From the Counsellor’s Chair
One of the things I have noticed, both in my work as a counsellor and simply from watching the people around me, is how much the timeline for relationships has changed.
Getting married in your twenties used to be fairly normal. Today, it is becoming increasingly common for people to reach their thirties without ever having been married.
And I don’t think you can explain that by simply saying that “people don’t believe in marriage anymore.”
The reality is much more complicated than that.
The statistics are actually quite interesting.
Around 2000, the average age at first marriage for South African women was around 28 years. Today, it is closer to the early thirties.
That’s a noticeable change in just over twenty years.
But what I find even more interesting is what happens when you look at how many women are actually married at different ages.
According to the 2022 Census, only about 6% of women aged 25–29, 10% of women aged 30–34 and 13% of women aged 35–39 were legally married at the time of the census.
Those numbers can sound surprising, but there is an important point to make here.
Being legally unmarried doesn’t necessarily mean someone is single.
People live together. People have long-term partners. People have children without being married. And many people are in very committed relationships without ever getting married.
So I don’t think we should automatically equate declining marriage rates with declining relationships.
What has changed is the role that marriage plays in people’s lives.
For previous generations, marriage was much more closely connected to becoming an adult.
You finished school, perhaps studied or started working, met someone, got married and started a family.
There was also considerably more social pressure to follow that path.
For women especially, there were economic and social reasons why marriage was much more important.
That world has changed.
Women today can build careers, earn their own money, buy property and live independently. Men are also spending longer establishing themselves financially before considering marriage.
And then there is the cost of everything.
Buying a house isn’t easy. Raising children isn’t cheap. Weddings can be extremely expensive. Even simply getting yourself to a point where you feel financially secure can take considerably longer than people might have expected twenty or thirty years ago.
So marriage is increasingly becoming something people do after they have established themselves rather than something that helps them establish themselves.
But I think there is another factor that gets overlooked.
I don’t necessarily think people have become less romantic.
If anything, I think we expect considerably more from our relationships.
Your partner is expected to be your best friend, emotional support, sexual partner, financial partner, co-parent, travel companion and someone who understands you on a deep psychological level.
We also expect to be happy in our relationships.
Previous generations often stayed married despite being unhappy. Today, people are much more willing to leave relationships that aren’t working.
I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing.
But it does create a different problem.
If we expect a relationship to fulfil so many different needs, finding the right person becomes more difficult.
And modern dating doesn’t necessarily make that easier.
Dating apps have completely changed how people meet.
You can potentially speak to hundreds of people you would never have encountered twenty years ago.
That sounds like an advantage.
Sometimes it is.
But having more choice can also make it harder to choose.
There is always the possibility that someone better is just around the corner.
Someone is slightly more attractive.
Someone earns more.
Someone has fewer emotional problems.
Someone seems more adventurous.
Someone is more compatible with your interests.
And social media makes this even worse because we are constantly exposed to other people’s relationships — usually the carefully edited version of them.
I’ve had people in counselling compare their own relationship to what they see other couples doing online and come away believing that their relationship must be failing.
The problem is that we are comparing our everyday reality with somebody else’s highlight reel.
I don’t want to turn this into an argument that people should simply get married younger.
I don’t think that’s the answer either.
Getting married at 25 doesn’t automatically produce a healthy marriage, just as being single at 35 doesn’t mean that something has gone wrong.
I’ve worked with people who married very young and later realised they had grown into completely different people.
I’ve also worked with people who met their partner much later in life and built extremely strong relationships.
Age isn’t the deciding factor.
The more important question is why someone is making the choices they are making.
There is a big difference between someone who is happily single at 35 and someone who desperately wants a relationship but repeatedly chooses unavailable partners.
There is a difference between having high standards and being so afraid of getting hurt that nobody can ever meet them.
There is a difference between enjoying being independent and using independence to avoid intimacy.
Those are the things I think are much more interesting to explore.
For some people, turning 30 changes something psychologically.
Then 35.
You start watching friends get married.
Then they have children.
You attend baby showers while wondering why you are still single.
Eventually the questions start coming.
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Why can’t I find someone?”
“Am I running out of time?”
“Did I leave it too late?”
I’ve seen how much pressure those questions can create.
And sometimes that pressure causes people to make worse relationship decisions.
They become willing to overlook things they wouldn’t previously have accepted because they are frightened of being alone.
They stay in relationships that aren’t working because they feel that starting again at 35 or 40 is too difficult.
Or they become so focused on finding a partner that being single becomes something they experience as a personal failure.
It isn’t.
I think we need to stop treating marriage as a deadline.
There isn’t a magical age at which you are supposed to have found your person.
But I also don’t think we should pretend that delaying relationships and family formation has no consequences.
There are practical realities around finances, fertility, having children, caring for ageing parents and building a life with someone.
Those things are worth thinking about.
The answer isn’t panic.
It’s being honest with yourself.
If you want to get married, ask yourself why.
If you don’t want to get married, ask yourself why.
If you want children, think realistically about what that means.
And if you keep finding yourself in relationships that end in the same way, it might be worth looking at the pattern rather than simply blaming the people you’ve been dating.
Because sometimes the problem isn’t that you haven’t found the right person.
Sometimes we keep choosing the same type of person.
And sometimes we don’t recognise what a healthy relationship looks like because we have become accustomed to something else.
Marriage in South Africa is changing. People are getting married later, and more people are remaining unmarried into their thirties.
But the statistic itself isn’t the most important thing.
What matters is what we do with that extra time.
Do we use it to understand ourselves better?
Do we learn how to communicate?
Do we deal with the baggage from previous relationships?
Do we become better at recognising healthy and unhealthy relationship patterns?
Or do we simply keep repeating the same cycle and hope that the next person will somehow make it different?
That’s the part I think is worth talking about.
If you’re struggling with relationships, dating, commitment or the pressure of feeling like you’re falling behind, counselling can give you an opportunity to step back and understand what’s actually happening — without someone telling you what your life is supposed to look like.
Let’s get you back on track!