Married life blues

Women settle down late, choose younger men.


KUALA LUMPUR: Get married and have babies. This advice to Malaysians was given by the National Population and Family Development Board to arrest the continuing decline in the fertility rate of the country.
The board expects the fertility rate to drop to 2.05 per cent in 2015 if more women opt to stay single and those who are married delay or do not want to have babies.

Board director-general Datuk Aminah Abdul Rahman acknowledged that getting married and having children were matters of personal choice but the decline in fertility rate had become worrying and of deep concern for the government.

A 1995 survey had shown a fertility rate of 3.4 children per woman. Ten years later, the number had decreased to 2.4 children. In 2007, it was 2.2 children.

“And this is mainly because of late marriages. The more you delay, the less your chances of having a baby. It’s a worldwide trend,”Aminah said after opening the Consultative Forum in Population Strategic Plan 2 here yesterday.

Because of this, she noted a growing trend of child adoption in the country.
The Women,Family and Community Development Ministry intends to have more premarital courses to help couples adjust to each other and teach them what to expect in a marriage.
Do they really think by giving all this courses would help the couple. Same goes to the must-take pre-marital courses arranged for the Muslims. Without it one cannot get married. Funny bit is ~ the number of broken marriages are getting higher and higher.

Where is the relevance?

Marriage is more of a practical and day to day living together rather than by the book thing. One can't read a book about marriage or in any matter at all and applied it to directly to real life. Book is just a guideline written by someone who got it from someone else.
The real life is more challenging and of course it will varies from different income group, intellectual level, and family background.
And the most important thing is the economic stability of the household.

It will also hold parenting courses together with non-governmental organisations.
Aminah, who met her counterpart from Norway at a conference two days ago, said the Norwegians had noted a similar trend in their country in the 1980s.
“When they noticed the low number of marriages and declining fertility rates, they introduced legislation to help women balance work and family life. When you legislate, people are compelled to follow.

“It took Norway some 40 years to do it but we don’t have to wait that long. All we have to do is to take the best practices from countries all over the world and learn from them.”
Obviously they had experienced it many years ago.
They are more advance and developed nations and have came across more experience in the aspect of socioeconomic.

She said the declining fertility rate was more noticeable among the higher educated ones and working people.
Because of education, women were also finding it difficult to find a compatible partner.
They were forced to marry someone who was less educated or with lower qualifications. Some also married men younger than them.
Smart working women find it unnecessary to get married. When we can earn better living than most men, why do we need to entangled ourselves into the web of being controlled and dictated by someone else.
The freedom of being without attachment are absolute.
The freedom of deciding and not having someone to say the otherwise is what all women should enjoy.
There are men (in this case I'd say Malay because of the race that I'm well versed with), who will be supportive of the woman's needs especially in the aspect of her carrier. But there are tons and tons of men who are the opposite. So dictating, so chauvinistic, so easily dampned (their man ego) and prefer the women to be less competent than them so it would make it easy for them to control and 'manipulate' and get their manly whimps and fancies achived.
Most men will labelled women of high achievers to be arrogant, snob, vocal and can't keep opinion to themselves.
I challenge any men who say that he is happy to be married to high achievers, earning 5-7 grand higher than him and are contented with life to say 'yes, im am totally happy earning much lesser than my wife' or 'yes, im very happy that my wife needs to fly in and out of the country regularly and go for metings and business dinners and come home late'......

Aminah said while women put off marriage because they were unable to find compatible partners, men say marriages are getting expensive.
“Why is it so expensive now to get married? Are dowries and wedding expenditure more important than the marriage itself?”
Why not ask the questions to yourself first, Aminah?
Would you allow your beautiful smart graduate daughter marry a Proton technician?
And I'm sure you would want your daughter to be supported by a man who have the monies to pay for higher dowries and other wedding expenditure too.
Lets get real.
It is a must be find compatible partner before one woman commit into marrying a man. We wouldn't want the marriage to last just 2 years would we?

One experience knowing lady in her late 40s who tried too hard to find man to marry her. Well, even though she is a business lady and won't need anything more from man to support her material needs, she fall prey to one 'Datuk', who wanted to marry her, which later on this poor woman realised that the man (who is a divorcee) just wanted the 'marriage' status in order to support him financially because he is broke (common thing since the Datukships are easily bought from several states in the Peninsular).
The marriage lasted only a year or so.

So, how?