> I think there’s a lot of societal pressure to both get married and to have children, especially in the south, where I’m from.
I don't know where things stand now, but there was a similar pressure in Appalachia ~15 years ago. If you'd been out of high school more than a couple of years and hadn't gotten married or at minimum found someone you'd intended to marry, people would start asking if you were closeted or something, which seemed crazy to me — how on earth could I possibly find it a good idea to get married before I'd even had a chance to get some clue about how to function as an adult or figure out who I was?
A lot of people succumb to that pressure. I think out of everybody in my class and the classes both before and after me I'm the only one who wasn't at least engaged by age 22.
I don't know where things stand now, but there was a similar pressure in Appalachia ~15 years ago. If you'd been out of high school more than a couple of years and hadn't gotten married or at minimum found someone you'd intended to marry, people would start asking if you were closeted or something, which seemed crazy to me — how on earth could I possibly find it a good idea to get married before I'd even had a chance to get some clue about how to function as an adult or figure out who I was?
A lot of people succumb to that pressure. I think out of everybody in my class and the classes both before and after me I'm the only one who wasn't at least engaged by age 22.