Why Are Women Still Getting Married?
Marriage wasn’t something I was bothered about. Then the invitations started arriving.
By Michaela McGuire
Illustration by Eirian Chapman
One of my earliest memories, the embarrassing clarity of which I can still recall, was a conversation I had with my mother when I was four-years-old. We were driving home after a special day that she’d planned, just for the two of us. My youngest brother was weeks away from arriving, and Mum explained that because she wouldn’t have as much time to spend with me while the new baby was very small, she wanted us to have a mother-daughter day. We went to a local fete, then to the cinema to see The Little Mermaid. Afterwards, in the car, I announced very seriously that I was only going to marry a man who wore a white shirt and black pants, just like Prince Eric. I don’t remember if I was imagining my wedding day or if I expected my future husband to be dressed for the ceremony the day we met and never get changed again. The white shirt and the black pants were very important. My mother smiled wryly and told me it didn’t matter what a man wore.
Until very recently, the last wedding I attended was as an 11-year-old. Throughout most of my twenties, acquaintances and distant friends bemoaned entire weekends lost at Amazing Race-themed hens parties, while my close friends — most of them in long-term relationships, many with children, some of them gay — couldn’t have felt further removed from such activities. It just didn’t seem likely that they’d suddenly decide to get married. It wasn’t something I planned on being bothered about and, in the fleeting moments that I did give it thought, I assumed that most of my friends felt the same. Then the invitations started arriving: perfect squares of thick paperstock, specially commissioned watercolour drawings and the calligraphed, all-caps names of couples inviting me to “join them to celebrate” crowded my letterbox seemingly every other month. Whether time had gotten away from me or had finally caught up didn’t matter: the shape of its shadow was the same.
This phenomenon started halfway through my 29th year. The median age for Australian women to get married is 29.5 years, so my friends are, it seems, right on trend — a trend that sees Australians putting marriage off. In 1975, the median age of first marriage was just 21 for women, and the median has risen from 24 to 31.5 for men over the same period. That’s for those who choose to marry, but we’re also marrying less overall: today, married households in Australian has dropped to 48 per cent, a record low. The reasons for this are obvious: de facto relationships aren’t equated with “living in sin” any more and now come with more legal protections than they once did; women, having made huge advances in education and employment, don’t need to be married; and don’t even need a relationship to have children, (and many are choosing not to have children at all). Which is to say that fewer weddings are easy to explain. Much harder to fathom, for me, was the stream of invitations suddenly encroaching on my life. Plenty of women — women who are feminists, who understand the oppressive origins of marriage, who disagree with much of its wording and traditions, and who support marriage equality — are still choosing to get married. I decided to contact sent an email to everyone who had ever sent me a ‘Save the Date’ email (and plenty more besides), and asked them why they think women still get married.
Some of this, I already knew. I remember my strict, Catholic grandfather well enough that my mother’s answer — that “it was an unvoiced expectation of my upbringing” to get married — didn’t surprise me. I didn’t know that one of my friends sat down to watch a reality TV show about weddings, “and without realising what I was doing, I opened a new spreadsheet on my laptop and started making a guest list for my own wedding. Even though I wasn’t getting married. Like a crazy person.” She did the only sensible thing. “I confessed to my partner what I had done and told him that we should probably get married, because that would downgrade my behaviour from frankly mad to sensible. And that is honestly why we got engaged. Shaky ground for a marriage, arguably, but so far we haven’t gotten divorced.”
In high school English, a teacher gave me a rule of thumb to help me sort out my Shakespeare: If everyone dies in the end it’s a tragedy, if everyone gets married, it’s a comedy. A similar rule of thumb is still in play across modern-day pop culture. In movies and sitcoms and songs, there is no more concise shorthand for living happily ever after than signing off the story with a wedding. When I want to escape from the world, I lock myself away in a dark room and binge watch hyperdramas, the type of expensive but terrible American television championed by Shonda Rhimes that neatly elides Shakespeare’s dichotomy of tragedy and comedy. It’s more-or-less guaranteed that by the end of the session I would have seen a marriage or two. What is the cumulative effect on a woman’s subconscious, the trope of the wedding as the narrative panacea to the story of a life?
Another friend, currently mired in planning her special day, describes feeling “like I’d been punched in the chest,” the first time she saw her fiancé try on a wedding ring in a jewelery store. “I wasn’t expecting to be moved like that, but I teared up with emotion. A gold ring on that finger, a marker on the man I loved, like I’d pissed up his leg and he was mine, mine, mine!” Others apparently decided to get married because the language that exists to describe unmarried couples didn’t feel adequate: “I couldn’t call him my ‘boyfriend’ any more, it felt absurd. ‘Partner’ was too bland. ‘Husband’ felt just right.’”
Another recently married friend says she had never pictured being married, but “just had this real feeling that I wanted my loved ones to come and witness and celebrate our marriage.” Like all respondents to my email, she is under no illusions that a wedding certificate will drastically alter the state of her relationship. Achieving a higher plane of intimacy is not something they’re striving for or expecting. “I felt I wanted to make that official commitment,” she said. “I don’t need a piece of paper or a ring to be committed, but there was something about making vows and transitioning to being married that felt important.”
I turned 16 the same year that my parents separated, and for my birthday my mother gave me her wedding band. I’ve lost the card that came with it, and can’t remember the exact sentiment that she hoped the ring would evoke, but when I look down at the simple white gold band now I think: Love is possible. It’s the grand idea that’s important, not the small details.
A twice-married friend in her forties told me that, “It’s kind of old fashioned and uncool to be married or want to be married these days. I wanted to be married. I felt that it was something that I had witnessed a lot of people getting wrong or failing at, as a child, and I wanted the chance to do it right.”
Twenty years after I first watched The Little Mermaid, I met a man wearing a white shirt and black pants and who began proposing to me several times a day within a matter of weeks. I hadn’t yet agreed to be his girlfriend, and he joked that he’d better start trying to wear me down now. Four years later, the likelihood of us ever getting married seems more remote with each of the thousands of variations of proposals.
One of my friends told me that she doesn’t like that weddings seem very much ‘for other people.’ Other people’s invitations are currently stuck all over my fridge, and I smile whenever another arrives in the post. My boyfriend and I love attending each and every one of them, but we spend our time imagining a life, not a wedding.
We’ve painted vivid descriptions of our life in progress: the balmy nights we’ll spend as 70-year-olds getting quietly drunk on Greek wine, how many cats we’ll have when we’re 50, the library that we’ll fill with our own books. Marriage wouldn’t change any of that.
