I just had a very interesting chat with my DH where he was telling me some of the things that his work colleagues had been telling him about what the expectations of marriage are where they are located.
I just had no idea that there were such differences. Am I naive to not have realised that these attitudes still exist?
By way of background, DH works for a large engineering company that have operations throughout the world and he was talking to some colleagues in the USA (specifically in the southeast US - that is North & South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi etc).
One colleague just mentioned that his daughter, who is in the final year of university, had just got married. My DH expressed surprise about that, with her being so young and still studying, but he said that this was quite normal in that part of the world.
Apparently their zoom meeting then got side tracked into a discussion on this and a couple of them said that in the Southeast USA, there still seems to be familial/societal pressure for girls to be married by the time they graduate college.
Another colleague also mentioned that his daughter had got married in the summer before her last year of college as well and since then had attended over 25 weddings of friends in similar situations over the last two years.
Another colleague, who is based in the midwest (places like Nebraska, Kansas etc) said it was a similar situation there with loads of weddings in the first year or two after college.
Perhaps I should have put this in AIBU, but AIBU to be surprised that there is still this sort of pressure or expectation in a western country in the 21st century?
Elsewhere in the US, things are obviously very different (or, at least, I presume they are) as the US Census Bureau says that the median age for first marriage for a woman is 27.9.
The average age for first marriage for a woman in the UK is 32.
Now, obviously, a lot fewer people are actually getting married these days and there is less pressure on people to get married.
However, for there to be a four year difference in age of first marriage between the UK and the US shows that there are some real cultural differences.
It's even more stark when you look at individual states. In many of the states in the southeast and midwest the median age of first marriage for a woman is 25 or 26.
Whereas in places like New York or Washington it is about 30 - a lot closer to the UK figure.
When my DH mentioned this conversation to me I didn't think much about it, but the fact that the age of first marriage in those states is so much lower than in the UK (and other parts of the US) show that, yes, this is actually still a thing in those parts of the US - an expectation that women are to be married off as soon as is reasonable.
Are we (or, at least, some Americans) still living in a world like that?