A Sturdy Foundation Is Worth Waiting For
By Mary Rooke
Mary Rooke is a mother of four who writes a weekly newsletter for the Daily Caller called the “Good Life.” This week, we are sharing her newsletter with readers at The Conservateur. To have her newsletter sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, found in November 2024 that marriage is one of the strongest factors associated with adult happiness. But the modern approach to marriage leads women to believe that their desire for connection and love should be ignored while they “find themselves” through travel and corporate-ladder climbing.
There is a lot of pressure in the conservative world to get married young.
It is likely the natural correction to feminists telling generations of women that they have all the time in the world to get married and have children.
In my most charitable view, I want to believe that conservative influencers who insist that getting married in your early 20s is the only right path are only saying that because they want young women to avoid the potential pitfalls to marrying later in life: infertility, loneliness, and a disconnect from family life.
Women have a small window of fertility. It’s biological reality. Our most fertile years are between ages 18 and 29. This is when our egg quality, which is important for healthy pregnancies, is at its highest.
This is also when the number of eggs we ovulate is peaking. Women are born with a finite number of eggs, we don’t continue to make them throughout our lives. Because the number of eggs decreases as women age, the older we are, the more difficult it is for us to conceive. After 35, our fertility is about half what it was during our peak years. Even with fertility treatments, like hormone therapy and IVF, healthy pregnancies are harder to produce.
It all sounds so scary to a conservative woman who is not opposed to marriage or motherhood and has likely been looking forward to this part of her life. Still, marriage isn’t a fix-all and shouldn’t be entered into out of fear of being alone.
Marriage is more than sourdough bread and babies. It’s incredibly important that when women choose a man to marry, she isn’t looking for the “perfect person” because that doesn’t exist. He should be someone you can build a life with through his strength, love, and steadiness.
My husband and I just celebrated our 14th wedding anniversary and have been blessed with four daughters. Although they are young, I frequently think about how to explain to them the importance of marriage and what it means to find a man you can build a foundation with.
We got married young — I was 22, and he was 24. We were far from a “power couple.” We were just starting out in our careers (if you want to call it that). We barely had two pennies to rub together, but we understood two simple truths: Life would be hard, and if we wanted our marriage to work, we’d have to fight for it.
And our young naive minds would have no idea just how hard it would be. We had our oldest daughter during our first year of marriage, which also happened to be during the 2011 economic crisis. I was a stay-at-home mother to a colicky baby while my husband worked long hours trying to provide. This is a traditional recipe for disaster.
We are as successful as we are now because we didn’t let these moments define the rest of our lives. Every victory was a win for our family, and every defeat was shouldered together.
There is something so calm and beautiful about a man who looks his wife in the eyes, while the storm rages around them, and says, “It’s all going to be okay.” A foundational man is someone who you believe with your whole heart when he tells you this.
The timing won’t look the same for everyone, and that’s okay.
All of my sisters, except one, followed a similar timeline. We got married right after college and immediately started families. She will be 38 when she gets married this year. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to get married when we were all settling down. She simply hadn’t met her foundational man yet.
My sister was lonely for over a decade as she watched all of her sisters walk down the aisle and bring our children into this world. It wasn’t easy for her. With every pregnancy announcement, she would admit it made her feel a complexity of emotions: happy for us but scared and sad for her. She worried it was never going to happen.
But if she had married the man she was dating at 22, she would have hated her life. While I believe there is beauty in getting married young and growing through life together — my life is a testament to that — I’m glad she didn’t give into the pressure of marriage before she had a chance to meet her now-fiancé. Still, they both want children. Her having to wait may mean this isn’t a possibility — although we pray it’s not.
It’s important we teach women that the type of man they choose is the ultimate determinant of their future happiness.
And while it doesn’t make you a rabid leftist or anti-marriage to wait, you also don’t want to allow the pendulum to swing so far the other way where no one measures up.
Every week I speak to women in my Good Life newsletter about marriage, motherhood, and how politics connects to culture. My hope is to guide a new generation of women through this wonderful world with real stories and life experiences. If you enjoyed this, please join us.
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