It’s Time, Peter Pan.

For men in their late 20’s early 30’s, it’s all about timing. When they decide they want to settle down, when they decide to get married, it’s a lot about timing.

Do they put thought into it or do they just decide it’s time? Is it just because their friends are all getting married and having babies? Or is that what they really want? Or is it that that’s what they really want, and their friends doing it just indicates to them that it’s time?

Avid Sports Fan Guy and I were discussing why 26 is too young, and his perspective was this: He is 28. Sure, he’d like to have a girlfriend. But he’d really like to just keep hanging out with his friends, drinking, watching sports, and playing video games. For as long as possible. He doesn’t want to put a lot of time and effort into finding and dating a woman. He’d rather play with his friends. But the older he gets, he finds fewer and fewer friends to do this with. Because they’re pairing off, getting married, and having babies. So he’s starting to realize that it’s getting to be time for him to focus on finding a partner. But if his friends were still available for him to play with, he would just keep playing.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to settle down, get married, and have babies. He does. But I think that the timing of it will be determined by his friends. When he runs out of enough friends to play with, he’ll refocus his attention to finding a woman to settle down with.
It’s clichéd (remember the Sex and the City episode?) and it doesn’t fit well with the romantic ideal that many women would like to believe – he meets you, falls madly in love with you, and can’t stand the thought of not spending the rest of his life with you. But the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

Because that is what happens – he does fall madly in love with you and he does decide he wants to spend the rest of his life with you. But only if the timing is right. It’s not that he decides that it’s time to get married and he marries the next woman he meets. It’s more of a mindset shift. He starts looking at the women he meets using a different set of criteria. A more serious set. He starts making the decision to seek out more serious relationships and find women with more than a great body and high tolerance for Jaegermeister.

So if you meet a great guy, and you’re having visions of wedding gowns and babies, make sure he’s decided it’s time.