Are women leaving it too late to get married?

Looking for inspiration for this week’s Just Saying column, I gathered up the weekend papers and as I went through them what struck me was the amount of coverage given to older women and marriage.

A headline in the Saturday Times Weekend supplement caught my eye, ‘Life after marriage: what it’s really like’.  After splitting with her husband of 17 years, Anna Blundy gives an account of life on her own, when I say on her own; she’s the mother of two teenage children so she’s not without responsibilities.  By all accounts this new found freedom isn’t as much fun as you would imagine, rather than living the life she had in her twenties, only older and wiser, Anna reports that ‘getting back out there’ isn’t as much fun as you think.  Finding a new man to share her life is proving harder than expected and she admits ‘ I don’t actually want to be on my own forever’.  ‘I miss being married’.

Move over to The Times Magazine and The Rise of the New Bachelors (they’re women), tells of Elizabeth Day who at 37 finds herself divorced childless and more eligible than ever before.  It took a tragic miscarriage for Elizabeth to realise how unhappy she was.  Her story tells of a marriage where she played by the rules, her own self-imposed rules of what being a wife should be, believing that she could have it all, driving herself to the point of exhaustion keeping everyone but herself happy.

You Magazine ran with the cover story, an exclusive interview with Gwyneth Paltrow where she says ‘I won’t rule out marrying again’.  You can’t have forgotten that Gwyneth consciously uncoupled from her husband Chris Martin two years ago.  I get the feeling that Gwyneth probably just mentioned this in passing, the feature was to promote her new healthy-eating cookbook, yet this statement make the front cover as well as the title of the article.  Gwyneth’s love life is bound to be a bigger draw than her cooking!

Apparently 43 per cent of women between the ages of 18 and 49 have never married, compared with 18 per cent 34 years ago.  Women have freedom of choice now that egg freezing is more widely available and they can have a child in their forties regardless of whether or not they marry.  Possibly finding the right sperm donor will be easier than finding the right life partner.

Interestingly the Mail on Sunday report that ‘Divorced, older dads are now the perfect catch’.  Divorced men with children were once considered poor marriage material for women, but a new study has found that women are now more than happy to marry men in this situation.  And apparently they don’t mind if they are unattractive or old if they earn a decent salary.  I must add that this survey was carried out amongst 500 unmarried Americans and found that compared to 22 years ago, women are happier to marry men with marital histories.

According to the article, one theory for the change in women’s attitudes to divorcees is that they think men who have married before can commit to long-term relationships and are attractive enough for another woman to want as a partner.

Call me cynical but could it be that by the time women get around to marrying most of the eligible men are divorced with children and older. 

So, what do you think about marriage in your forties – to be or not to be?