Why is it that when a woman reaches her late twenties/early thirties, she's suddenly treated like a 90-year-old spinster by those around her? Yes ladies that dreaded question that I thought was only spewed out on the big screen in a plethora of predictable movies has now happened to me.

"When are you going to get married?" an elderly aunt bellowed in my direction last Saturday. Seven powerful little words which, just like in the movies, silenced a whole room and had a sea of faces locked on mine as they waited for an answer.

I had about five seconds to consider a response.

So before my legs could give way and cause me to collapse in humiliation, I said: “Soon I hope.”

I don’t even have a man for peace sake! Many in the room knew this, and simply laughed and whispered to each other.

I can’t stand this pressure and neither can several of my sistas of a similar age. Yes we want to get married when we’ve found the right man/found our ourselves/got the mortgage sorted/blah blah blah - yet it feels like the entire world thinks we should do it right away or face everlasting confinement to the bottom shelf of single-woman-no-man-no-kids-she’s-not-normal.

The media, the smug already-married and older family members put too much emphasis on marriage, or should I say The Wedding. For instance, the media love nothing better than to showcase the latest celebrity bride and groom yet do little to advise people on how they can stay out of the divorce courts and really last "till death do them part”. While the smug already-married always seem to be more madly in love with the term “married” than with each other as though this term/this thing has some mystical significance. And as for the relatives (mine in particular) I’m sure they’re just looking for a big party to go to with wine aplenty or champagne if they’re lucky.

Do you feel under pressure to walk down the aisle before your 35? Would you like to get married or do you think marriage is dead? Like me, are you keen to get married before you have kids?

Jewel x

there is not enough happiness in the world, our parents generation just like to see some before they depart this earth.

I feel the same way. Im 30 and my mother is pressuring me and older aunts are constantly asking me, "When are you getting married?" I usually give them the same answer you did, "Soon." But I'm really not sure if I will marry the person that I am with. I've only been with him a few months, but I keep getting told that my biological clock is ticking.

"My big day" - maybe it's me but this emphasis on MY speaks volumes which might explain why it hasn't come yet. I sense a Walt Disney theme behind it. Where there is culture, marriage doesn't usually take this long to arrive, it's more a right of passage and less of a pipedream 'one day my prince will come' fantasy.

Yawn........

didn't know it was the their(media) job to advice people about marriage

At 25+ the older families members will expect one to have done all the 'finding one's self' new age stuff, and if you havent you can do it together with the 'right man'- you develop together

@ jewel, I know what you mean girl.

I come from a family of all girls, two are married, the remaining three of us aren't (although one is in a long term relationship, but doesn't want to get married).

I do feel the pressure to "settle down", even though I'm the youngest and still in my twenties, but I just dont believe in getting married to someone who isn't what I want/need and vice versa.......thats just a recipe for a quick divorce.

To be honest, I'm not ready......I'm far too selfish at the moment. When I have done the personal growth and "me time", then I can think about it.

To be honest, I am not much use to any "husband" right now, let alone children. I want to travel more too, and I like to travel alone. I like my time to be my own and noone should make demands on it......thats a single persons mentality, not someone who is ready to settle, and I'm not done with it yet.

When I am ready to be a wife, I will attract my life partner/husband.

Until then, my Mum, Aunts etc.....will just have to "keep praying"...........lol

Men do you gwet a similar type of pressure not just from family but from peers and friends of your partner and female onlookers on your relationship? I know from personal experience and from personal observation.. that women do frown upon men who live with their partners for years on end and yet do not make a serious offer of marriage.

Normally you get the odd jokey remark, or the snide side comment about 'making her an honest woman'... which in turn makes the woman in question agitated and unsettled, because she then feels that unless she has had that offer, she is somehow been 'taken for granted' or 'not valued'.... So i think the pressure goes all round when it comes to the big day...

Ignore i say. Do your thing and believe that everything will happen in "perfect" time. Personally i want to be emotionally, financially and spiritually ready before i say i do and i am lacking like errr all three of them at the moment lol.

My mother is very active in our community and church and she would get asked a lot by the other women and aunties......"so when is your daughter going to get married" I guess one day she got tired of this questioning and she told the women to look at me and she said unlike your daughters my daughter has her own house and car she does not ask for any money, doesn't have a brood of children she cannot manage, is never covered in bruises from beatings from her husband never runs back home every Friday for protection from her husband and is generally a happy person. No one has ever asked again.

K - lobotomised christians of the elder generation maybe but in general most men seem to think it taboo as in you never know when a better woman is coming along, marriage is seriously detrimental to this. still to be fair to them, it's like when women are married they get this sensation that they have finally got the man under lock and key, guess they're thinking about the better woman just like the man is