As you wait and wait for your boyfriend to give you an engagement ring, you say to yourself, “I want to get married, but he doesn’t. What is going on?” You start asking yourself a series of questions. “Why won’t he marry me? Is there something wrong with me? Does he really love me? Is he the type of guy who will never get married?”
And then you sit back and begin to generalize the situation. You’re left to wonder, “Do men really want to get married at all?” It’s a valid but unsettling question for a woman who is looking for a lifelong commitment from a man.
The news out there does not help much. You hear that marriage rates have dropped dramatically. Men do not need marriage so much in an age where sex is so easy to get.
Some guys also shy away from tying the knot because they feel the legal system is stacked in favor of women. Why would a man risk his financial future on a woman who is already sleeping with him but unable to make any claims on his income? And why would he want to burden himself with a wife and children as he is trying to advance in his career, which may demand long hours and a lot of travel.
What’s more, our culture portrays married men unfavorably. Movies, TV shows, and commercials customarily make the husband and father out to be an idiot. We men, who have vulnerable egos by nature, are not looking for ways to humiliate ourselves. And we are painfully aware of the cultural perception of married men.
We also see all around us men who seem to have lost their free will to their wives. Wives are notorious for counting their husbands drinks, for instance. Single men drink to their hearts’ content, and it adds to their bravado. Husbands, on the other hand, all over the land, are doing their best to conceal their alcoholic intake from their wives. I know this for a fact. It’s a common topic of conversation among married men, and young unmarried men hear the stories.
So now what? How do you “sell” marriage to a man who is fully aware of everything I’ve said here?
Here’s the good news. Men truly want commitment, connection, and intimacy. And very few men deep down foresee a life without children. This is the male mindset at its primal level. By primal I mean a man’s deepest, God-given instincts and desires. This is the level where you need to communicate with him.
All the bad news about marriage that I talked about above is the product of a temporary culture. The male mindset has not changed except insofar as it’s reacting to an environment perceived as hostile to a married man. It’s acting in a defensive mode.
This actually provides a unique opportunity for you if you can understand it and react yourself. The vast majority of women who want to get married are still trying to play by rules that say once you have dated a man for a year or more, he belongs to you and owes you a ring. You have the chance to know better. You can reinvent your relationships with men.
Here are some key points for you to understand. Men feel love, just as women do. The big difference is that love does not motivate men the same way it motivates women. Men are motivated by their sense of self-image more than they are by love.
I mentioned above that we men have vulnerable egos. It may not seem that way, but this operates deep down in our guts, where we feel vulnerable, not on the surface, where we tend to show excessive self-confidence.
Moreover, we feel like we’re on an important journey, like we have a destiny. We believe we are going to become great in some way. This is where our true image of ourselves exists, in our sense of self-destiny. We look at a potential partner as someone who will either help us on our journey or weigh us down.
If you are giving a man the impression that you see him primarily as the future provider for you and for the children that are to come, you are unlikely ever to see that engagement ring. But if you figure out what he thinks his destiny is, and then show him that you understand his journey better than he does, your chances for the ring and for the lifetime commitment will increase dramatically.
So, do men really want to get married? The answer is yes. But we are living in times hostile to marriage. If you want to marry a man for life, you have to become aware of the forces working against you and become something of a cultural rebel, as strange as that may seem. Because happily married women tend to be strong enough to push back against the cultural influences that are working against what they want out of life.