Are there any interesting cultural habits or things that other countries do that you wish the US would adopt?
One’s twenties are such a strange, strange chapter of life. Propped up by the predictability of a national education system, it's as if our childhood and teenage years offered the safe lane lines of a pool—people followed in the tracks of those who came before them, with the same strokes, one after the other. But now that we’ve graduated out into the open ocean that is the working world, young adults are flailing about, grabbing at things that provide anchoring, electrified and paralyzed with the realization that this existence—more so than ever before—is wholly our own.
Nowhere is this path fracturing more apparent, IMHO, than in the love lives of twentysomethings. I have friends from high school who are expecting their third child. Others who are scrambling to plan their weddings. Still others who have been going steady in years-long relationships. And then there are many who, for better and for worse, are like me: single and guessing at the day when this piece of the puzzle might click into place.
Some affirming news, albeit slightly disheartening: due to reasons that are too numerous to get into here, dating in modern society is considered by many to be harder than ever. In fact, an entire meme culture has developed around the fatigue that many young people feel navigating these nebulous, what-are-we waters.
Me back in the streets after another failed talking stage, one reads. Another talking stage? I’d rather take a Razor scooter to the ankle, a tweet cries out. The memes are hilarious and sadly representative of the times we live in, a collective outpouring of youthful exasperation for a phenomenon that crosses boundaries of class, race, and gender with ease. Turning 25 in the USA means crawling into the early days of wedding season--engagement announcements and invitations are few and far between, but they seem to be ramping up, and exponentially so.
I feel like I’m now impatient to fall in love now haha, a female friend texted me the other day. Like I wasn’t at the beginning of this year, but it’s been months of meeting people and just feeling…mediocre.
Settling isn’t really an option though, so…, I replied. She emphasized my message before continuing.
Also makes me wonder if I’m like doing something wrong. But I don’t think I am????
Arriving in Egypt, I was extremely curious to learn more about the ancient country’s marriage rate--one of the highest in the world. How have the Egyptians been able to facilitate their partner-seeking so effectively? Have they figured out something that escapes the rest of us?
My research—to the degree that one can come close to understanding anything about a country during a two-week visit, not to mention something as complex and nuanced as the institution of marriage—has led me to believe that, well, unfortunately, no.
Marriage in the Eastern Hemisphere is seen more so as a blending of two families, assets, and communities than the love-conquers-all mentality that sometimes permeates Western thinking. Not that the spark of passionate love doesn’t play a vital role in Egyptian relationships, but as a general rule, the role is definitely less pronounced than it is in North America and Europe. Rather than an increased capacity for love-seeking, I’ve discovered that a high marriage rate among young Egyptian adults results more so from an immense public pressure to do so within a set time frame, and especially for women. (For context, in 2018, the average Egyptian woman married at age 20.2.) It’s a kind of pressure that is largely unfathomable to Westerners: one that emanates from family, friends, coworkers, the community, the mosque, and even the law.
It's also notable that for a 99.9% religious country like Egypt--where the government requires a "Religion" section on all official forms of identification--sexual intercourse outside of the sacred bond of marriage is considered one of the gravest forms of haram. Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that certain young couples also marry in order to have sex, protecting themselves from public alienation through their God-ordained bond--a trend that's also increasingly visible among certain Muslim student populations in the USA.
Getting married, more so than just the norm, is the expectation. “And when you do get married,” said one Cairo-bred couple I interviewed, “it’s a social obligation to have children soon thereafter.”
In this way, we Americans are more like Egyptians than we are different. Though on paper, we marry much later and are much less religious of a country than our counterparts in the Middle East--our Christian population accounting for approximately two-thirds of all adults in the USA--roughly 80% of Americans still marry by age 40. Adding in the nearly 10 percent of cohabiting adults, and the rate of "partnering" is close to 90 percent. The religious precedent of marriage established by Christian ideology centuries ago in the United States became a sociocultural expectation somewhere along the way, and no one really noticed.
These statistics feel directly counter to my experience in a place like Sweden, one of the first countries I visited during my travels. Upon arrival in Stockholm, I was greeted by a local friend who I hadn't seen in six long years--a blue-eyed, blonde-haired baker-turned-interior-designer who studied abroad in my small town of Barrington, Illinois. One day, munching on burritos and basking in the brisk headwind of a viewpoint overlooking the city, I told him about my project: how I was investigating long-term human connection through the lens of marriage around the world.
"Were your parents ever married?" he asked, popping a nicotine pouch into his mouth.
I looked back at him, eyebrows furrowed.
"You know, your question is really interesting," I told him. "Because in the USA, it's assumed that if I exist in the world, then yes, my parents were most definitely married at some point."
"Huh," he said, gazing out at the Stockholm skyline. "I've never really thought about it like that."
He explained to me how in Sweden--notably, a mostly secular country--it's extremely common for children to be born out of wedlock, for family units to be a hodgepodge of past relationships and half-siblings. Many couples opt to live together for decades without actually formalizing their bond because the Swedes simply don't place the same kind of emphasis on marriage that Americans do. In fact, the Swedish government goes so far as to offer an official arrangement called sambo in which a cohabiting couple is granted many of the same legal and financial rights as a married couple. As of 2016, about 1.8 million Swedes in a country of 10 million engage in sambo--a whopping 18% of the population.
Though Sweden and Egypt occupy opposite ends of the spectrum on the necessity of marriage, it's important to mention that their divorce rates--respectively 50% and 40%--are comparable, hinting that perhaps staying married is a concept entirely removed from getting married. Even so, I believe there's something we Americans can learn from our Nordic friends, if not for how to nurture loving relationships in the long-term, then at least in taking the societal obligation off of marriage as a whole.
It may be surprising to hear that, after setting off for a year to study marriage in different countries, I've actually returned with the perspective that it shouldn't be so highly valued in the first place. Don't get me wrong--meaningful, long-term, romantic connection is still something I most definitely want. But the actual institution of marriage and its forecasted timelines in America are now a thing of absurdity to me, with the power to make a magical process that's supposed to be very fun actually quite stressful. By law, we are technically permitted to marry for the first time at age 20, or age 55, or not at all; socially, however, staying single can feel like standing on the outskirts of a game of social musical chairs that has already been set into motion, watching the available seats slowly but surely getting taken.
In her book The Defining Decade, psychologist Meg Jay dedicates a few chapters to the love lives of twentysomethings in the USA. One of the most common challenges she hears about in her practice is something termed the Age Thirty Deadline: a quiet but nagging concern of twentysomethings about settling down that, at age thirty, crawls out of its corner and becomes a full-blown panic. "Though what to do about relationships in our twenties may not be clear or even seem imminently important," she writes, "'I'd better not be alone at thirty' is a common refrain [for my clients]."
As a case study, Jay references one of her clients--pseudonym Jennifer--who got hitched at thirty two and sought out Jay's help as she was getting divorced just six months later.
"I'm really, really embarrassed to admit this," confesses Jennifer, "but I almost didn't care whether it was going to work out. I thought even if it didn't work out, at least I would have gotten married when everybody else was. I would have been on track."