for other pessimistic/optimistic reasons, but because they want to take care of their ambitions first. In other words, they want to settle the self, before settling down with another person. This paper investigates the reasons why people marry when they are adults already, instead of marrying during their teenage years. It includes examining the realities of those already married and the demographics they belong to. This paper aims to study if personal aspirations, particularly education, economic stability, and other personal endeavors, are powerful reasons to delay marriage. It examines both the attitudes of people who married later and those who plan to marry later. The main research question is: Do people with strong personal aspirations for college and better socioeconomic status marry later? Review of Literature People who are not satisfied with their socioeconomic status tend to be married later. Ghalili et al. (2012) examined the reasons for marriage, based on a survey on twenty-one young people of Isfahan. The sampling stressed that economic readiness is critical, followed by moral readiness. They wanted to have a stable financial condition because they think that wealth is important in raising families when married. This study shows the importance of economic stability in marriage. This paper infers that if people have not yet attained their target economic goals, then they are more likely to delay marriage. de Graaf and Kalmijn (2006) studied divorced cohorts in the Netherlands. They used a national survey with information from 1,356 divorces between 1942 and 1999. They learned that people with higher social class tend to stay married. This can be related to the understanding that when people are not satisfied with their financial conditions, they tend to be unhappy in marriage. Because of this belief, some people want to be settled first because they want a better financial standing that will prepare them for married life. Fujita (2008) noted that for Japanese men, they tend to get married when they are more settled in life, meaning they have better socioeconomic status. Some women, on the contrary, marry later when they have better socioeconomic conditions (Fujita, 2008, p.16). Zhang (1995) noted that men marry later when they have poor financial conditions. They cannot marry because they fear that they cannot provide for their families. These studies show the richness of data on married couples. For several individuals, marriage is something that concerns financial stability and to attain the latter first is significant in their marriage decisions. Financial ambitions persuade people to marry later. Theobald and Farrington (2011) showed that marriage has a protective effect for men. Married people tend to be less involved in crimes, according to their review of literature. Marriage is then something desirable on a social level, although some people want socioeconomic homogamy when finding their marriage partners. When teenage marriage or pregnancy is related to poverty, some people think that it will be better to marry when their in their twenties or ...Download file to see next pagesRead More