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In all seriousness, I think this is where you are going wrong. A lot of young men, especially here which skews conservative, were totally ready to start settling down young (or at least a year or two after university when they had an income) and raising a family. There’s a reason several people were yeschadding your post about young men being over educated, and I say this having done a PhD.
Painting with a broad brush, the problem from my perspective is that we were prepared to be lovers and providers, and the other side never turned up. Indeed, they seemed to flock in droves to the young men who openly disdained responsibility and family while those men were busy getting as broke and high and sexed as humanly possible.
I am ready to believe that this is a mutual illusion arising from young women disproportionately meeting the fuck-around men and not seeing the quiet ones who worked hard, and likewise young men nmeeting the girls who came to parties and not the quiet ones. I don’t say that it’s true, but it’s possible.
But this is how things looked on the other side of the screen.
Really? 25 year old men wanting to take on a wife and kid? Not impossible, but funnily enough in the context, I was reading a ghost story from the 1930s or so and in it the narrator describes how he doesn't want an early marriage - this is a man in his late 30s established in his career and with enough money to support a stay-at-home wife (no other sort for the middle-to-upper classes back then) and children.
So the attitude of putting off marriage was indeed prevalent among the educated classes back then, but it wasn't solely over-educated women spurning men of their own class.
Sure, that’s always been there too. There have always been lots of bachelors and playboys, especially amongst the upper classes. The working-class boys at the university were much more of the ‘get as much clunge as possible’ mindset which ironically probably put them in a better position to date and marry later on.
So many who wanted to play around. But also a good number who didn’t. For myself in my ideal life plan I wanted to meet a nice girl at university, move in together a year later, spend a couple of years getting to n ie each other and then marry and have children around say 26 years old.
Of course, if I had been popular with the ladies perhaps I would have got a big head and started fucking around. No way to say.
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