Why Men Marry Some Women and Not Others: How to Increase Your Marriage Potential by up to 60%. John Molloy T.

had made the comment she just offered, I apologized.

      I had to admit she had a point. My interviews with single men had shown there were men who would not commit. Beth was also right when she said that if I could help women identify which men were more likely to commit, I would be performing a real service. As a reward for her insight, I put her in charge of the project.

       Looking for Mr. Right

      My researchers approached this project the same way we had others. First, Beth reviewed the literature and research we had on file. With this in mind, I reviewed our interviews with men and women who were planning to marry and videos of two focus groups we had run with single men. We then broadened the study by surveying and then running focus groups of single men who at that time had no intention of getting married. At first, we had young single men do the interviews, but so many of the interviewees gave macho answers that we doubted their reliability. In fact, we threw out the entire study and started again.

      The second time we tried teams composed of men and women, but that produced mainly politically correct answers, which we also questioned. Finally, we had men in their sixties ask the questions, and that solved the problem. The responses they elicited were generally straightforward. The single men apparently did not feel an obligation to give these interviewers macho or politically correct answers.

       Is He Old Enough to Marry?

      This survey uncovered some interesting facts. The first was that there is an age when a man is ready to marry—the Age of Commitment. The age varies from man to man, but there are patterns that are easily identified:

      

Most men who graduate from high school start thinking of marriage as a real possibility when they are twenty-three or twenty-four.

      

Most men who graduate from college don’t start considering marriage as a real possibility until age twenty-six.

      

When men go to graduate school, it takes them longer to get into the working world, and they’re not ready to get married until a few years after that.

      

Ninety percent of men who have graduated from college are ready for the next step between ages twenty-six and thirty-three; this is when they are most likely to consider marriage. But this window of opportunity stays open only for four to five years, and then the chances a man will marry start to decline.

      

A majority of college graduates between twenty-eight and thirty-three are in their high-commitment years and likely to propose.

      

This period for well-educated men lasts just a bit over five years. The chances men will commit are sightly less when they are thirty-one or thirty-two than when they were between twenty-eight and thirty, but they’re still in a high-commitment phase.

      

Once men reach thirty-three or thirty-four, the chances they’ll commit start to diminish, but only slightly. Until men reach thirty-seven, they remain very good prospects.

      

After age thirty-eight, the chances they will ever marry drop dramatically.

      

The chances that a man will marry for the first time diminish even more once he reaches forty-two or forty-three. At this point, many men become confirmed bachelors.

      

Once men reach age forty-seven to fifty without marrying, the chances they will marry do not disappear, but they drop dramatically.

      Still, there is no one-to-one correlation. For example, when a man goes to law school, which takes three additional years, he usually starts considering marriage around age twenty-seven or twenty-eight. That’s also the age when most doctors, who spend four years in medical school and at least one year as an intern, start seriously thinking about marriage.

      The single men we interviewed explained that when they get out of school and get a job and start making money, new possibilities open to them. For the first time, a majority of them have some independence. All of a sudden, they have a nice car and an apartment and an income. They’re reluctant to even consider marriage for a few years, because they want to sow their wild oats. Many look at time spent as a carefree bachelor as a rite of passage. So for the first few years that they’re on their own, their primary goal is having fun, which translates into dating without any serious thoughts about marriage.

       Just Because You’re Ready Doesn’t Mean That He Is

      One of the most common mistakes young women make is to assume that because they’re ready for marriage in their early- or mid-twenties, the men they date are, as well. But as the above research shows, that’s usually not the case. If a woman is seriously trying to find a husband, she should date men who have reached the age of commitment. She can date men slightly before they reach that age, because by the time she’s gone out with a man for a year, he may have reached the point of being receptive to the idea of marriage. But this is taking a gamble that the man is typical, because the figures I’ve just given are educated estimates. Not all men mature at the same rate, and other factors can and do affect a man’s readiness to marry. Even among men who are positively inclined toward marriage and are from identical educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, 20 percent will reach the age of commitment a year or more before our estimates, while another 20 percent will only consider marriage as a real option two to four years later. So if you’re dating a man much younger than the commitment age, the chance he’ll commit is relatively small.

      There’s one exception to this rule: Men and women who are seriously committed couples while still in school often get married shortly after they finish their formal education. This is usually an arrangement agreed to by the man but devised by the woman. Such couples, however, represent a very small percentage of today’s singles.

       Signing Off on the Scene

      When we conducted a focus group with twelve men who had just proposed to women, we learned that men were far more likely to marry when they got tired of the singles scene. Our original intent was to determine how men at different ages reacted to single women they met at social gatherings. We started by asking the men about their lives before they met their future wives. How often and whom had they dated, where had they met the women, had they gone to singles places and, if so, how often? The first thing that struck us was that about a third of them said that for six months to two years before they met their brides-to-be, they were not dating or going to singles places as often as they had been just a few years earlier.

      They had not stopped dating. It’s just that they were no longer going to singles hangouts and trying to pick up women several times a week. Picking up women was no longer their main reason for going out. A majority of them hadn’t admitted it to themselves, but their answers revealed they were trying to meet someone with whom they could have a serious relationship. They told us the singles scene was not as much fun as it used to be.

       The Next Step

      The men had not completely given up on the singles scene, but they were ready for “something else” or the “next step.” Those two phrases caught my attention. Four of them used one phrase or the other, and ten of twelve men in our focus group said they felt the same way: The singles scene had lost some of its appeal. The “next