Is Selfishness the reason why we are marrying later and later these days?

[TheLastGeek]

Today, women don't really need men. They are capable of supporting themselves as they have their own careers
and many even more prosperous than men. Women, esp. in the biblical times needed a man for several reasons
which I won't get into.

So it seems to me now more than ever, if a man and woman are to meet and get married and raise a family, it's
not out of need for survival and security, but more so now on the relationship/companionship. But the standards
and preferences we all have for our potential life partner also seems to have become more stringent and picky (because
we can afford to be picky now). "He's got to X tall, have X money, own X, career in X, full head of hair, thick eye brows,
well-cultured, driven, confident" the list goes on and on.

What ever happened to just marrying and loving someone because God told you to do so. The woman should be obedient
and the man should be selfless willing to sacrifice his life for her (these two points are actually biblical and the highest calling
for each gender).

Is it safe to assume the obvious answer why we are not marrying anymore these days, and if we are, it's getting later and later
and even fewer people are having kids/families......mostly because we are more selfish than ever before (the greatest idol in
today's world is "me")?

For whatever it's worth, I don't think being able to select your life companion based on compatibility, attraction, mutual interests and views, etc, rather than "Well, I'll be homeless and penniless if I don't attach myself to someone with male genitalia", is a bad thing.

 

[Faithfulandtrue]

From my experience I'm not some career driven boss lady like the annoying feminist want you to think. I do things alone because I have no choice. Not anyone to date really. I work a minimum wage job and live with my parents. Times are different and the current political situation has only made things worse for us millennials "just starting out". Things are expensive because evil globalist want it that way. As a woman I personally would love to be a stay at home wife and mother but it just hasn't happened yet.

 

[Faithfulandtrue]

I don't think everyone is marrying later and later. There are still people that get married when they are in their late teens, early 20s, mid 20s.

I can tell you my side of the story, but that doesn't mean it applies to everyone. It was hard to find a single man in the church even when I was in my late teens and early 20s. Then when I did online dating, it didn't go the way I thought it would. I was clueless and selfish when I looked for a man. I looked for cute guys and didn't look for any inner qualities except for being saved. I hadn't been taught anything, apparently.

I received wisdom from God about a partner after getting Him involved. While I am still single now, I know God has a man for me in the future.

It all depends on what God wants for us and whether we're going to obey His will or not.

Amen same

 

[ViaCrucis]

This is not me saying it. The Bible says this. You better read: Eph. 5:22-24 (Obedience)
and for men it is dying to self, and dying for her (Eph.5:25 - give your life for her) just as Christ did for his bride (the church).

It's biblical, but I definitely can see where saying a woman should be obedient as her highest virtue can make you feel uncomfortable
considering the amount of gender issues out there.

Bible teaches us that we as the "bride" for the "bride groom" (Jesus) is to have the virtue of obedience. So the most proper aspect of a chrisitan's life is obedience to God.

Contextually Paul is saying, to the entire Church, "submit to one another". In fact in the Greek of the text here where you read "wives submit to your husbands" it simply says "wives your husbands", because the verb "submit" is borrowed from the previous statement of "submit to one another".

What Paul is doing is calling for mutual submission out of love and respect, wives to husbands and husbands to wives. Paul then goes on to offer further examples, as he continues the same line of thought into chapter 6, speaking of children honoring their parents and parents respecting their children, and of slaves submitting to their masters and masters submitting to their slaves.

Women are not subservient to men. Wives don't submit to husbands because husbands are the CEO of the house. Instead there is an equal partnership between husband and wife built on mutual respect and love. We, not as husbands, wives, etc, but as Christians, submit to each other out of love because we are called to the imitation of Christ. And thus each of us is to regard ourselves the servant of others. It is not about being less-than, but rather loving others as we would want to be loved. It's about empathy, about recognizing that we aren't the center of the world, and that this Christian thing is about life with one another, and all our relationships are to be built and established on the Foundation of Christ, and thus built on love, respect, kindness, and grace. Nobody is lord over another except Christ, the one Lord of the whole Church; and even He demonstrated His Lordship by emptying Himself and embracing the shame of the cross.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[DragonFox91]

I believe people are moving in w/ each other but not marrying b/c the idea scares them (divorce, 'forever?', want to leave options open').

So while people aren't getting married, that doesn't mean they're not in relationships.

Christians still marry tho, at least they should be.

Just because people are marrying later doesn't mean they're not in pre-martial relations (which I deem selfish because such is based in lust and wanting the freedom to split from him or her when the relationship goes south)

EXACTLY. Thread winner. Close the thread!

 

[RDKirk]

We can also mention "career first, family second" which works for men, but not for women (both psychological and biological reasons), laws supporting divorce rather than marriage, unhealthiness epidemic (majority of people being obese and/or with mental problems), disappearing concept of simply honoring and keeping a promise, people having no working example of a stable family from childhood, because more and more people are from single parent homes etc.

It doesn't actually work that well for men, either. It's just that men traditionally have a little more time to see-saw between the two.

But generally, a person needs to prepare in their 20s for where they want to be in their 30s. If that includes being a spouse in their 30s, both men and women need to be working on the mentality and psychology of being a spouse while in their 20s. That at least means not dissipating themselves sexually (which always has a negative psychological effect on both men and women).

 

[RDKirk]

If you cannot accept submitting and being obedient to your husband, then you can't be submissive and obedient to Jesus Christ.

The central point there is that submission must be practiced in the flesh to expect it to exist in the spirit. People who claim to be submissive to God but are submissive to no one in the flesh are deluding themselves.

"If you love Me, obey My commands" goes with "For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen."

Whoever cannot submit to anyone in the flesh cannot submit to any One in the spirit.

What we see in Ephesians and elsewhere are, indeed, suggestions taken from the contexts that were contemporary to those writers, but everyone should have someone they're submissive to in the flesh. If a wife is submissive to a loving husband, she has an easier road than a husband who has to be submissive to most bosses.

But there is also the reality of the current age to deal with. The fact is that in America, the great majority of men cannot earn enough to support a family on one income. It's a fact of life for most families. That means if the wife has been submissive to her boss all day, by the time she gets home, she's plumb out of submissiveness.

This is where something I call "submission to the marriage" comes into play. I recall that the actual dynamic between my grandparents--what I could actually see between them as a child--was that they were doing all each of them could do all day long for the sake of the single life they lived together. Nobody sat down until all the work was done. Back in the 50s, yeah, that amounted to much work that fell into "traditional" husband/wife roles: My grandfather would come in from work and then spend several hours tending the huge garden behind the house or tending to the pigs he raised on a plot outside of town. That wasn't merely a "hobby" garden. It was about an acre of corn, beans, okra, peas, cabbage, spinach...food the family actually depended on. And each season he'd slaughter the two or three pigs he'd raised and put the meat up in the smokehouse behind the house. He worked until grandmother called him in for supper. Nobody sat down until all the work was done. Not even me...the evening would find me standing on a step stool doing the dishes at five years old.