One woman believes that getting married and having kids is something some people, particularly women, seek in life so that they feel accomplished. To her, these milestones are really nothing more than a box to check off that makes people who achieve them feel successful. She wasn’t putting down these women, but she wasn’t exactly building them up either.
There is a big debate in our culture about the importance of marriage and family, especially in the lives of women. Some people feel like getting married and starting a family is the most important thing a woman can do, while others think that women should reject tradition and focus on cultivating fulfilling careers. Still, others fall somewhere in the middle, thinking there is a happy medium to it all.
Christina J. Huynh shared her thoughts on the matter in a TikTok video and echoed a sentiment that she had apparently heard from another TikToker. “Someone on here said that getting married and having kids is a shortcut to feeling accomplished, and honestly, they’re right,” she said.
“Women, specifically, are taught that those milestones are what make a successful adult, so deciding to follow that script is the path of least resistance,” she argued. “Especially when what is promised on the other side are things like people saying congratulations, big celebrations, and, maybe most importantly, this feeling of doing something right.”
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She called school “a perfect example of this.” If you work hard and study, well, then you’ll succeed and make good grades. That’s really the whole point of school. If you follow the path laid out before you, then you will excel.
“But life is not that simple and straightforward,” she said. “Hard work does not always directly correlate to success, just like marriage and kids does not always directly correlate to a sense of fulfillment.”
This, Huynh argued, is why people have quarter- and mid-life crises. They do what they thought they were supposed to without really thinking about what they wanted to do, and then they find themselves feeling unhappy or unfulfilled.
“This is also why child-free single women can be so triggering to people,” she explained, “because they are proof that there was another choice — that happiness and fulfillment and success can be achieved in other ways besides what was sold to us.”
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According to a YouGov survey, 37% of Americans felt like women faced pressure to have children. Only 17% thought men felt this same pressure. While someone may ask a woman when she plans on starting a family, or inappropriately joke that her biological clock is ticking, the same is hardly ever said to men.
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Additionally, Jane Greer, a marriage therapist, explained that by the time women hit the age of 30, people around them usually push them to get married as soon as possible because it’s just what they’re supposed to do at that time in their lives.
“It comes from their judgment about what they think the ‘right’ thing is to do at this stage of life,” she stated.
So, yes, women are facing pressure from society to get married and have kids. And, it’s true that some may do so just to feel like they are fulfilling some sort of duty or doing the next thing they are supposed to do.
But that doesn’t change the fact that some women want to, and happily choose to, enter family life. Just like there are women who choose to remain child-free, there are others who desperately want to be mothers. There’s nothing wrong with either path as long as you feel like it is the right path for you and you’re not being coerced into anything.
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Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
