What does a woman’s age have to do with courtship?His logic is amply supported, if not turbo-charged, by the reported preferences of unmarried women as revealed in a recent British poll.
For a man who is managing the risks of courtship outlined above, the age of a woman is very important. The older a woman is, the more likely it is that she is very picky and/or not seriously looking for a husband. Older women also are less attractive from a courtship perspective because they have used up more of their most attractive/fertile years, and while their attractiveness for marriage has declined their expectations for courtship have only increased. In short, the older a woman gets the worse a bet she becomes (on average) when it comes to courting her.
There is another impact of women increasing the time period they expect courtship, and this is on men’s willingness to court younger women. Consider the 25% of current early thirties White women who still haven’t married; unless they are terminally unattractive an awful lot of courtship has almost certainly been wasted on them. They aren’t just bad bets for courtship today, but (in retrospect) they clearly were bad bets for courtship for the last 15 years. Even more telling, just shy of half of all late twenties White women have never married, which means five years ago 50% of early twenties White women were a complete and total waste of traditional courtship risk and resources. Given the direction of the trends over the last five years, the risk is even higher today.
Put simply, the extended delay of marriage by women has placed marriage minded men in a dilemma; older women are (generally speaking) known bad bets for courtship, but half of early twenties women are also poor bets for courtship. And this is before the man in question starts to consider which of the good bets for courtship (in general) would be a good bet for him personally to court.
"The proposal should be made approximately three years and four months into a relationship, after the couple have been living together for a while and after a number of discussions about marriage. But while girls like to have had a couple of 'deep and meaningfuls' about marriage, they also want the proposal to be a complete surprise and something their partner has given great thought to."
In other words, a man is expected to invest sufficient time to have four children in a woman before he even PROPOSES to her. Is there any wonder that even men who are interested in marriage can't be bothered to jump through the ever-increasing number of hoops that women have come to expect? How can any man rationally justify wasting years on a woman that he may not even marry?
It appears that women increasingly like the idea of postponing marriage and "having fun" in their twenties before "settling down" in their early thirties. And they assume that men must therefore think the same way. But the young men inclined toward marriage are learning that there is no point courting a woman with no intention of getting serious during the next 10 years; how many times is it reasonable to expect them to be told "no, I'm not interested" and still keep trying? Meanwhile, the young men less inclined toward marriage hit their thirties and discover that not only are there more young women in their twenties who just want to have fun being made every single day, but those women are actually more inclined to have fun with them than their predecessors were a decade before.
The reality is that six months is a sufficient period of time to determine whether a woman is marriage-worthy or not. If you require more time than to make up your mind, then you've already made up your mind and she is not worthy. If you have any genuine concern for her, have the decency to next her and move on to the next girl. Don't string her along for the additional 34 months it will otherwise take her to realize you have no intention of marrying her.
