Reply to My relationship advice: get an education, date only with an eye toward marriage, marry young (22-27)

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Reply to "My relationship advice: get an education, date only with an eye toward marriage, marry young (22-27)"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]AND no kids until you’ve been married for 5 years. Really get your spouses to see if they would make a good parent. Observe them.

The “marry young” part is for mutual wealth building. [/quote]

I did all that.  Got married at 24, worked on establishing our careers, planned to have kids around age 30, and navigated multiple job related relocations together.  Then we got divorced at age 30 which was stunning and upsetting to me because he left me for someone else.  I had just relocated to a mid-sized city in a red state with a major university because we both got good jobs here despite having some reservations. I had zero local support network when my marriage dissolved, and found it extremely hard to date as an educated professional woman in my 30s.  I made friends, but most of my friends have families since it is the sort of town where people settle down to have kids younger, and I just feel so sad about not having my own family sometimes.  Then the pandemic happened, and it was impossible for me to find a new job in my field because hiring froze during 2020-2021, and I was living alone in this town and dating got even weirder since people weren't socializing as much.  The politics also got completely unhinged over the past few years here, especially during the 2020 election and I have felt very alienated at times.

Eventually I did meet someone new. I am now almost 35 and just got remarried a few months ago.  We're relocating in a few months for a great new job opportunity.  I still badly want kids, but I needed to get a new job and won't have maternity benefits for another year, so I probably won't have my first until 36 or 37.  Meeting someone in my mid-30s put a ton more pressure on moving quickly, and it also put a ton of pressure on the relationship to need to search for a new job and put relocation on the table after we had really only been dating for a year.  Also, as a guy in his 30s, he really didn't viscerally understand the fertility crunch and wanted to have kids "sometime" so we had to work through all that. Planning for kids has been on my mind since age 25, since my ex and I thought about it multiple times after getting married but the timing was never right and we felt like we had plenty of time.  And yet I still don't have them.

So, sometimes life happens, and not as planned.  My divorce was very painful, and I still feel behind in life milestones because of it.  I wouldn't have made the same professional choices without my ex in my life, and while so far it seems to be working out ok, I still wonder what life would have been like had I not made certain compromises like moving to a town I don't love.  If I'm being honest, I'm not 100% sure that I didn't rush into my new marriage out of fear of that window to have a family closing, and I'm not always sure that is a good thing.

Anyway, anyone who thinks they have all the answers for how to navigate life is just wrong.  Divorce happens, as does illness, death, mental health crisis, and financial struggle. You can't plan for it all.[/quote]

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