Peer Pressure

A friend recently wrote that he “never knew how to withstand peer pressure until all of his friends started to get engaged”. Besides the fact that he is an old fossil and should consider re-stating that fact, Old Man Time has something of a point.


100 years ago, girls of my age were married with 3 kids (the lucky ones whose husband’s visited their bedchambers). Hell, 27 years ago, my mother at my age was married with 2 kids. It just goes to show. But today, getting married at 23 makes you strange. Unless there is some kind of ‘accident’ (you tripped, fell, and got me pregnant), people don’t tend to push into marriage quickly. Obviously this has to do with differing social expectations and a change in the environment in which we live, but at the same time there is a sense that moral values are falling more in line with what they used to be.

The 70’s and 80’s were a time of sexual revolution and female liberation, and with that came a booming lack of moral stringency. You came, you saw, you saw, you came etc. Birth control and easy ways to 'take care of accidents' made a lot of problems from the previous generation just vanish. Then look what happened? Mothers all worked and marriages fell apart, and now 50% of kids grow up in a family torn apart with fighting and buying love.

But these days, as the threats of aids, venereal diseases, cancers and the decline of the family, the people of my generation seem to be looking for something a little different. Sure, we’re more free and easy in our choices than people of so many years ago, but the main thing is that most of my friends are not looking for Mr-Right-Now, but rather Mr-I’d-Like-To-One-Day-Settle-Down-With-You-Once-We-Know-We’re-Right. So marriages aren’t being delayed because we’re too busy sowing our wild oats, they are being delayed because we’re trying to find out who we are apart, and who we want to be together. Perhaps more conscious than 40 years ago of how destructive divorce is, my generation seem to want to be more sure when they get married.

I’m all for wanting to wait, and Old Man Time, I’m on to resisting that peer pressure with you.