My Classmates Plan for Their Careers. Why Not Their Marriages?

“Where do you see yourself in five years?” 

I was at a house party, where a few of us had drifted up to the roof to escape the noise. Someone threw out that classic icebreaker, and we went around the circle. One guy saw himself finishing a fast-tracked PhD, having squeezed four years of undergrad into two. A girl talked about an exit strategy for her startup, joking about the “bachelorette-pad” life that would follow. When my turn came, I replied that I saw myself happily married, hopefully starting a family. 

The awkward silence that followed felt like it went on forever. Finally, someone chuckled, "Aw, that's cute—good luck finding that in San Francisco."

Everyone on that roof had a plan, including me. The difference was that their plans were treated as serious ambitions, while mine were written off as a daydream.

A Strange Silence

So, why isn’t preparing for marriage taken seriously on most college campuses? A major reason is that institutions shape culture by what they value—and students learn fast which ambitions earn an adviser’s support, and which ones just get a "cute."

Universities insist that they don’t just train workers. They promise to form whole people: ethical leaders, thoughtful citizens, mature adults. But that preparation runs in one direction. We get advisers, internships, and step-by-step roadmaps to build our careers in fine detail. But what about the family life most of us actually hope to build one day? Silence there, too. Family is framed as a personal side project, something you sort out only after your ducks are in order.

A generation trained to plan every step of our future careers shouldn’t have to wing the commitment that matters most.

That silence is bizarre. Marriage is the most consequential investment most of us will ever make. It is the foundation of our daily lives and the legacy we leave behind. And despite what cultural stereotypes say, most students still want it. According to the 2026 State of Our Unions, 64% of unmarried young adults called marriage an important life goal. 

Research suggests they are right to do so. Gallup data published by IFS finds that marital status predicts well-being more strongly than a college degree, to the point that a married adult who never finished high school rates his life higher, on average, than an unmarried adult with a graduate degree. As IFS describes it, marriage matters more than career for long-term happiness.

The Capstone Model

I used to be a resident assistant in an all-women dorm. Boyfriends came and went from our halls constantly, and nobody batted an eye. Then, one of my residents got engaged. Her boyfriend proposed at the top of the Campanile, just as she'd always dreamed. But when she turned to our campus Reddit page to ask for affordable local wedding photographers, people didn’t congratulate her. Instead, strangers piled on, predicting the marriage wouldn't last even a few months. She brushed it off with a laugh: "They're just mad I have a ring and they don't." 

Nobody minded her having a boyfriend, but making things official struck a nerve. When marriage isn't something that students actively prepare for, a 22-year-old with a ring doesn't look ready. She appears to be rushing.

That’s the unspoken rule on campus: you won’t get side-eyed for wanting a marriage, but you will for preparing for it by dating with clear intention, cultivating the character a strong marriage requires, or planning for a family with the same seriousness applied to graduate school. Instead, many young people have absorbed what IFS scholars call the “capstone model” of marriage. In this view, marriage is the final piece of the puzzle—after the degrees, savings, and soul searching. The problem with a capstone is that the requirements to be “ready” keep rising.

Today, young adults' expected age of marriage sits five to six years in the future regardless of how old they are: 22-year-olds say they’ll marry around 28; 33-year-olds estimate they will marry by 39. The horizon keeps moving. Without a clear timeline or purpose, dating defaults to risk avoidance: only about a quarter feel confident even approaching someone they’re interested in. On campus, that paralysis fuels the rise of "just talking"—a state of relationship limbo where two people hang out for months, afraid to define what they both want.

That’s the unspoken rule on campus: you won’t get side-eyed for wanting a marriage, but you will for preparing for it with the same seriousness applied to graduate school.

Why Not Prepare Students for Family Life, Too?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Preparing for marriage isn’t romantic fantasy; it’s practical work that can start long before finding a partner. It involves working on personal character, reflecting on family habits we’ve inherited, getting smart about finances, and deciding what kind of home we want to build. 

When we do meet someone, it means dating on purpose instead of drifting through a relationship. Researchers Galena Rhoades and Scott Stanley found that couples who make deliberate choices about relationship milestones, rather than sliding into them, report much higher marital quality. Deciding well is a habit built long before the big moments arrive. 

Premarital education is similarly tied to higher relationship satisfaction and lower divorce rates. And building your life around a marriage—using it as a cornerstone rather than a capstone—doesn't diminish your chances of success. Research from the National Marriage Project reports that couples who marry in their early twenties report just as high relationship quality as those who wait until later. In fact, as IFS Senior Fellow Jason Carroll has pointed out, having a clear marital horizon gives young adults something concrete to grow toward.

Behind our hesitation is a quiet fear. My generation grew up under the long hangover of our parents' and grandparents' divorces, with roughly 40% of today's marriages expected to end that way. So for many of us, the question isn’t whether marriage is desirable—it’s whether a lasting, healthy one is attainable for us. 

A Better Way

That question deserves a better answer than campus silence. Writers on these pages have called for clearer guidance and preparation in dating, noting that parents, schools, and communities are leaving a major gap unfilled. And as Dr. Andrea Gurney wrote recently, a group of relationship educators are working to fill that gap and give young adults “practical blueprints” for healthy relationships.

To be clear, I am not calling for universities to mandate marriage prep. It’s simply a call to stop treating family life as an afterthought and to give personal relationships the same dignity we afford professional ones in our advising centers, orientation talks, and daily conversations. A generation trained to plan every step of our future careers shouldn’t have to wing the commitment that matters most. After all, building a lasting life with someone is not a distraction from a serious ambition—it is the ultimate one. 

Srisha Raj is a senior studying statistics and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.