To be 100% honest about kids/marriage intentions on first date?

You clearly have a very jaundiced view of a life you admit yourself you haven’t experienced and have zero knowledge of. If there is a ‘trend’ towards early marriage, it’s because yours is something of a broken generation, traumatised by Covid, missing out on normal developmental stages, afraid of the world, and retreating into the kind of apparent ‘safety’ represented by closing down as many freedoms as possible as early as possible. Good luck to you, obviously, but I think you’ll need it.

Op I did this when I was 21 at university. Told dh I was dating to marry and i didnt want to date if marriage was on the cards at some point. We married a year later and our first and only baby is due the same month as our 10 year wedding anniversary. I am a millennial.

No, you actually don't need to do that. Social conservatism is on the rise amongst Gen Z - I would know, I am a 23 year old who has been married to my 26 year old husband for two and a half years, and am now trying for my first baby. Many of us have liberal parents who advocated for casual sex and dating, two income households, small families and delayed parenthood, but we are decisively rejecting the Millenial and Gen X way of life for a return to traditional family and lifestyles. OP's daughter will almost certainly be able to find a marriage and family minded man in the 23-28 year old age bracket if that's something she is actually looking to make happen soon, though I get the impression that she might just be declaring that as a life goal rather than something whe wants in the next two years.

I would advise all young women who are marriage and family minded against casual dating - there is absolutely no benefit of subjecting yourself to drama, heartbreak, sex outside of committed relationships, and time wasting. My personality, perspectives and marriage are deeply impacted by the fact that I have only ever had a serious relationship with, and slept with, my husband. Is it actually fun to cause yourself emotional damage over, and waste your energy on men who will be another woman's husband one day?

Good for her. She will do well dating men approaching 30 though. They don't grow up until then.

15 @carrotsandtomatoes pre-2016 it was 13+, not 18+

Jeez how young did you start on Tinder??

Exactly. If she finds that her current strategy isn't working for her, she will need to adopt a different approach. But in the meantime, she's 20 and she doesn't need to date at all if she doesn't want to, so she is entirely at liberty to date on her own terms.

I work in a competitive professional sector and when young female interns ask me for advice I always say that, if they intend to have children and a life partner, the biggest factor in a woman’s success is their choice of partner.

And that finding the right person earlier rather than later brings better life outcomes: professionally, financially, emotionally - and family life.

Friends who met at university, identified shared life goals, married young, leant into their careers together, young, took adventures overseas, together, young, bought their first house, had children young - tend to be doing better and are wealthier in their forties.

I appreciate this is only my experience and many will strongly disagree!

But there’s a lot to be said for meeting your life partner young, sharing similar ambitions and having fun achieving them and growing up together through your twenties.

At 23 I'd spent two years wit someone who it turned out didn't want marriage and children and bought me a shut up ring. At the end of the first date with the next one I asked if he wanted to get married and have children. I said he didn't have to marry me but I didn't want to waste any more time. I did marry him and have his kids but I wish I hadn't.

Fair play to your DD.

Yea, you are right actually. As long as the rejections aren't getting to her then I guess she should continue with what she believes in. Since she is only dating people she knows or friends of friends it won't take her too long to have exhausted the dating pool and then she will know if maybe she just needs to wait a few years until the men in her age group are ready to consider marriage/children.

If she is dating to marry she should be restricting herself to only dating men who are about 8 years older. Those her own age are almost all of them definitely not ready to consider marriage and she will be putting them off by being so up-front. Dating is the process through which you find out whether you are interested in a long term commitment to someone, and it takes a few months at least to work that out. She's trying to skip the stage of having fun with no commitment. It's not going to work.

I think that's up to her, though. So what if she "scares off" perfectly nice men who aren't yet sure about whether or not they want kids? If she knows that she definitely does want children, then it's entirely her prerogative to decide that she doesn't want to waste time on relationships with people who aren't on the same page as her.

Of course, people can change their minds and opinions over time, and that could apply to the OP's dd as much as it might to any men that she may date. But if she feels right now that she isn't interested in dating anyone who isn't sure that they want children, then that's her choice. And she might not be in the slightest bit bothered about missing out on relationships with "perfectly nice" men who don't want what she wants.

My dd is 19 and has been with her bf for the last 3 years. I never imagined at the outset that it would last into adulthood, and of course, there is no way of knowing what might happen in the years to come. They both acknowledge that they're very young and that things might change. However, they also both feel that they wouldn't want to stay in the relationship if they knew now that there was no future in it. And they have both talked about the various "red lines" that are non-negotiable for each of them. I think that's pretty healthy tbh. Better to discuss those things upfront and establish that you're on the same page than to find out later when you're heavily emotionally invested.

Let her do what she wants
if it doesn’t work she’ll have to adjust her approach

Ds1 is this age, I too wouldn't want him being asked this on a first date. It's too intense.
However, no point dating anyone unless they do want a serious relationship, if you do. She might he best dating a man a few years older say 23, 24?

I think it just puts unnecessary pressure on what is a young relationship between two people who are just learning who they are as adults. A lot of men, in particular, that age don't know if they are going to be wanting to have kids 15-20 years down the line and would be put off by the seriousness of it if that is the expectation. I don't think my DS or his friends could say for sure that they will want to have kids at any point, but they might. They are mainly focussing on making sure they can support themselves and they are very aware of what the world looks like now and what it might look like when they get to a stage of potentially wanting to have kids. If OPs DD doesn't want to have kids in her near future then I think she will be scaring a lot of perfectly nice men away that might at some point want kids.

I agree. It's limiting to say everyone should be living their 20s the same, whether that's the 2020s potential "ideal" of travelling, dating lots of different people etc or settling down straight after uni. I've zero regrets about doing the second (or that we started our family in our 20s).

Well, at the ripe old age of 52, I can look back at the 18 year old me and say categorically I had me right the first time. It was the fannying about in my 20s and early 30s pretending to be something that I'm not that made me miserable. I would have been so much happier if I'd just been 'allowed' to get on with it instead of being pressured to look, act and dress a certain way by people telling me that I needed to be 'having fun' at my age.

Are you male? Because many women will find it hard to concieve by 40. I know lots don't, but as a general rule it's not something women can afford to put off until then.

“Dating to marry” sounds very serious for her age.

But if she absolutely knows she wants children, I think it’s sensible to not get into a long term relationship with someone who knows that they definitely do not. That conversation doesn’t need to be on the first date, but equally no point being 2 years in and finding out the relationship either needs to end or you’re going to hang around hoping he changes his mind.

Fair play to her. It will effectively end 99/100 dates immediately.

I think it's fair enough for her to set her own standards and boundaries in whatever way she chooses tbh. She can always reevaluate if she finds that her current approach isn't working for her.

20 is very young to be thinking about marriage and kids, though. Does she have other aspirations alongside this?

I have a very strong maternal instinct and knew I wanted kids from a young age. I think if your goal is to fall in love, get married, and have kids, there’s not much point in wasting time on people who don’t want that.

But stating it all upfront in a first date is a bit much, and probably intimidating. Just have fun going out a few times and then mention in conversation how much you love kids. Also? An easy way to weed out the guys who are interested in you as a person from the guys who just want something casual is to not have sex for at least the first few months of a relationship. The “casual” guys will get bored and go elsewhere.

She is still very young so I think she needs to relax a bit and just enjoy life. Most men in their early 20s would be put off by such an intense conversation on a first date
I can understand that approach if she was in her late 30s but at her age she should be exploring life not thinking about getting married and having children

My children (boys and girl ) would run.

They look for monogamy and 2 of them are in longer term relationships for their age (2 years and 3 years) but aren’t looking for more than that from a partner.

If she’s dating much older people in their 30s then it might be less of a problem but people in their 20s aren’t as serious about dating unless their cultural expectation of marrying in their early 20s and many have to date approved people anyway.

I can't see the problem in asking at 20 if marriage and children are something you would want at some point in the future. That doesn't mean you want them right now at all, but at 20 many people know whether or not they see a future with those things in it.

Dating a man who says adamantly that he would never want children is very different to dating one who says the thought of having them now would be awful but in ten years time he would see himself wanting marriage and children. Your daughter would presumably get rid of the first and date the second. I'm assuming she doesn't want marriage and children straight away herself but knows she wants that in the future.