Ask almost any childless women in her 30s to name five things that have been on her mind lately, and there’s a good chance she’ll mention her biological clock. It may not be the first thing she names — her career, the economy, saving for a house, her parents’ health, the health of her relationship, finishing her dissertation, fitting back into her skinny jeans, and finding someone to share her life with may be getting more of her attention; but for a vast majority of us, the idea of having kids is something we think about nearly as much, if not more, than almost everything else. After all, our biological clocks and the issues of when, whether, and how long we have left to procreate determine so many other variables in our life. And for those of us who wait until our 30s — a quickly growing number of us these days — it’s a decision we face when the stakes are especially high.

I was a little bit unsettled when I read a recent Cary Tennis column on Salon called “I’m 32 already. Time to get married!” I realized that I could have written the question myself (well, I just want to meet someone great). A woman is torn between wanting to meet a life partner and wanting to follow every fun, salacious flirtation that comes her way – because, after all, isn’t that the best part of being single? Tending to choose the latter, she knows that it will not ultimately get her what she wants.

If you thought your friend was about to make a mistake—say, buy a computer that gets a ton of viruses or stay in a really dodgy hostel in Rome—you’d try to convince them to do something different, right? Well, I feel a little guilty because I have a friend who might be making a mistake by getting married this summer and I tried to talk him out of it.

There are only two reasons why I’d move in and live with another girlfriend. We’re married and determined to fill a sweatshop with our nimble-fingered love critters. Or she cracks me in the head with a shovel, sews my mouth shut, replaces my eyeballs with marbles, and sits my stuffed body in the corner. Whatever you do, don’t move in with your boyfriend. What? It’s too late? Sweet Zeus, Odin, and Quetzalcoatl, winged serpent god of the Aztecs! I hope your cohabitation doesn’t end the way two (two!) of mine did – with helicopters launching off the roof amidst tornadoes of debris and smoke, a single individual hanging off the skids, flipping the bird to the person whose name is on the lease.

Post-failed engagement, I’m not sure how into the idea of marriage I am. I think it’s great for other people and maybe I’ll really want to get married eventually, but for now, I don’t really see it as the end-all, be-all of my romantic future. That said, I’m all about commitment and monogamy, just without a legal document decreeing it so. But according to a conversation on “The View” this morning, this kind of commitment—the wedding band-less kind—is not as serious. The gals were talking about David Letterman of course, and Whoopi kept exclaiming that during the time that Letterman was schtooping his staff, he may have been with Regina Lasko for nearly 20 years, but he hadn’t married her yet. And based on all the clatter Whoopi has heard around the Hot Topics table over the years, that made his cheating not as bad. I think that’s ridiculous.

On the season finale of “Entourage” this week, one of the characters, Eric, proposes to his girlfriend, Sloan, only it wasn’t a romantic get-down-on-one-knee proposal, so much as it was a seemingly spur-of-the-moment declaration of his commitment to her. “You’re never going to be able to commit — not to anyone,” Sloan accuses during a heated argument. “I’ll get in that car right now, drive to Vegas, and commit to you for the rest of my life,” Eric shoots back before pulling an engagement ring out of his pocket. It’s not exactly the kind of grand proposal women dream of, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s more than most of us get these days ... and if maybe that’s OK.

Yesterday, I came across a wedding story in the Washington Post that caught my eye: “In the End It’s a Fairy Tale.” Who doesn’t like a happy ending? It was the wedding story of interior designer Kerilyn Fox, 34, and chef Peter Russo, 38. The bride describes their path to the altar as “part fairy tale, part ‘Jerry Springer’ episode.” They were together; they broke up. He proposed; she turned him down. She moved in with another man; finally, she left the other man for Russo. Fox says they were “meant to be,” adding, “In the end it’s a fairy tale. I’m marrying the man of my dreams.” The story is accompanied by a photo slide show, and while they seem like a happy, well-matched couple, I couldn’t help but notice Russo looks to be morbidly obese. That got me wondering: Would you marry the man of your dreams ... if he was obese? Put your thoughts in the comments. 

NOTE: The Washington Post requested that we take down the photo. So we did.

The good news: my boyfriend has engagement rings on the brain. The bad news: he’s been reading the Freakonomics Blog on the New York Times website. Why is this bad? The Freakonomics economists solve puzzling economic capers of day-to-day life, most recently tackling what a “bad investment” it is for a man to give his girlfriend a diamond ring:

Q: It doesn’t seem rational for a young man to give his girlfriend an expensive engagement ring when he proposes. My thought is that the most efficient use of that dollar is to invest it into something that a young couple would value most e.g. a down payment on a first house, etc. The diamond market is a monopoly and diamond prices are manipulated so that prices are always high. Can you construct a concise and logical argument that young men across the world can use to not buy diamond rings? After all, you already are offering the most valuable thing that you have (your heart) to your soon-to-be bride. In this age, why is a token like an overpriced rock still needed?

In response to this penny-pincher’s question, economist Tim Harford replied, “I tend to agree with you.”

Uh oh.

You’ve got the ring, you’ve set the date. You’re dreaming of your beautiful wedding gown and the lovely slow walk down the aisle. The reception place is booked, the flowers and favors ordered, the menu confirmed, and the honeymoon destination set. Add to this the fact that “you’re so completely in love” and all you focus on is the wedding day.

You’re all ready for your wedding; but, are you ready for marriage?

The “M” word is something that many couples don’t really consider until after the honeymoon. With all the dizzying preparations surrounding the planning and executing of a wedding, the reality of married life takes a back seat. Sometimes its “seat” is so far in the recesses of your mind that you find you and your partner have prepared for everything, down to the minutest detail, except the actual marriage itself. Continue reading...

“Marriage doesn’t really mean anything to me. I feel like in many ways marriage is more for the families [of the couple] than for the people involved, so I don’t gravitate to it. But I’ve also said that the minute that Jen is like, ‘You need to marry me,’ I’ll be like, ‘All right!’ We are both on the same page.”

—Jon Hamm, on why he and longtime girlfriend Jennifer Westfeldt haven’t gotten hitched [Elle]

Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, was published in 2006, and her followup book was touted in the back of at least 200,000 copies of the book. Tentatively titled Weddings and Evictions, it was described as a memoir about Gilbert’s “unexpected journey into second marriage” and was supposed to hit shelves in 2009. But Gilbert scrapped her 500-page draft of the book and told her publisher she needed more time. What she had wasn’t working.

Because Eat, Pray, Love had been such a huge success, staying in the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list for 57 weeks, Viking wanted the followup to come out as quickly as possible. But her editor gave her another year, and this second draft, now called Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage will be published in January.

The man I was engaged to was my first real adult love. It was mutual, it was committed, and it was mature. But there were other “loves.” Adam, the long-haired hippie in 8th grade, who held my hand once and played the acoustic guitar; Rob, the twenty-something video store employee, whom I stalked for the entire summer before I turned 15; Jesse who gave me emotional support when my parents divorced the summer after freshman year of college; and lastly, Aidan*, a fellow staff member at my college newspaper whom I fell for—HARD—my senior year.

“I also feel sorry for the other woman. I am sure she is a fine person. It can’t be fun for her, though I do sometimes question her judgment. If she knew the newspaper had those E-mails back in December, why did she want him to come in June? But I can’t go there too much. All I can do is pray for her because she made some poor choices.”

— Jenny Sanford, in an interview for the ever-important September issue of Vogue, speaking of Maria Belén Chapur, the Argentine woman with whom her husband, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, was discovered earlier this year to be having an extramarital affair. [via WashingtonPost]

Here’s your daily dose of sweetness: a couple in England who fell in love as teenagers writing letters back and forth during WWII is celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary this week. Geoff and Pat Bunyan, now 83 and 82, became friends in 1945 shortly before Geoff was deployed to fight in the war. Over the next several years (Geoff remained overseas after the war ended to “clean up the mess”), the two sent a whopping 600 letters to each other, numbering each one to keep track of them. Though the letters began with a friendly tone, as the two shared stories and opened up to each other, their correspondence took a more romantic turn. Soon, they were proclaiming their love to one another, looking forward to the day Geoff would return to England and they could be together. When Geoff finally returned home in 1948 — three years after he left! — he married Pat and the two of them bought a house together, which they still live in to this day.

I’ve been married all of 11 days now and, as if on cue, the day my husband (still very much getting used to saying that!) and I tied the knot, he stopped putting the toilet seat down. I ignored it at first, but by our first weekend together as a married couple, I couldn’t stand it any longer and said something to him about it. I made a jokey comment about his sudden change in behavior — more embarrassed than pissed at being such a cliché so early in our marriage. After over three years together, surely he must realize if there’s one thing I wanted to avoid in marriage it was being a cliché, but I suppose the lesson here is that that’s a lost cause for any married couple, even those of us who think we’re so “modern.” One cliché I will be able to avoid, though, is the terrible mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship so many women have. My own mother-in-law passed away long before I got a chance to meet her, and while I’d love to think we would have had a wonderful relationship — if her sons are any indication, she was a terrific woman and I hope she would have approved of me — the odds, apparently, aren’t in our favor.

Amy Wolfe, a 33-year-old church organist from Pennsylvania, is so in love with the magic carpet fairground ride, 1001 Nachts, at Knoebels Amusement Park, she plans to “marry” it and change her surname to Weber to symbolize her spiritual marriage to it. Wolfe suffers from objectum sexuality, a condition that makes her sexually attracted to inanimate objects. She first fell in love with the ride when she visited the park at 13. “I wasn’t freaked out, as it just felt so natural, but I didn’t tell anyone about it because I knew it wasn’t ‘normal’ to have feelings for a fairground ride,” she says. Ten years later, she began a “courtship” with 1001 Nachts, traveling 160 miles 10 times a year, and riding it over 3,000 times. She sleeps with its picture on her ceiling and carries around its spare nuts and bolts to feel closer to it. “I love him as much as women love their husbands and know we’ll be together forever,” she said. Yeah, that’s what she says now — wait ‘til she gets tired of picking up his dirty socks and putting the seat down every time he uses the bathroom!

The BBC did a documentary recently on others who suffer from objectum sexuality, including a woman in love with the Eiffel Tower, another in love with the Golden Gate bridge. Check it out above. [Telegraph]

What attracts you to a man the most — a sense of humor, a great smile, a hot bod, keen intelligence? Apparently, a lot of women get weak in the knees for men who do housework. A recent study from Oxford University examined “marriage and cohabitation rates” across 13 countries and “compared them to attitudes towards the roles of men and women at home.” After questioning “13,500 men and women aged between 20 and 45 from each country about gender, housework and childcare responsibilities,” researchers discovered that women are hottest for men “they believe they will help out with household chores and make an equal contribution towards childcare.” In countries where men are less likely to pull their weight at home, women are between 20-50% less likely to shack up with them. Dr Almudena Seville-Sanz, of the university’s Centre for Time Use Research, said: This study shows that in egalitarian countries there is less social stigma attached to men doing what was traditionally women’s work.’” After the jump see how the 13 countries included in the study rank on the “egalitarian index.”

The Rorschach test is in the news.  The entire 10 plates have been posted on Wikipedia and the controversy begins.  The ten plates have been kept tightly under wraps for years.  But now the copyright has expired.  So it is quite natural to wonder:  “Can a Rorschach test be used to determine marriage material?  Can it tell us about intimacy?  What about sex?” Continue reading...

If you have an extravagant wedding, you might be in debt longer than your marriage lasts. According to a U.K. financial management company, couples borrow an average of $42,000 to pay for their wedding. This can take 16 years to pay off with interest and everything, and the average marriage supposedly lasts 11.5 years! So, when it’s time for you to get divorced, you might end up divvying up debt, rather than assets. If you’re engaged, take the advice of our recently married Wendy and make your wedding more about memories than money. [Marie Claire U.K.]