Why not tie the knot? Here's what some singles have to say

We invited seven Seattle area women who have yet to tie the knot (or have untied it) to chew on the topic of marriage-wariness over lunch. Here are excerpts from the conversation:

They all feel society's pressure to marry, even if they resist ...

Gigi: The cultural aspect, being Korean-American, they really expect you to basically be born, grow up, get a great job, get married, squeeze out some quick kids and that's about it. I definitely had this pressure from my parents and other family members when I was in my 20s. ...

I go to a community college (in north Seattle). And it's kind of strange because I lived in New York, and it was a very singles town. And then I'm stuck in suburbia where there are so many young people who are 18 to 22 who are already married, have kids, and I feel kind of weird. ...

Joriel: But coming from Virginia, there's definitely a lot more tolerance for me not being married to my partner here in Seattle.

Kimberley: A lot of people have a schedule. OK, I'm going to go to college from this year to this year, graduate on this year. By this year, I'll be married. By this year, I'll have a child, and we'll have bought a house. We'll be raising a family. By this year, my child will be doing this. I feel really uncomfortable fitting into someone's slot. I don't want to be in a slot.

Danielle: I'm gay, and I came out when I was 23. When I was growing up, it was like OK, you either get married and have children, or you're a nun. I was like, OK, I'm going to be a nun. Then I nixed that because I liked sex, then dated because that was what you're supposed to do, had sex and thought it sucked, almost married a dude because that's what you're supposed to do, then went to college and met a girl, thankfully.

Sometimes the pressures are really about loneliness ...

Danielle: I've lived by myself for the last 15, 20 years, and when I'm living alone in my house and I come home to an empty house, I want someone around. I'm not looking for a girlfriend (per se) ... My mom has moved in with me now, and I come home and I smell chicken soup and someone's home. And I'm like, 'I ain't looking.'

I think so much of our thinking is about satisfying our loneliness in this world. I think marriage often gets substituted for loneliness.

Joriel: That puts a huge amount of pressure on that relationship. You expect your partner or your husband or wife to be all things to you.

Sandra: That's never going to work. That John Gottman stuff (University of Washington emeritus psychology professor John Gottman, whose Gottman Institute provides workshops and counseling based on research about marriage) talks about how if you're relying on your partner for something like more than 50 percent of your social engagement, that's an undue strain on your relationship.

Dianna: I've been blessed with a lot of friends. But still ... being a single person, sometimes your needs aren't always getting met. ... I think when you're dealing with men, affection a lot of times equals sex for them. So you may just want to lay in someone's lap, but you may not want it to go beyond that. So I think that ends up in an interesting dynamic. Now as I'm getting older, you also get more confident and more OK with having your own boundaries. But I think in my early 20s I probably had a lot more sex than I wanted to because I just wanted to have the affection.

They've got plenty of reasons they haven't married, though ...

Kimberley: I have a long list of reasons why I think marriage is highly questionable. There's a lot of hypocrisy. Like, "You're this person that I really love and value, so why don't we enter into something where 75 percent of the time it will fail?"

... I can go down to Vegas, make out with some boy at a bar, get married to him. And my (gay) friends who have been together for years can't.

Dianna: I do have room in my life to be married. For me, when the right fit comes, then I will do it. I meet amazing men who will be excellent husbands, just haven't been a good fit for me. ... (but) I've only dated black men, and it's been pretty much what I've been attracted to. So in this particular population, living in Seattle ... when you look at who would be a good fit for you, you talk about the numbers getting smaller and smaller.

Joriel: I have a partner who's a guy, and we had a commitment ceremony back in 2005... We just wanted to make promises to each other directly and not have that whole structure around (a marriage). So we got powers of attorney and living wills. We don't have all the rights of a married couple. But we felt like it was worth the extra complexity to do it our way.

Gigi: I'm real ambivalent because I know so many married people who are very unsatisfied (and) divorced friends who have told me, "Don't get married, don't get married" every time they see me.

Danielle: In my case, I can't get married ... I had a partner who's from Virginia. And we had a kid together. And I proposed, with the ring and the whole deal. I would have married her if I could have gotten married. After a couple years, we wound up splitting up. And she took the baby and moved to Virginia, of all places, which is the absolute worst place she could have gone. Had she gone to California I could have ... sued for parental rights. But Virginia, forget it. They're like, "Same sex? Yeah, right."

They weigh what they'd give up, and the tradeoffs ...

Barbara: I've never been married. I do have a 16-year-old daughter. When I was younger, (marriage) was this fairy tale. You had this man who was going to love and honor you, who was going to rescue you. ... I look at my parents and my girlfriends' parents who have been married 38, 40, 45 years and I think, during that time that was a beautiful thing because that's something people did. They knew that one person, they married them ... of course they've had their ups and downs.

But I think as peoples' worlds and viewpoints are expanding, you realize certain things you will tolerate and you won't, things you will compromise with and you won't.

So now that I'm older, I realize I don't have to be married. I think it's a nice ideal. I want really more of a companionship rather than to say I'm legally bound to someone ... Many times it seems very one-sided. I think that's been my biggest turn-off about marriage: I've seen a lot of women sacrifice themselves and lose their identities. ...

I kind of do want to be married, but I'm also scared to commit myself because it's like, "what am I going to give up?"

Sandra: Right out of college I married the man I was dating because that was what you were supposed to do next. And that didn't really play out so good, though I have a delightful son (to show) for it. I'm resistant to the idea of marriage for me. I feel like I've got a good thing right now (with her live-in boyfriend) and that marriage will change things. It might make it wonderful, but I'm not invested enough in being a married person to risk it.

Joriel: I think there's something to spending your life with someone, saying, "I'm going to commit to you, and no matter what happens we're going to work it out" because I think that's going to help me grow as a person and be the person I want to be.

(My partner and I) knew it wasn't going to be easy. I think a lot of people think, "I'm going to get married and that's that. It's done. It's solved." And we didn't see it that way.

Monogamy? Um ... that's a biggie ...

Kimberley: I'm also not sold on monogamy. I think there are some people who can be in happy relationships that aren't monogamous.

Danielle: The monogamy thing has to do with the length of our relationships now. I read recently that when you meet someone, what happens is a physiological thing, we're in an altered state where we're actually hyped up, so everything's fresh and new. Your body cannot sustain that level of physiology, so what happens is it goes back down. And then all of a sudden that zing is gone, and then we all think, we should have that zing. And then we're all disappointed ...

Boy, if we could just understand that's how that works and take the relationships for what they're worth.

Some people can do monogamy. And some people haven't found the right person to want to do monogamy. I mean, that's a huge thing. If you found that ultimate awesome person, then you might want to do monogamy. But if you haven't, then it's like, why?

Dianna: Part of that, too, is that you might find that great person, but then the sex is really bad. So you don't really want to have sex with the same person your whole life.

Sandra: For me as a parent, who I want as someone who will raise my child with me and will go along with me on the things that I find as very being important, may not be the person who is sexually satisfying in every aspect, in every way. I don't necessarily equate marriage with monogamy, either.

The Mommy Factor figures into everyone's equation ...

Kimberley: When dating guys, "So do you plan on having children?" is a big (question). My answer is immediately, "Hell, no" (because of "the stereotypical overpopulation argument"). And then there's always some questioning about that, like, "Well, were you abused?" There must be something wrong with you if you don't want to do things the way that other people want to do them.

Sandra: There's this sort of societal expectation that women are the ones who are supposed to want to have kids and the men the ones who are supposed to be ambivalent-to-acquiescing but certainly not driving it.

Kimberley: That hasn't been my experience at all ...

Dianna: I don't feel my clock is ticking so much. I have a 13-year-old son. So that's sort of a big issue. I date men, and they say, "Do you want to have more kids?" And it is a loaded question because there definitely is a right answer. One thing I've never had is, I've never had a family. Yeah, I know that I would like to have a family. So if the right man came and we were going to have an amazing family, and it was somebody with the energy to chase a small child ... It would have to be a good fit.

Gigi: I think I would like to have a child, regardless of whether I find a lifemate. I don't know how that's going to happen exactly. I'm definitely willing to be a single parent.

Joriel: My partner and I want to have a child eventually, and we've also talked about moving back to Virginia (which recently enacted strict state laws against the rights of unmarried couples, straight or gay.) Are we going to have to, at some point, get married in order to have shared rights to raise a child the way we want to? I think it's a risk ... if you're going to have a child together without the benefits of marriage.

Sandra: Part of why I don't want to get married is (I'd have) to renegotiate how we relate to my son ... My boyfriend wasn't there from the start with my son. I want to keep some distance between my family of myself and my son, and the three of us.

Not that single parenting is easy — financially or otherwise ...

Barbara: I don't plan on having any more children. I'm done. My daughter is 16. And having been a single parent since the age of 21 is very trying. I mean, I love my daughter, she's amazing, and it's definitely been a blessing.

She doesn't have that male — to see what could be positive — interaction. It's a challenge. I mean, if I was to go back and say, "OK, what would I do differently?" I would have waited to have a child. I would have been able to travel and finish up school and get a home and perhaps have an opportunity to build a relationship with someone who can say, "yes, I'll be there," and us get a home and then raise children.

Dianna: Investing and owning more and having more, I think that it's a lot easier obviously with two incomes. I think about how if you have someone to just bring in a little bit ... just how your lifestyle can be so different. ...

As you're taking risks, buying rentals and stuff, and you think I'm in this by myself and I have my son to raise, too. ... I feel fortunate to be able to be in the position to make some of those decisions, but it would be nice to have someone else ...

Danielle: ... My ex (with the child) married a guy partly to get his health insurance ... The reality is that we get married, too, sometimes for reasons that are simply self-preservation reasons.

They find dating a mixed bag ...

Sandra: I enjoyed being alone and being myself and dating as a single person in my early 30s so much more than I ever did in my 20s. In my 20s, it just mattered so damn much. ... When I was in my 20s I really felt like I had to have a good reason to not just beat that relationship to death.

When my (current) partner and I started dating ... I really felt like the decision to be with him was so much more mine than any kind of societal expectations. .

Barbara: As far as dating, I've been here four years. I've pretty much done interracial dating since I've been here. When I lived in Atlanta, it wasn't really something I thought about. It was like OK, Africans, Caribbeans, but I never thought I'd really date someone who's Caucasian ... Since I've been here, it was like, "OK, we're in Washington" ... And so I'm still open to, just not right now, to any dating. I just kind of need a break and just to work on myself and maybe a year from now, then I'll be like OK and go back out there and start dating again. It's great to learn about someone else's culture and someone else's viewpoint.

Danielle: I've been dating a lot of single moms lately. Having went through just having a kid for three years what I realized is that when you have a kid, oh my God, it's a whole other life, you're really busy.

So when I got out into the single world, I realized, I don't want a partner right now; I want to have sex. And I thought, who do I know? And there's tons of them (single moms) out there. (We) just come get together on the weekends. So that's been working out really good for both of us. There's no big ties. They've got their kid. And I'm like, "I don't need to know your kid, I don't need to go to your house, you can come over to my house."

Now if they could rewrite the Rules of Matrimony ...

Dianna: I'm very upset about the fact that you can't have gay marriages. I work for a corporation with great medical benefits. And as a single person, how come I can't choose one person — it can be my cousin, it can be a homeless person on the street, anybody — if the company is willing to pay for a spouse and dependents, how come I can't choose and at least sign a contract that says for five years, I will have this person covered?

Danielle: I think it would be really cool to pick your rights for your marriage. Like, "OK, we're going to enter into this contract, and we're going to pick property passage, and debt sharing, and mortgage sharing and children responsibilities." Because what is marriage? It's a legal binding contract.

Dianna: Marriage is about protection of your property. You die, who's going to take care of your affairs, who's going to make the decisions for you. And there's this other thing about a commitment between you, that person, and — what I believe — God. That, to me, is marriage. To me this thing you do with the state and our property should not be called "marriage." Or that personal thing should not be called "marriage." One or the other.

Danielle: The institution of marriage is severely outdated. I mean, when they invented marriage ... people were living to 30. Marriage should be a time commitment. You commit to five years or 10 years, or 20 years if you're going to have a kid. And if you complete that five years, yay!

Interviewer Michelle Goodman, author of "The Anti 9-to-5 Guide: Practical Career Advice for Women Who Think Outside the Cube" (Seal Press), can be reached at www.anti9to5guide.com