How to Encourage Your Son to Get Married

As a parent, you may find yourself in a situation where you have to encourage your son to get married. This is likely to be the case if you see that your son is advancing in age, yet he does not seem to be in any hurry to get married.

The age at which you should start getting worried about your son’s single status varies from place to place. There are places I know where relatives would start getting concerned about a man who gets to 25 years of age without showing interest in getting married. And there are other places I know where there would be no alarm, even if a man got to 45 years of age without showing interest in marriage. Indeed, there are parts of the world where marriage has come to be regarded as a ‘life choice’ meaning that in those parts, it is viewed as ‘okay’ for a man not to ever get married in life, if that is what he chooses. Even then, a man who fails to get married all his life is bound to be viewed as an oddity. There is an almost global expectation that one would, at the very least, take the trouble to be married at least at some point in life.

So, how do you go about encouraging your son to get married? Well, there are two approaches you can use. The first one is the direct/head-on approach: where you sit down with the son in question, and have a frank chat with him on the need for him to get married before he gets too old. The second one is the indirect approach: where, without directly tackling the issue, you nonetheless drop hints to the son in question, on the need for him to get married before he gets too old.

The most important thing to keep in mind is the fact that the son may be having real issues that are keeping him from wanting to get married. So you have to tackle the whole thing with the sensitivity it deserves. Perhaps a good place to start may be by asking the son if at all he has plans to get married in his life. If he tells you that he has no plans to get married in his life, the next challenge for you would be that of trying to change that viewpoint. You need to show him why it is important for him to get married, with some emphasis on how his decision not to get married may cause him regrets at some point in the future. If the son tells you that he indeed plans to get married, but not yet, the challenge would be for you to get him to understand how/why marriage is a time-sensitive issue. And how it may be hard for him to finally settle down in marriage if he keeps on postponing it.

In the final analysis, it is possible for you to encourage your son to get married without making it seem as if you are interfering too much with his life.