The Cost of Delaying Marriage
by Danielle Crittenden

Esquire 

The pull between the desire to love and be loved and the desire to be free is an old, fierce one. If the error our grandmothers made was to have surrendered too much of themselves for others, this was perhaps better than not being prepared to surrender anything at all. The fear of losing oneself can, in the end, simply become an excuse for not giving any of oneself away. Generations of women may have had no choice but to commit themselves to marriage early and then to feel imprisoned by their lifelong domesticity. So many of our generation have decided to put it off until it is too late, not foreseeing that lifelong independence can be its own kind of prison, too.

Danielle Crittenden is the best-selling author of What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, and Amanda Bright @ Home.Her articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and she is a frequent commentator on national TV and radio. She lives with her husband, author David Frum, and their three children in Washington, D.C.

From What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Womanhttp://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001135.cfm