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Young men want to get married.  They really do.  They want a wife, children and the house with the picket fence.  They just don’t want it right now. Instead, men ages 25 to 33 prefer to have fun, unencumbered by commitment and responsibility.   That’s the word from a new study called “The State of Our Unions” that concludes that young, educated, professional men don’t want to commit to marriage.  They place great value in the institution of marriage, but are still single.

The researchers interviewed 60 heterosexual men in Chicago, parts of New Jersey, Washington, D.C. and Houston. For the most part they were employed full-time and earned between $21,000 to $35,000 annually.  Most had either attended some college or graduated. None of them were married, although three of the men were fathers.

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The Top 10 Reasons Why Men Won’t Jump the Broom:

1. They can have casual sex without marriage, something that is far more common today and accepted than in generations past.
2. Men want to avoid the financial risks of divorce. What better way to do that than to not get married in the first place?
3. Since they don’t have to worry about their biological clocks, men say they want to wait until they are older to have children. They really do not want to be pressured into marriage by a woman whose primary goal is to have kids. On the flip side, Men may not want to marry a woman who has children already.
4. There are certain guys who don’t want to get married simply because they like their care-free lifestyle.  They don’t want to compromise and they cling to their personal space.
5. Sometimes relationships can have trust issues and it makes it impossible to whole-heartedly be with someone, knowing they may lie or cheat.
6. There are very few social pressures to marry. While their dads were pressured by religion, employers or society to settle down and say “I do,” men today are free from that.
7. Money can play a large role in a relationship as two people start sharing their income.  When you realize that the girl of your dreams can’t keep a hold of her pocket book and she’s dragging you down in the process, it becomes hard to imagine a future together.  The other side of this is that your girl may have more money than you.  Plain and simple, it can be difficult for some men to maintain relationships knowing that they aren’t the primary breadwinners.  This can create insecurity and actually work to emasculate some men as they may be constantly reminded by their situation or even by their girl that she does in fact make more than him.
8. Being established financially and successfully are goals that many men want to achieve before they marry.
9. Children learn what they see and if they have no role models to emulate, or if their parents weren’t married, it may not be normal to them. Some men may have seen their parents go through a nasty divorce may fear marriage and the pain it may cause.
10. She may want to live in one area while he wants to live in another.  He may get a job out of town that could be full of possibilities and she may be on the fast track in her own field.  Simple things like geography can be a relationship killer for men when compromise is out of the question.

This post is tagged Marriage