The Fascinating Research That Can Land You The Husband Of Your Dreams

The Marrying Kind

WHEN BETH, one of my better researchers, said that men who were averse to commitment were drawn to her like bees to honey, I gave her a copy of the summary report of my research on "why men marry." The report showed that the primary reason a man asks one woman to marry and not another is that each woman treats him differently.

After looking it over for about fifteen minutes, Beth returned the report to my desk and told me I was a male chauvinist.

I was taken aback for a moment. I was fond of Beth and trying to help her, so after I recovered, I asked her what made her think that.

She said, "You reinforce the myth that the reason men don't commit is that the women in their lives do something wrong. That's nonsense. In most cases, it's the man in a relationship who decides he isn't ready or doesn't want to get married, and he makes this decision without any help from the woman.

No matter what some women do, there are certain men who are never going to commit. Unless you recognize that, you've missed the whole point. If you want to do women a real service, help us identify those losers before we get involved with them."

After telling Beth that more than three hundred women had worked with me on the marriage research and not one had made the comment she just offered, I apologized. I had to admit she had a point. My interviews with single men had shown there were men who would not commit. Beth was also right when she said that if I could help women identify which men were more likely to commit, I would be performing a real service. As a reward for her insight, I put her in charge of the project.

Looking for Mr. Right

My researchers approached this project the same way we had others. First, Beth reviewed the literature and research we had on file. With this in mind, I reviewed our interviews with men and women who were planning to marry and videos of two focus groups we had run with single men. We then broadened the study by surveying and then running focus groups of single men who at that time had no intention of getting married. At first, we had young single men do the interviews, but so many of the interviewees gave macho answers that we doubted their reliability. In fact, we threw out the entire study and started again.

The second time we tried teams composed of men and women, but that produced mainly politically correct answers, which we also questioned. Finally, we had men in their sixties ask the questions, and that solved the problem. The responses they elicited were generally straightforward. The single men apparently did not feel an obligation to give these interviewers macho or politically correct answers.

Is He Old Enough to Marry?

This survey uncovered some interesting facts. The first was that there is an age when a man is ready to marry-the Age of Commitment. The age varies from man to man, but there are patterns that are easily identified:

• Most men who graduate from high school start thinking of marriage as a real possibility when they are twenty-three or twenty-four.

• Most men who graduate from college don't start considering marriage as a real possibility until age twenty-six.

• When men go to graduate school, it takes them longer to get into the working world, and they're not ready to get married until a few years after that.

• Ninety percent of men who have graduated from college are ready for the next step between ages twenty-six and thirty-three; this is when they are most likely to consider marriage. But this window of opportunity stays open only for four to five years, and then the chances a man will marry start to decline.

• A majority of college graduates between twenty-eight and thirty-three are in their high-commitment years and likely to propose.

• This period for well-educated men lasts just a bit over five years. The chances men will commit are sightly less when they are thirty-one or thirty-two than when they were between twenty-eight and thirty, but they're still in a high-commitment phase.

• Once men reach thirty-three or thirty-four, the chances they'll commit start to diminish, but only slightly. Until men reach thirty-seven, they remain very good prospects.

• After age thirty-eight, the chances they will ever marry drop dramatically.

• The chances that a man will marry for the first time diminish even more once he reaches forty-two or forty-three. At this point, many men become confirmed bachelors.

• Once men reach age forty-seven to fifty without marrying, the chances they will marry do not disappear, but they drop dramatically.

Still, there is no one-to-one correlation. For example, when a man goes to law school, which takes three additional years, he usually starts considering marriage around age twenty-seven or twenty-eight. That's also the age when most doctors, who spend four years in medical school and at least one year as an intern, start seriously thinking about marriage.

The single men we interviewed explained that when they get out of school and get a job and start making money, new possibilities open to them. For the first time, a majority of them have some independence. All of a sudden, they have a nice car and an apartment and an income. They're reluctant to even consider marriage for a few years, because they want to sow their wild oats. Many look at time spent as a carefree bachelor as a rite of passage. So for the first few years that they're on their own, their primary goal is having fun, which translates into dating without any serious thoughts about marriage.