Marriage Mondays: Single Girl Pressure vs. Married Girl Pressure

Here's something I've been thinking about for a while: the difference between being single and married. Specifically the difference in how you feel pressured to meet others' expectations. For instance, when you are single, people are dying to know when you are going to get married. They are always asking you if you're seeing someone or thinking about someone they could set you up with. It seems like all they care about is whether you will ever get married.

Until you do...then the pressure shifts. Now, it's when are you having a baby? When are you going to buy a house? When are you going to move out of the city and really settle down?

You go from not being taken seriously to being told that it's time to get serious. It doesn't make any sense either way. How anyone thinks their business is your business is beyond me, but the pressure is there nevertheless.

We don't get a lot of baby questions except from my father. Still, the expectations are there, even if they are not constant. About six months after getting married, we had someone tell us that they had a ton of baby stuff for us to use in the next couple of years. The irony was that that couple had waited almost a decade into their marriage to have kids.

Being single means people think they control your love life. Being married means people think they control your uterus...and your real estate choices. We are desperate to get out of our place and we'd love to buy a house, but we are open to a condo, too. And as I've said before, we're staying in the city. There are a lot of questions about where we'll move and how big a place we will get. Why, you ask? The secret hidden agenda is that they want to know if there will be room for a baby. Or will we move to the suburbs.

The truth is that we like our lives just the way they are. Sure, we'd settle for less work, but we like sleeping in and eating whenever and staying up late. We like it and for now, it's all we want. We're not opposed to kids, we're just not in any rush. When the time is right, we'll do what is right for us. I just get sick of the pressure to want to want kids, like, now. Right away. I'm pretty good at dealing with the questions when they hit (and they do, on average 1-2 times monthly, depending on who I talk to in that month), but it does get old. I guess the way to look at it is to just be happy someone cares enough to ask. Even if you've answered many, many times before. : )

Did you feel single girl pressure? Do you feel married girl pressure now? How do you deal with it?

Do you subscribe to Not the Marrying Kind? If not, you should! It's free and fun and it means you automatically get new posts when the blog is updated. No having to check back! Click here for more details!