. . . You enter a certain amount of madness when you marry a person with pets, but I didn't care. When Charlie and I were married, I was 25 years and 11 months old, and I was such a ninny I thought: Thank God I'm getting married now, before I'm 26 and washed up.
Nora Ephron, Heartburn
I was chatting with my late-married friend about the modern orthodox "dating crisis," and she said that 25 is considered the threshold. To be honest, it was the same for me. A quarter-life crisis, if you will.
Even though we are living, longer better lives now, with the means to keep ourselves perfectly preserved well into our 40s, we better be with our life partner by 25. It's all doom from there.
Ephron's point is: sure, you could theoretically get married to beat an imagined deadline. But don't expect it to be everything you've dreamed of. You can't get both—unless it's a rom-com where she realizes the guy she can't stand that she's been fake-dating for some ridiculously mutual beneficial reason is her soulmate.
Keep in mind, since relationships involve two people, in order to coax a man into a proposal for the purpose of "settling" probably involves some acting on her part: fake laughter at his bad jokes, batting eyelashes, "I love your mother!" There would be no authenticity. It's kinda hard to maintain duplicity in the long run.
If one's goal is to "just be married," that's fine! But we "just being married" is not the goal for a lot of people.
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