On this episode of “The Federalist Radio Hour,” author and relationship coach Suzanne Venker joins Federalist Executive Editor Joy Pullmann to discuss her new book “How to Get Hitched (and Stay Hitched): A 12-Step Program for Marriage-Minded Women” and how to navigate marriage in a world with historic levels of singleness.
“On a daily basis, you’re just constantly bombarded with a message that you don’t need to get married: It’s not that important, it has nothing to do with your happiness, you never want to depend on a man, marriage and motherhood is something for later, make sure you’re career-focused, nobody can afford to get married and stay home with their kids anyway, that’s passe. All these messages are coming at them constantly, all the time, and my argument is essentially that if you’re constantly being bombarded with this message … map out your life with marriage and motherhood at the center and make all your decisions academically, professionally, and financially, all those other decisions, around that focus.”
Fear, Venker said, is the No. 1 reason for stalling or stifling relationships and marriage.
“That’s what I see across the board, there’s just tremendous fear. No. 1 reason is because they’ve had zero modeling, zero. They are products of divorce, or their parents could have been married and they had a bad marriage and they just don’t want to emulate that. Or their parents had an OK marriage but they wanted a different one for whatever reason. They just don’t have a model for what they want, or a model for success, and that could be either the marriage itself or the ability to have work and family in your life and how that would work in the long term. So you know, to me, the answer always comes out to: Look, where do you want to be 10 years from now? And how are you going to get there?” Venker said.
